Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

Unity across racial lines will save America from its corrosive contemporary politics and widening social divisions, according to this inspiring memoir. Former NAACP national president Jealous (Reach) presents a series of insightful personal anecdotes that touch on a wide range of social issues, including mass incarceration, racial profiling, social isolation, drug addiction, and mental health. Highlights include a trip to visit his godbrother, comedian Dave Chappelle, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at the turn of the millennium; working with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to tackle mass incarceration as part of a Republican-Democratic coalition; forging an unlikely friendship in rural Mississippi with an elderly white man who helped stop the state from turning a historically Black college into a prison; and listening with Georgia politician Stacey Abrams to heart-wrenching testimony from the son of a former Klansman. Elsewhere, Jealous relates the story of a white inmate who risked his life to expose corruption in a Mississippi prison and get justice for a murdered African American inmate, details the links between skyrocketing university tuitions and mass incarceration, and notes that colonial America’s first rebellions pitted white indentured servants together with enslaved Africans against “the ruling elite.” Fluidly interweaving autobiography, politics, and history, this is a rousing song of hope. (Dec.)