Ordinary and Amazing: A Child’s History of the Civil Rights Era

Histories of marginalised communities are often found in personal memories and anecdotes. Such narratives invariably reveal alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world. In the wake of Black Lives Matter movement, contemporary Black women writers are engaged in narrativising the lived realities of Black children navigating private and public spaces by redefining their agency. The framework of microhistory enables us to interpret such intimate accounts of women, Black people, and children, drawing broader conclusions about the social fabric that shaped their lives. However, the archival capacity of the nuanced experience of being young and Black is rarely inspected. America’s celebrated writer of Young Adult fiction, Jacqueline Woodson, writes in response to growing up in a period marked by the absence of ordinary Black lives in literature. As a champion of diversity in YA literature, Woodson sifts her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) through the perspective of her younger self, Jackie, a Black girl growing up in Brooklyn during the civil rights movement. Woodson illustrates the experiences of a Southern Black family and their engagement with the repercussions of the period, as felt by a child in the margins of society and family. Informed by the framework of microhistory, I will situate Woodson’s memoir in the broader context of revisionist accounts of Black childhood. Through a close reading of the memoir, I will explore childhood as a lens to explicate the lives of marginalised communities and the significance of children’s perspectives in broadening our understanding of history.