Reasonably enough, most commentary about the work of writer Debra Dickerson focuses on her new book, The End of Blackness. However, I believed it might be useful to revisit her previous effort, the autobiography, An American Story, before penning a piece about what she has to say four years later. My lingering impression of An American Story after reading it in 2002 was that it showed promise in regard to the raw material she had to work with, particularly the history of her family, but was not rigorous enough in regard to the ideological issues she attempts to tackle.

I reread An American Story yesterday. This time, I feel as if I am reviewing two different books. One is the autobiography of an African-American woman who, despite her obvious intelligence, was earmarked for the societal junk heap, or as she says, pink collar wage slavery, at best. That is, of course the fate of most women of color who are born into poverty or the working-class. Dickerson's other story is one of an ideological journey. So, this review will have two parts, one focusing on Dickerson's life story, the other on matters of ideology and politics.

Dickerson's parents were part of the Great Migration of thousands of African-Americans to Northern cities to escape Jim Crow, poverty and lynchings in the 1940s.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, movement of blacks to the North increased tremendously. The reasons for this "Great Migration," as it came to be called, are complex. Thousands of African-Americans left the South to escape sharecropping, worsening economic conditions, and the lynch mob. They sought higher wages, better homes, and political rights. Between 1940 and 1970 continued migration transformed the country's African-American population from a predominately southern, rural group to a northern, urban one.

By 1950, the black population comprised approximately eleven percent of the population of the United States, while black migrants comprised forty percent of the population in several of the U.S. major cities.

Her mother's family hails from Mississippi; her father's from Tennessee. The two wed and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, after Eddie Mack Dickerson's mustering out of the United States Marine Corps at the end of World War II. He worked as a truck driver. Johnie Florence Dickerson, (formely Gooch), Debra's mother, was a waitress for most of Dickerson's childhood.