A weekday in Harlem, Albany, GA, circa 1960s 

America has a multitude of best-kept secrets. The Albany Georgia Civil Rights Movement  is one of them. It started in the fall of 1961. I was seven years old, and my late sister, Betty, was just shy of twelve.To my knowledge our late parents—like most of the more than 20,000 blacks in Albany at the time—were not active in the Movement. Quite the contrary, they sheltered us from it, for obvious reasons: extreme southern white bigotry was nothing to mess with. Yet that is exactly what a few brave souls chose to do, mess with the racial status quo in order to force change. You will meet many of those heroes in future posts.

I have many vivid memories of my parallel life growing up on Hazard Drive while this crucial part of American history unfolded around me. These memories were the bud for my work-in-progress novel, PEACH SEED MONKEY, where I have placed a host of fictional characters inside the very real present-day Albany, with flashbacks to the highly charged 1960s.

I invite you to visit here often (and subscribe!)  to learn how important the Albany Movement was ~ and still is ~ as an instrument of change and a model for the Women’s Movement, Vietnam protests and subsequent non-violent struggles for human rights throughout the world. Although the Movement is crucial to this story, PEACH SEED MONKEY is a work of fiction and will set out to do what novels do best ~ present the author’s exploration of a certain truth.

Leave comments, join the conversation as I’ll be sharing snippets from my process and travels—both mythic and actual—as they pertain to and inform the story; sometimes going back to 1960s Albany and my childhood house on Hazard (now a parking lot, for real); sometimes looking around my present-day life in northern California and even projecting ahead to the world our teenage daughter is headed for. I will let you in on why this is a story I am powerless to resist.