The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among the great and the good of Chicago’s black elite. She calls this society ‘Negroland’: ‘a small region of Negro America where residents where sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty’.

With privilege came exception, and she recalls her reckoning with the strictures and demands of her upbringing at crucial historical moments – the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America. She charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contractions.

Jefferson offers a meditation on race, sex, class and American culture, told through the prism of her experience of growing up and being educated amongst Chicago’s upper-class black community.

Speaker biography:

Margo Jefferson is a Professor of Writing at Columbia University School of Arts. She was a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times, and won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and Negroland: A Memoir.

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