White Boy: A Novel

by Danny Duncan Collum

Overview

In the summer of 1961, black and white Freedom Riders from all over the U.S. converged on Jackson, Mississippi in a campaign to force the desegregation of public transportation and public facilities. Buses were burned. Some Riders were beaten almost to death. They were jailed by the hundreds, and they rocked the conscience of the nation. In this compelling coming-of-age novel, when the first Freedom Ride rolls into Jackson, one Mississippi white boy, Tommy Jackson, is watching and waiting. His young life was already turned upside down by the arrival of rock and roll and by his first-hand exposure to the racial violence that ruled his hometown. When he sees the Freedom Riders, he stops being a silent witness and takes action, hoping to redeem his guilty conscience and join a community of like-minded souls. Instead he finds there is no escaping the past. White Boy depicts the world seen in the 2009 best-seller, The Help, but from a grittier working-class perspective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627200165
Publisher:	Apprentice House
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	715 KB

About the Author

Danny Duncan Collum is the author, most recently, of White Boy: A Novel (Apprentice House 2011). He teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort and is a contributing editor and columnist for Sojourners magazine. Collum is also the author of three nonfiction books (Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South, Rising to Common Ground, Black and White Together)and the editor of a fourth(African Americans in the Spanish Civil War). More information about his work is available at dannyduncancollum.net. Collum was born and raised in Greenwood, Mississippi. He attended the Greenwood public schools and Mississippi College in Clinton. He later earned a bachelor's degree at Loyola University of New Orleans and the M.F.A. in creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. From 1980 to 1988, Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners, a Washington, D.C.-based monthly magazine of religion, politics and culture, and took a leading role in the advocacy and organizing work associated with the magazine. He later served as executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, a historical society devoted to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In that position, he initiated a Ford Foundation-funded research project that resulted in the book, African Americans in the Spanish Civil War, which he edited. Since 1988, Collum has served as a contributing editor for Sojourners, writing a monthly column on popular culture and media and frequent features. Sojourners currently has 120,000 monthly readers of its print edition and 320,000 monthly visits to its website. In addition, Collum is popular music columnist for the monthly, U.S. Catholic. His articles have also appeared in Utne, Rock & Rap Confidential, The National Catholic Reporter, The Progressive and other periodicals.Danny Duncan Collum lives in rural Shelby County, Kentucky, near Waddy, with his wife, Polly, and their four children.