Episodes
| Episode | First Broadcast | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 20160613 | Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 to a successful black, middle-class couple in Chicago. Her memoir looks back on her childhood and the black bourgeois upbringing that 'made and maimed me'. She explains the title of her book, 'Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. But the material comforts provided by a father who was a paediatrician and a mother who was formerly a social worker were circumscribed by all the painful and baffling assumptions of racial prejudice. To be a child in Negroland you had to learn the rules. But who was making those rules? And what exactly were they? Margo Jefferson went on to become an arts and theatre critic on the New York Times and Newsweek. She won a Pulitzer for her journalism and now teaches at Columbia University. Written and read by Margo Jefferson Margo Jefferson's memoir asks what it means to be born both black and privileged. |
| 02 | 20160614 | To be born into a black , relatively wealthy family in Chicago, in the late 1940s, was to be born into a world of contradictions. Margo Jefferson describes this world of 'privilege and plenty' as 'Negroland'. But despite their comfortable home and private education she and her sister still had to navigate the rules that determined what made a black woman attractive. The shade of their skin, the texture of their hair, the shape of their noses. In prose that is always intellectually incisive and often powerfully vulnerable Margo Jefferson reads from her own memoir. Written and read by Margo Jefferson Margo Jefferson looks back on her Chicago childhood and the rules of race that defined it. |
| 03 | 20160615 | To be born into a black, relatively wealthy family in the late 1940s was to be born into a world of contradictions. Margo Jefferson describes this world of 'privilege and plenty' as 'Negroland'. As her father became increasingly successful as a leading black paediatrician, he and her mother moved the family into a neighbourhood that had been exclusively white. Change was coming but it wasn't always welcome. As a young girl, Margo had to learn who amongst her white friends she could trust and who came from families which really despised them. Margo Jefferson went on to become an arts and theatre critic on the New York Times and Newsweek; she won a Pulitzer for her journalism and now teaches at Columbia University. Written and read by Margo Jefferson Margo Jefferson turns her critical gaze towards her own childhood - Chicago in the 1950s. |
| 04 | 20160616 | A fiercely intelligent account of race and class by writer and critic Margo Jefferson. She was born in 1947, the daughter of a paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, and grew up surrounded by the comforts of a well off family who were part of Chicago's black elite. This is the world she terms 'Negroland' - 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. In episode 4, Dr and Mrs Jefferson take their two young daughters on a holiday trip, but in Atlantic City not everything goes to plan. Written and read by Margo Jefferson The Jeffersons take their two daughters to Atlantic City, but not everything goes to plan. |
| 05 LAST | 20160617 | The writer and critic Margo Jefferson was born in 1947, the daughter of a paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, and grew up surrounded by the comforts of a well off family who were part of Chicago's black elite. This is the world she terms, 'Negroland' - 'I call it Negroland because I still find 'Negro' a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. ... because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long. In the 1960s, as the Black Power movement in America gained momentum, the young Margo Jefferson had to find a way of resolving the internal conflicts arising from being educated to be better than the white people who occupied positions of power. Growing up with the advantages of class and money had somehow resulted in 'an excess of white-derived manners and interests'. Negotiating rules, entitlements and prejudices made it increasingly difficult to find her place and her self in the fractured world around her. Written and read by Margo Jefferson Margo recalls the 60s and 70s and the difficulty of reconciling being privileged and black |