Negroland: A Memoir

2015 National Book Critic's Circle Award for Biography or Autobiography

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac -- here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

Born in upper-crust black Chicago -- her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite -- Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty."

Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments -- the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America -- Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

"Poignant....In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more." Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times

"Powerful....Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being party of America’s black elite." Roxane Gay, O, The Oprah Magazine

"Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required reading across the country." Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair

"Powerful and complicated... power dwells in the restraint of Negroland. Ms. Jefferson gets a lot said about her life, the insults she has weathered, her insecurities, even her suicidal impulses. There’s sinew and grace in the way she plays with memory, dodging here and burning there, like a photographer in a darkroom....Ms. Jefferson will not be denied....With luck, there will be a sequel to this book." Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Ever provocative and insightful, the cultural critic Margo Jefferson bravely directs the focus inward to her own life and times as a child of the rigid and nearly invisible world of black elites in pre-Civil Rights, mid-century America. By turns, melancholic and hopeful, raw and disarming, she weighs the psychic toll of constructed divisions at the intersection of race, gender, caste and privilege. A moving memoir that is an act of courage in its vulnerability." Isabel Wilkerson

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.