The Last Children of Mill Creek

ISBN: 1948742640

Author: Gibson, Vivian

Condition: New

A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before urban renewal changed everything.Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as progress. A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibsons large family-her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father-and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibsons words, This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl-a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history-or for anyone who was once a child.Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek2022 Missouri Author of the Year WinnerMissouri's Great Reads from Great Places Selection for the 2023 National Book FestivalThis is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain. -TheLos Angeles Review of Books