Summary

In Chapter 19, Jefferson talks about the young Negro men who were dying with guns in their hands, either at home or in Vietnam, or who were turning to drugs and alcohol that eventually took their lives. Some young Negro women were falling into disgrace with premarital sex and unplanned pregnancies outside marriage. With the Civil Rights Movement, everything changed and the Negro was faced with the knowledge that there were more options than one extreme or the other - the full decorum demanded by their parents and the disgrace of sex and drugs.

Suddenly, Jefferson, her family, and her peers were not entitled, but were corruptions of the black race. They had left behind their black culture to live on the edge of white culture. The young generation of blacks examined themselves ruthlessly, looking at how much African history they had studied and...