Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (New Edition) (Parenting Black Teen Boys, Improving Black Family Health and Relationships)

by Marita Golden, Nathan McCall (Foreword by), M.J. Fievre (Afterword)

Overview

Raising Black Teen Boys in Turbulent Times 

"It is always heartening to see women step up to the writer's table. When the results are as adroit and affecting as Marita Golden's work, it is more than satisfying; it is a cause for celebration."—Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate

Two decades ago, Marita was the first Black writer to address the horrifying statistic that haunts all Black mothers: the leading cause of death among Black males under twenty-one is homicide. Today, police brutality rages on as millions call for the reformation of our broken law enforcement in the wake of the traumatic murders of Black teen boys like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Daunte Wright. 

Read an intimate account of a mother’s efforts to save her son. Writing her son’s story against the backdrop of a society plagued by systemic racism, economic inequality, and mass incarceration, Golden offers a form of witness and testimony in a time of crisis for Black Americans. 

Learn how to grapple with the realities of Black America. Join Golden as she confronts the root causes of violence inflicted upon Black teen boys and reassesses the legacy of her own generation's struggle for civil rights. Explore Black boys’ difficult road to adulthood in the U.S. and learn why single Black mothers are often wrongly blamed for their sons’ actions.

Gain invaluable advice and knowledge from trustworthy sources. In Saving Our Sons, Golden documents her conversations with psychologists, writers, and young Black males themselves.

This book is designed to help you: 

• Discuss and unpack generational trauma with loved ones
• Gain deeper insight into the injustices Black children face in the U.S.
• Recognize the importance of community for the success of Black teen boys 

If you liked Decoding Boys, Mother & Son: Our Back & Forth Journal, The Boy Crisis or Boy Mom, you’ll love Saving Our Sons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642508932
Publisher:	Mango Media
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	1,068,730
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Marita Golden is an accomplished author of dozens of critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction works, including The Strong Black Woman (Mango 2021). She is also the co-founder of The Hurston/Wright Foundation, an American literary nonprofit organization that provides workshops, classes, support, and community for talented and successful Black writers. During her teaching career, she has taught creative writing at numerous colleges and universities, including Johns Hopkins Universityand Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Marita is the recipient of many esteemed writing and literary activism awards, such as the International Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent Inductee (Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University), the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award (Poets and Writers), and the Distinguished Service Award (Authors Guild). 

Currently, as a masterful creative writing coach and literary consultant, Marita spends her time coaching burgeoning and seasoned authors through the necessary stages of fear and anxiety in the creative process.

Nathan McCall served as a reporter for several newspapers, including The Washington Post, where he worked until taking a leave of absence to write his bestselling memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America.

Makes Me Wanna Holler was a New York Times bestseller and won the Blackboard Book of the Year Award for 1995. McCall's second publication, released in 1997, is a series of personal essays titled What's Going On.

Nathan made his fiction debut with Them, a timely and penetrating story that explores the complexities of gentrification. Them was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 2007. In 2008, the novel reached No. 1 on the Essence magazine bestseller list. Also, the Georgia Center for the Book nominated Them as one of ten finalists for the 2008 Townsend Prize for Fiction, awarded to an outstanding novel or short-story collection published by a Georgia writer during the past two years.

McCall also served as a visiting lecturer in the African American Studies Department at Emory Universityin Atlanta.

Born in Port-au-Prince, M.J. Fievre, B.S. Ed, earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Barry University. A seasoned K–12 teacher, a creator of safe spaces, and an initiator of difficult conversations, she spent much time building up her students, helping them feel comfortable in their own skin, and affirming their identities. Her close relationships with parents and students led her to look more closely at how we can balance protecting a child’s innocence with preparing them for the realities of life. She has taught creative writing workshops to children and teens at the O Miami Poetry Festival and the Miami Art Museum, as well as in various schools in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), and South Florida. She’s also been a keynote speaker at Tufts University(Massachusetts), Howard University(Washington, DC), the University of Miami (Florida), and Michael College (Vermont) and has served as a panelist at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (AWP).

M.J.’s publishing career began as a teenager in her native Haiti. At nineteen years old, she signed her first book contract with Hachette-Deschamps for the publication of a YA book titled La Statuette Maléfique. Since then, M.J. has released nine YA books in French that are widely read in Europe and the French Antilles, and she is the author of the award-winning Badass Black Girl book series for tweens and teens (in English). One Moore Book published M.J.’s first children’s book, I Am Riding, as part of a special limited series edited by Edwidge Danticat. A middle-grade book, Young Trailblazers, and picture book, Sam Is Afraid of Christmas, are both set to be released by DragonFruit in the fall of 2021.

As the ReadCaribbean program coordinator for the prestigious Miami Book Fair, M.J. directs and produces the children’s cultural show Taptap Krik? Krak! For her podcast, MJ has interviewed many literary legends, including Edwidge Danticat, Alice Randall, and Nikki Giovanni.

Read an Excerpt

“This is the story of how I loved and raised my Black son, tried to make him strong and sensitive, and keep him safe. I fell down. Often. But I got up. We fell down. Often. But we got up. This is not a how-to book, rather it is a “How I did one of the hardest things you can ever try to do, and with faith in yourself and the support of family and community and luck, do it well” book. Jesse Jackson urged us to keep hope alive. Every parent who loves their child or children knows those words as prayer and mantra and instruction. You cannot raise a Black child in America and not be an optimist, no matter what.

“We have to save our sons and daughters at a time when old-school systemic racism is now shaped and enhanced by climate change, artificial intelligence, social media turbulence, and the relentless replay of ‘black death at the hands of cops’ videos, along with a new outburst of White backlash. In 1969, Gil Scott Heron sang that while people had no food to eat on earth in ‘Whiteys on the Moon.’ Now the destination is Mars. Still. And yet. We have to raise sons and daughters who will not be the meek inheriting the earth. We will fight for them all. We will raise them to fight for their place in the sun. They are our wealth. They are our future. We have always known our Black children’s lives mattered.”

Excerpt from the introduction.

“At a corner table in an upscale restaurant heavy on redwood paneling, scented candles, and a retro sixties atmosphere, Elaine Ellis Comegys and I sat talking about sons. I was a visiting writer in residence at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Elaine is an associate dean of students. At noon we had set out, walking leisurely from the nearby campus to this restaurant located in ‘downtown,’ an area that is really no more than a five-block strip of retailers, which include a gourmet carryout, a health food store, an art supply shop, a children’s bookstore, and the town’s only theater. Yellow Springs possesses a vaguely aging counterculture feel and the town invoked in me fond memories of a time when my Afro hair was several inches thicker than the close, conservative natural I wore that day.

“Ebullient and warm, Elaine had given me a capsule history of Yellow Springs, population 4,000, including its status as a stop on the Underground Railroad. In May 1993 the town was bucolic, lovely, and so safe that unlocked doors along the wide tree-lined, shaded streets were common. The most serious recent crime wave anyone could remember was one spawned by a serial bicycle thief.

“Psychologically, I was a long way from Washington, DC, where I returned each Thursday evening to spend the weekend with my family. I would be spending a month at Antioch, teaching a workshop on autobiographical writing, and so during lunch that day I gently grilled Elaine, in a sister-to-sister-on-a-white-campus way, to tell me everything she knew that I should know too. Over Elaine’s pasta and my fish, we dredged up academic anecdotes. We had both spent much of our professional lives on historically white campuses and so the revelations and headshaking lasted awhile. But by the time we ordered dessert, we were talking about sons, ours and everyone else’s.

“Elaine and I landed on the gritty shore of this topic, any resistance to it capsized by its inescapable pull on our emotions. For at that moment it was the fate and the crisis of our sons that obsessed and engaged us. Whether we were talking about the schools, a drive-by shooting, the economy, rap music, or the Knicks versus the Bullets, we were really talking about our sons. We talked about them because if we had not yet lost them, we feared we would. And looking into each other’s eyes, hearing the confusion in our own voices, we wondered who could tell us how to get them back.”

Excerpt from ‘Part I: Calling My Name.’

Table of Contents

Author’s Preface
Acknowledgements

Calling My Name
Trouble the Waters
An Acquaintance with Grief
Soon One Morning

Epilogue
The Dead Call Us to Remember
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Marita Golden’s Saving Our Sons was revelatory when first published and remains so today. Saving Our Sons is a superb mother’s, artist’s, teacher’s, and community activist’s love story of her son and by extension, all Black sons. This is a book that provides life lessons for our daughters too. Saving Our Sons is critical as a guide, motivator, love-note, and an avenue into lifesaving discussions of the heart for all Black children.”
—Haki R. Madhubuti, founder of Third World Press and author of Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous (1991) and Taught By Women: Poems As Resistance Language New and Selected (2020)

“It is always heartening to see women step up to the writer's table. When the results are as adroit and affecting as Marita Golden's work, it is more than satisfying; it is a cause for celebration.”
—Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate

“Marita Golden has captured the special pain that shadows the joy of Black parenthood in these turbulent times. Elegantly written, this book is a breakthrough.”
—Chicago Tribune

“A wonderful storyteller, an uncompromising mind, Marita Golden explores the African-American experience in a completely original way.”—Newsweek

“In this book, Marita reminds us why every black parent should be vigilant and intentional in considering how to steer young black boys—and girls as well—through the precarious passage to adulthood. Saving Our Sons is disturbingly relevant in this, the twenty-first century. It’s a compelling read.”
—Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America

"One of the most important pieces of literature for Black parents."
—MJ Fievre, author of Raising Confident Black Kids

From the Publisher

``As the mother of a black son, I have raised my child with a trembling hand that clutches and leads,'' declares novelist Golden (And Do Remember Me). Though her book title is overbroad and her narrative a bit jagged, she crafts a moving story, mainly of raising her son, Michael, whose middle-class status is no badge of protection from cops or peers. With family ties frayed by mobility, Golden has built a community with friends, but is estranged from her Nigerian ex-husband and wonders if Michael suffers without a father figure. In the course of her tale, Golden marries a man Michael likes, and eventually takes her son to a happy reunion with his father in Lagos, Nigeria. She mixes accounts of Michael's struggles in school and his shoplifting episode with meditations on D.C.'s mean streets and meeting the mothers of sons killed by drugs or convicted of murder. Racism must be dismantled, she knows, but she also argues that the ``first line of defense against racism'' is self-discipline. And, she adds, just as forgiving Michael's father was a vital act of motherhood for her, black men and women must practice forgiveness of each other in order to help save their community. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical testimony, novelist Golden (Long Distance Life, LJ 9/1/89) interweaves diary entries with her exploration of what it means to parent a black male adolescent in the turmoil of today's society. Her understanding is heightened by the fact that for the first decade of his life she raised her son in Nigeria, a country largely free of racism and violence that reveres young males. Golden's fears and hopes make the problems of crime and violence, racism, and parenting very real. A book whose readership should not be limited to African Americans, this is strongly recommended for every library. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/94.]-Kay Brodie, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills, Md.

Library Journal