The Dawn at My Back : A Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, 1900-2000

Individual lives, viewed through the right lens, can reveal the essence of a time and place with startling clarity.

In this innovative memoir, filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era.

This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism - one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity - even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship.In telling this story, Blue underscores how strongly popular culture images of Blacks affected the lives of individual African Americans.

She remembers movies such as "Imitation of Life" that she and her mother viewed together and fought about, ads that portrayed Negroes as unclean, TV shows like Amos 'n' Andy that perpetuated stereotypes - and shows how the unending barrage of demeaning images set her mother on a lifelong quest for self-improvement and middle-class respectability. Blue also describes how the same images, coupled with her mother's relentless efforts to impose essentially white standards of behavior and appearance on her daughter, created in "Blue" the desire to be a shaper of images rather than just a consumer, which eventually led to her becoming a photographer and filmmaker.

Sweeping across the whole twentieth century, this mother-daughter story ultimately becomes a seething American history, the story of a growing African American awareness.