I was delighted to learn that my novel Loving Artemis, an Endearing Tale of Revolution, Love, and Marriage (from Thorned Heart Press was one of the winners of Literary Titan’s top books from 2022.
In honor of that and in honor of the important day of service dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, I am posting an excerpt from Loving Artemis in which a protagonist in her senior year in high school is at the local public library researching a paper that includes the history of her era. This part of the story takes place in 1977.
Grace nodded. She headed over to the microfilm reader.
After an hour, she found the article in the Metro section about Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm from New York’s 12th Congressional District announcing her bid for the presidency. She read the article, copying notes on her index cards, putting the citation on the top. Then she saw a sidebar on the highlights of the civil rights movement.
She remembered learning about the Emancipation Proclamation when she was in junior high. It was passed in 1862 when President Lincoln was in office. There was a mention of the 1915 Supreme Court ruling (Guinn v. United States) against the grandfather clauses used against black people to deny them the right to vote. She learned about this last year in social studies. She remembered the teacher talking about Rosa Parks starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott by refusing to give up her seat in 1955, but she hadn’t learned that the U.S. Armed Forces weren’t desegregated until 1954. She remembered seeing a film about the integration of Little Rock Central High School after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1954 ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. At the time she knew this was important, but she didn’t have the strong feeling that she had now that the rights of all people would open doors for her too.
Grace looked down the column and skimmed the paragraph about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, then she read an item about interracial marriage. She didn’t know that it had ever been illegal, and she didn’t know why it had never occurred to her. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia against states prohibiting interracial marriage. Grace read that Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, residents of Virginia, brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court after they each had been sentenced to a year in prison because they had violated state law by marrying.
Grace sat back in her wooden library chair and stopped making notes. She was astounded that this had just happened ten years ago.
It was true that most of the families who lived in her neighborhood were white. In her section, there were three black families and one East Indian family. The parents were all married to someone of the same race. But when Grace had gone on an overnight class trip to a ski resort several hours away, she had seen the captain of the football team, who was white, and the head cheerleader, who was black, horsing around in the indoor swimming pool. They were practically making out. Everyone knew they were a couple, but no one said anything about it. As captain of the football team and head cheerleader, they were both royalty in the pecking order of high school. Grace leaned forward and went back to taking notes. Then she sat up and scanned the bottom of the column. In 1968, the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to congress.
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
Janet Mason, author 