New Book By Lawyer's Daughter: How My Parents Helped Integrate St. Louis
Growing up in a circle of influential African-American attorneys at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court had just decided that racially restrictive property deed covenants were unconstitutional, Gail Milissa Grant took it for granted that she, too, would have a responsibility to help work for a better society when she became an adult.
One of the ways she has done so is to write a book about how her parents and their friends worked to integrate St. Louis, At the Elbows of My Elders, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Before her father, David Grant, died in 1985, she interviewed him, although she didn’t begin working on the book until 1997. Her parents’ circle also included prominent St. Louis attorneys Margaret Bush Wilson, Frankie Freeman and Ira Young and Judge Theodore McMillian.
“My father organized the first economic negro boycott when Woolworths opened a store in a black neighborhood and refused to hire blacks to work there,” Grant recounts. “They started a picket line. The picketers got arrested. They couldn’t hold them, so they went back and protested again. They ended up getting blacks hired.”
The civil rights work these individuals did many decades ago helped pave the way for Barack Obama to become the first African-American nominee for president of the United States this year, she says. “What we are seeing in the presidential race is a fruit of their labor. The fact that a black man is running for president of the United States is astounding.”
