Why Now?

What motivates a 73-year-old African American man to publish his first book? All my life I have fought an uphill battle against racism. In most of the educational and professional venues in which I have studied and worked I have been in the minority. I attended majority white schools and worked in majority white places of business. Since I was a child, reading and writing have been the palliative I have used to soothe myself against the daily injuries that a racialized society deals out to those of us who refuse to know our place.

Since I was a child, I have loved western novels and T.V. shows, because they were morality plays where good and evil were clearly defined often by the color of their hats.  In the western movies and books, however, often the only black things were the hats and the horses.  This led me to research the role of African Americans in the “taming of the west.”  What I discovered was that racism had deftly obliterated black people from the historical picture of the western frontier. In Walker’s Way I try to set the record straight through fiction based upon fact and at the same time remind my contemporaries, young and old, that we have a rich history of facing and defeating daunting odds.  The people of color in my book refuse to be defined as victims, supplicants or savages.  Instead, they carve dignity and self-respect out of the rock of oppression.

Writing Walker’s Way was therapy for me, a therapist. It is one way I have tried to seize this pivotal moment in history and add my voice to the chorus that insists that black lives matter, yesterday, today and tomorrow.