Central City's Joy and Pain: Solidarity, Survival, and Soul in a Birmingham Housing Project
Jerome E. Morris
University of Georgia Press
Jerome E. Morris explores complex social issues through personal narrative. He does so by blending social-science research with his own memoir of life in Birmingham, Alabama. As someone who lived in the Central City housing project for two transitional decades (1968–91) and whose family continued to reside there until 1999, when the city razed the community, the author provides us with the often unexplored bottom-up perspective on Black public-housing residents’ experiences.
As Morris’s experiential and authoritative narrative voice unfolds in the pages of Central City’s Joy and Pain, both the scholarly and lay reader are brought on a journey of what life is like for people who live and die at the intersection of race and poverty in a rapidly evolving southern urban center.