Abstract
Spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, American society is more openly confronting the enduring problem of structural racism and how it manifests for both Black and white individuals. This narrative identity study profiles a 73-year-old Black man, Lonnie B., born to sharecroppers in Mississippi, who migrated North to work in the shipyards of New London, Connecticut. Lonnie juggled three jobs, earned a bachelor’s degree, and graduated from law school over the course of a 20-year period. He went on to become a prosecuting attorney, working primarily with youthful offenders. Employing McAdams’s life story interview, we examined his narrative identity, focusing particularly on his self-defining memories and redemptive ideology, despite ongoing encounters with institutional and interpersonal racism. His personal philosophy, based in an ethos of love, education, and openness, and that draws on a foundation of family resilience, accounts for both his unflagging persistence and his generative efforts in social activism. We examine the challenges and benefits that he has experienced in maintaining this worldview in the face of slow-to-change structural barriers.
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Hamlett, N., Singer, J.A. (2023). “Water the Plants, Not the Weeds”: A Narrative Identity Study of Black Resilience in the Aftermath of the Great Migration. In: Mayer, CH., van Niekerk, R., Fouché, P.J., Ponterotto, J.G. (eds) Beyond WEIRD: Psychobiography in Times of Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28827-2_15
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