The Outskirts of Hope

A Memoir of the 1960s Deep South

Jo Ivester

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631529658
• Subtopic: Education Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But ultimately it was not Ivester’s father but her mother—a stay-at-home mother of four who became a high school English teacher when the family moved to the South—who made the most enduring mark on the town. In The Outskirts of Hope, Ivester uses journals left by her mother, as well as writings of her own, to paint a vivid, moving, and inspiring portrait of her family’s experiences living and working in an all-black town during the height of the civil rights movement.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Photographs
• Prologue
• One The Outskirts of Hope
• Two Mound Bayou
• Three Living with Don Quixote
• Four The Land of Cotton
• Five Inspired to Teach
• Six If Not Us, Who?
• Seven If Not Now, When?
• Eight We Shall Overcome
• Nine Guess Who’s Going to College?
• Ten Dreaming the Impossible
• Eleven Leave the Books
• Twelve Back to Mound Bayou
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author