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What makes the story Paris tells so powerful and heart wrenching is that it is told from the perspective of an innocent youngster who is just beginning to figure out how the world really works. It’s also a story that warrants telling. - Robert Devet
Read The Full Review Here The Nova Scotia Advocate
Len Paris' memoir is an excellent book, revealing the effects of racism in Nova Scotia. I planned to read a chapter a day, but I ended up reading it from cover to cover in one sitting. - Pam T (@A_Le_Map)
" The first chapter speaks to Len's lingering pain and distress caused by racist acts some 65 years ago, in small town Nova Scotia. Len points out that the continued racism still exists in today's societies, creating new painful experiences for future generations to endure." ". ..Len's father, was both a celebrated War Hero and a discarded victim of White society's racism and discrimination. He volunteered to fight Nazism for the good of all people, yet it was racism that was the harder life-long battle." - Edward Adach, Toronto Police Service
"While Paris was in elementary school his family moved from Truro to Priestville, a community of about 60 families with 15 of them being Black or Mixed-Race. He remembers the blueberry pies his mother made when he and his siblings returned home with jars of berries. He also remembers the frost on the nail heads in the rafters above the children's beds..." "The book is partly memoir, partly an analysis of what he terms "structural racism." - Rosalie MacEachern, New Glasgow News
"... Leonard Albert Paris recounts in his memoir, Jim Crow Also Lived Here: Structural Racism and Generational Poverty, Growing Up Black in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia (Friesen Press) what life was like for him in the 1950s and 1960s. Paris's family home in the community of Priestville, on the edge of New Glasgow, had no plumbing, no telephone, no well, no inside toilet, little insulation, and two wood stoves for heating and cooking." "The White citizens in all the local towns, including New Glasgow, made it well known that the Black community should stay out of their White neighbourhoods or being in their downtown areas. This was routinely enforced at night." - Allison Lawlor, The Chronicle Herald
"Leonard Paris was born in Truro, Nova Scotia and spent his early years growing up just outside of New Glasgow, NS in an area called Priestville. Jim Crow Also Lived Here chronicles Leonard’s first 18 years growing up poor and Black in NS and his journey from Army Cadets to a 47-year career in law enforcement with some blueberry picking in between.
I recently spoke to Leonard – on “I Am Black History” podcast. He told me that he did not set out to write a book. He just started writing down memories as they came back to him, often in dreams and he realized that after he had filled two notebooks that it was time to write a book. We are lucky he did. I wanted to include a link to this work because it is exactly what we talk about when we say Our Voices, Our Stories."
Please check out this beautifully written, fascinating, informative memoir at https://www.jimcrowalsolivedhere.com/
By:
Donna Paris
In the Black Canada – Our Voices, Our Stories
www.intheblackcanada.ca
I recently spoke to Leonard – on “I Am Black History” podcast. He told me that he did not set out to write a book. He just started writing down memories as they came back to him, often in dreams and he realized that after he had filled two notebooks that it was time to write a book. We are lucky he did. I wanted to include a link to this work because it is exactly what we talk about when we say Our Voices, Our Stories."
Please check out this beautifully written, fascinating, informative memoir at https://www.jimcrowalsolivedhere.com/
By:
Donna Paris
In the Black Canada – Our Voices, Our Stories
www.intheblackcanada.ca
