Author Celebrates Success of Wall of Color

Florida author Jeanette Cooper celebrates the success of her book, Wall of Color, set in New Orleans, ISBN: 1-4241-4221-7) published by PublishAmerica.

The book characterizes a young biracial woman’s plight to live within the restrictive boundaries of a society where the rules of segregation allow few exceptions to the all-white, all-black, separate–but-equal divisions upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

When Jeanette taught elementary school, she worked with a few biracial children, who taught her many things about race and ethnicity.

“They were the teachers and I the student,” she said.

She recalled one child, in particular, who gave her a lesson and a glimpse into the agonies of a biracial child’s life. The young fifth-grade student made Jeanette aware of the psychological factors affecting biracial children, by sharing her sense of isolation, loneliness, and lack of identity, as well as her tormented feeling of not belonging to either parent’s race. The same child inspired the writing of Jeanette’s book.

Jeanette states that in the past decade, biracialism and multiracialism have multiplied at a faster pace than literature written about it. “I feel that more literature is needed to establish a cultural heritage for both biracial and multiracial ethnicities,” she said. “My book is for adults, but its relevance to the identity crisis of biracial and multiracial persons is for people of all ages.”

An avid reader of historical novels, Jeanette set her book in 1953. She notes it was a time when the Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy, and racism, bigotry, and discrimination were on trial (1951) through the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. It became a landmark case in 1954 when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v Ferguson.