Pulitzer Prize Winner's 'Negroland' Tackles Pressures Of Privileged Blacks In '50s, '60s

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Margo Jefferson pulls no punches in her memoir called "Negroland."

She writes, "If you were a successful, upper-middle-class negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper-middle-class girl."

Except, of course, they were told they had to be twice as good.

"It's so easy to forget what was required, what was imposed," Jefferson told WCBS 880's Jane Tillman Irving.

Black society has always imposed hierarchies of skin tone, of hair texture and width of nose and lips.

"There was snobbery," Jefferson said. "There was cruelty on occassion."

But also a meritocracy of accomplishment and racial uplift.

"We saw ourselves as advancing and upholding the best of the race's goals," Jefferson said.

Jefferson, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her book and drama reviews in The New York Times, grew up in the "Negroland" of her memoirs. She was a prominent Chicago doctor's daughter immersed in the white world of school and camp and the elite black world of her parents. She faced pressures that at one point led her to contemplate suicide.

And then things changed.

"The '60s, that absolutely pivotal time in American culture -- that Civil Rights Movement and black power, followed a few years later by feminism," she said.

Jefferson said it was a privilege to have experienced those cataclysmic times.

"Negroland" is published by Pantheon.