The Outskirts of Hope: A Memoir of the 1960s Deep South Paperback – 23 April 2015

Learning about what segregation* was like from movies and history textbooks in high school was a much different experience than reading a first person account like this one. It was moving to get a glimpse into the inner thoughts and emotions of Aura and Jo as they experienced life in rural Mississippi during segregation, and also to get a sense, through their eyes, of what it must have been like for the black families living in the poorest town in America. Here is just one of the quotes that I found moving: "Just then, the buses pulled up in front of the theater. ... I watched my students walk quietly in pairs... their heads held high as they crossed a whites-only threshold for the first time in their lives." Aura had negotiated with a theater for her students to watch "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" (out of state, as it was banned in Mississippi) but only if they didn't have to sit in the "colored balcony". *Of course "segregation" is a euphemism. What black Americans experienced during these times was nothing short of terrorism.

They dared to move to a totally black community at a dangerous time in history. It took courage and a gererous spirit

This is a compelling, true story of an ordinary family who spends two years in extraordinary circumstances. It tells a captivating, honest tale of a white family in an all black town in the height of the civil rights movement.It is full of tenderness, love, drama and goosebumps. The family, often ignorant of the dangers facing their neighbors from the KKK, through sheer passion for helping others, develops a deep love for the community, which is reciprocated in kind.Until something happens, and they are forced to leave.Full disclosure:Aura and Leon were my Great Aunt And Uncle, and while I knew and loved them both, the familial relations are not my reason for the 5 star review.I found the book a page-turner. It is full of daily simple acts of kindness and tenderness and the not-so-subtle horrors of discrimination. Aura is a delightfully flawed character beginning her journey as an honored educator. And the simple, innocent interjections from a 10-year-old Jo, bring goosebumps.Read this.

I am always skeptical of books by white people about the Civil Rights Movement. It feels like every white person who did anything has to write a book in which they're the hero. But this book almost immediately made me put down my attitude, because Aura is such an authentic and reluctant "heroine." I really loved the Aura portions of the book. Jo is a less accessible character, I think partly because of her age - 10 to 12. At first, the sections written in her voice are very short and more or less factual - I went to school, I played with my friends. It's hard to know what she is feeling about moving so far away, to someplace completely different from what she knew. She comes alive later in the book, but I never felt as connected with her as with Aura.I found myself being furious at Leon and the sexism that seems very much taken for granted, which of course, it was at that time. He not only decided what the family was going to do without consulting his wife, but he made no effort to prepare her for what it would be like. At the beginning of their journey south, she desperately has to pee and the car pulls up to a gas station rest room, someone tells her not to go in but not why, and later everyone is ragging on her for using a segregated bathroom. But why did they stop, if they didn't want her to go in, and why didn't they explain to her what it would mean? However, that incident, and others like it, are very vividly used throughout the book to make Aura's character and her journey come alive.I felt invested in the saga of the family and also enjoyed the small reflections on how the South was changing over those few years. The scenes after Dr. King's murder had tears streaming down my face. Very simply and honestly told.

This book has the pacing and narrative flow of a novel. The structure is also compelling - the author has crafted the memoir from her mother's diary entries, and interspersed some of her own as well. I was immediately captivated by the characters and by their story. Not only is this a wonderfully drawn human portrait of a family that uproots from a middle class to a poor, and from all white to all black, community, with all the adjustments needed - it's also adroitly told social history. Without any preachiness or lecturing, we are given a lesson about race relations in the 60s and now, and about the impact a single person can have on society. The author does a near- impossible thing: She gives us a beautiful homage to mother as both a "real" amd flawed human being, but also a woman of extraordinary courage and commitment.

In 1967, a ten-year-old tom girl is uprooted by her father from her all-white Boston suburban neighborhood to be thrust, along with her family, into an all-black community in the heart of Mississippi—Mound Bayou. The Civil Rights Movement was making its mark on the South by transferring a white doctor (Jo’s father), her mother, two older brothers and herself into the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields in order to set up a community clinic. Did Jo or her family have a voice in this decision? Did her mother move in sync with her radical husband?With a near-constant threat from the KKK, as well as some of the residents of Mound Bayou, this memoir is told clearly and unflinchingly through the words, diaries and notes of both Jo and her mother, Aura. Aura, a strong woman in her own right—albeit, a short white Jewish woman from Boston—she made her own mark on Mound Bayou. She strode into the high school—in spite of not having a teaching certificate—and begins teaching reading along with English literature. Even today, almost fifty years later, Aura is still remembered for the gifts of education she bestowed on her students.Complex, riddled with possibilities of strife and crisis, this family gives fully to the community without asking for anything in return but safety for their endeavors.Remembering with clarity the pangs of fear for the Freedom Fighters and Civil Rights activists who dared to wrestle with the ‘Devil’ during the 60s, I found this memoir of mother and daughter to be fully engaging and gratifying as a story of hope and promise. Well done, Jo!

Ok, I'll try to keep it coherent and not start yelling, which may necessitate a shorter review than my head and heart contain.The first thing it's important to say is TRIGGER WARNING. There is racism, sexism, violence, and sexual assault in this book. There are many things mentioned that are simply glossed over and leave me going - "What?!! WHAT??!!" and they're written like they are nothing.This book is simply written, accessible, and utterly disturbing and infuriating. I can't say I'm happy I read it - it was too disturbing - but it is a very good book.More thoughts:SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!! If you don't want to read spoilers, skip the rest of the review.Things that infuriate me:-Aura needs the bathroom so they take her to one then complain that she uses it because it's "Whites only". Sooo.....you take her to the bathroom when she's about to explode and demonize her when she uses it?! Seriously?!-Leon's sexism, selfishness, and utter self-absorption. A thoroughly unlikable character.- She got her beaten and abused daughter out of bed to sit at the table to make sure everything looked good for Leon coming home??!! You're freaking kidding me, right?!- The assertion over and over that Jo wasn't raped. Excuse the hell out of me, that little girl was subjected to sexual assault on an almost daily basis - had to avoid activities she enjoyed because of the constant assaults, and was, in the end, severely beaten and assaulted by four boys because they thought it was "fun"?! So I guess as it's not rape it's not so bad and it's all ok then, huh?- The racism. On both sides.- I thought the afterward would calm me down, but that little bastard couldn't even acknowledge what he'd done - and LIED TO HIS VICTIM'S FACE about it.- Even Jo couldn't acknowledge the sexual assault. After describing what happened she only ever called it "the beating". Hell no, girl, you weren't just beaten.END SPOILERS

I finished this book a few days ago and, I loved it.It was truly engrossing. I read it in one day.Here's a quick run-down: When she was ten years old, Jo Invester's family moved to a small, poverty-stricken, all-black Mississippi town in the heart of the cotton fields. Her father, who was a doctor, opened a clinic (her father is largely absent from the narrative and one gets the feeling that he was emotionally absent from the family's lives as well).It was 1967, smack in the middle of the Civil Rights era, when Jim Crow laws were still enforced (even though the Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964), the Klu Klux Klan periodically swooped down upon towns instilling fear.Revisiting such a time in history isn't easy, and the book often caused me to squirm, such as when barefoot high school students tied rages around their feet to protect themselves from in cold. (This in 1967, when most of living up North were sitting cozy in living rooms watching The Monkeys on TV. The differences between such lives was startling. It hit like a slap.)Ivester wrote much of the book from her mother's notebooks and from her mother's point of view, and it's evident that she worked hard at maintaining her mother's voice. Yet, at times the mother came across as too good, too committed. It's almost as if Ivester were unable to distance herself from the role of a daughter to the role of a writer. There were points where I groaned, points that sounded as if the white-savior-teacher-works-hard-to-save-the-poor-black-children.Yet, Ivester's mother (Aura Kruger) was truly committed toward this cause. She was a teacher who worked with disadvantaged youth and made a difference in countless lives while also participating in civil rights and gay rights marches. There's even a documentary about her work teaching Shakespeare in underprivileged schools (Hard Lessons).While the voice felt forced at time, I doubt that most readers will notice. As someone who reads for voice, however, it nagged at me.The chapter headings were an added point of the book. Here Ivester includes photos and civil rights era excerpts and it adds an extra layer to the book.The Outskirts of Hope is a powerful read that tells a powerful story in a sad and troubling time of history we too often ignore.

This was a very interesting book about a white family from Boston thrust into a small black town in the mid-1960s, told from the perspective of the mother and 11-year-old daughter. The only reason I don't give it five stars is because some threads were simply dropped, like what happened to the three boys they sent to Brandeis on scholarship. And the fact that the parents divorced somewhere along the way was just mentioned in passing -- I think readers deserved more. Much was made of the fact that this was a Jewish family, yet we learn nothing about their lives as Jews, and indeed most of the children do not seem to live Jewish lives as adults. I would have liked to read more about this part of their identity.

Few of us get to live experiences as Jo Ivester did when her father, a doctor, moved their family from Boston to a tiny town in Mississippi in the 1960's so he could provide medical care to an under-served town of African- Americans. Few of us would have had the courage to go. Ivester tells her story in a suspenseful manner through a mix of excerpts from Jo's journal as a ten year old and her mother's. One gets an ominous feeling from the first page that grows to the end. It is an important story that illuminates the consequences of racism but ultimately it carries a a message of women's rights. Jo's mother teaches in an all Black school in a way that transcends standards and teaches her students how to live. The healing that evolves is a testimony to the health of one family and one girl.

Reading The Outskirts of Hope takes a child of the 60s back to that time where hope indeed lurked on the outskirts of political turmoil, economic prosperity (for many) and social revolution. With a narrative carried on in the mixed perspective of a no-nonsense practical mother and a ten year old child, each taking care of the business of adjusting to a father’s decision to uproot and move his white family to a black town in the deep south, Outskirts poses the large questions of race, poverty, self-determination and justice through the lens of one family in one town. Jo Ivester, using her mother’s extensive journals, charts each member of her family’s challenges and victories, offering the reader an authentic view of a complicated time. The birth of her mother’s career as a teacher- of literature- showcases the importance of preserving and telling these stories.

Having grown up in the 60s, living in Kansas ( I graduated college in 1966) I was only vaguely aware of the happenings in the south. As I read this wonderfully startling account of the true story of those times, I realized how sheltered I was at the time. I knew of and witnessed on t.v. the marches and segregation, racists attitudes of law enforcement and polititions, and yet it was all so unreal to me. There might as well have been a huge ocean between Kansas and Mississippi. I am a retired teacher who has known respect from my students from outside of the Deep South. This is a remarkable enlightening account of a teacher, Aura Kruger, who was way a ahead of her time! Thank you "Joey" for penning your mother's memoirs.

Jo Ivester's The Outskirts of Hope is a memoir that reads like a compelling dramatic fiction. I devoured it, fascinated to know how the characters would develop and change, and what would happen in the family's journey from their upper middle class, white, Jewish suburban Boston life, to the rural isolation of an all-black town in Mississippi. What transpired surprised me.In this modern era when it has become clear to all that America has not healed our racial divides, living through one family's and one community's experience is a window into understanding where we came from, and how far we have to go. This is a family and town I will not forget.

I was immediately enamored with Aura. As the mother and dutiful wife, she embarks on a journey to an all black community while her husband, Leon, opens a medical clinic in a rural part of Mississippi. But it was the strength of Aura that made this book shine. Her ability to transform what could have been a distrastrous situation, led her to become a highly respected educator for decades to come. She led with courage and love, wanting to bridge that horrible gap of segregation. The book flows as Jo Ivester seamlessly introduces her own 10-yr old child POV with that of her grown mother, bring two perspectives to the same moment. I would highly recommend this book for an enlightening historical read. It has a definitely place in the classroom also.

Due to my hectic schedule, my intention was to read this recommended book during my subway rides, and perhaps late at night before I fell asleep. Well, I decided to read the first few pages one day and was hooked. It was so frustrating to only read it in small chunks of time. So I set aside a late afternoon into evening period and read the bulk of it. I found it to be captivating, educational and extremely emotional. I'm in awe of what Ms. Ivester's family sacrificed to be of services to others, only to find how much it also enriched their lives. This is so beautifully written, jumping back and forth between the memoirs of Mother and Daughter and ending with a cathartic journey back to Mississippi many years later with her own daughter. I highly recommend this read!

I related to this story on many levels, although I have little in common with the actual incidents. Once I picked up "The Outskirts of Hope," I couldn't put it down. I was slightly younger than Jo during the civil rights movement, too young to have such a considered experience, yet always intrigued by the swirling black and white memories I hold from this time. I felt privileged to glimpse the quiet courage and profound compassion of Aura. A shy woman, deposited by her admirable husband in a small town in the Deep South at a time when no one quite knew the rules or how to gracefully embrace the changing times or the unknown danger & anger that could result from ignorance and resistance to change (at the hands of the KKK and others). That the crux of this story revolves around Jo's brutal loss of innocence and the ensuing potential for violence toward the town and the perpetrators as a result, makes my head spin. This is a beautiful story of an heroic family and a loving testament to the community that embraced and allowed them in. Bravo.