Lawrence Jackson grew up in West Baltimore. Returning to the city as a “distinguished professor” at Johns Hopkins after building his career elsewhere … called him to navigate the city’s streets and neighborhoods with a discerning eye, calculating what works for his sons and for him, finding answers in the distant as well as recent past, digging into the patrimony he’s earned and what he can hope to pass on.
Jackson invites us on the journey in Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore. He says:
“The book of course is a gigantic irony of the process of upward mobility for African Americans. What does the striving amount to under the conditions which one inevitably faces.”