Keeping History Alive: The Merits of Freedom in the Family Stephanie Perez College

For thousands of years, history has been kept alive through the written word; me and women of virtue, in particular, have recorded social struggles so that future generations can know about the events that transpired over the course of their lifetimes. Through Freedom in the Family, Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due set about to make sure that the injustices that they and countless other African Americans experienced during the Civil Rights Movement would never be forgotten. In their memoir, the mother and daughter duo enumerated all the obstacles they had to overcome in their fight for freedom for themselves and for their family. Their story is one of a search for purpose, identity, and a desire to be free amongst a sea of discrimination and injustice, but above all, it is a piece of history that has been uncovered in the hopes that it will never be repeated.

Patricia and Tananarive both state their purposes for writing this memoir in the first few chapters in a way that is effective at setting the tone for the memoir and emphasizing the importance of what the writers are undertaking. Patricia tells a short anecdote of a time when she was sitting on a textbook committee and realized none of the textbooks mentioned...