The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America - Hardcover

Bush, Cori

 
9780593320587: The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593320581 ISBN 13: 9780593320587
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From one of America's most transformative politicians and activists, a powerful and inspiring memoir that sheds light on a harrowing personal journey and reveals how urgently we need our political leadership to prioritize meeting the needs of our most marginalized communities.

"Piercing and gripping... Bush’s words are beautifully devastating." —The Cut

Having worked as a nurse, a pastor, and a community organizer in St. Louis, Missouri, Cori Bush hadn’t initially intended to run for political office. But when protests in Ferguson erupted in 2014, Bush found herself on the frontlines, providing medical care and protesting violence against Black lives. Encouraged by community leaders to run for office, and compelled by an urgency to prevent her children and others from becoming social media hashtags, Bush campaigned persistently while navigating myriad personal challenges—and ultimately rose to unseat a twenty-year incumbent to become the first Black woman to represent her state in Congress.

The Forerunner is the raw and moving account of a politician and activist whose life experiences, though underrepresented in the halls of Congress, reflect some of the same realities and struggles that many Americans face in their everyday lives. Courageously laying bare her experience as a minimum-wage worker, a survivor of domestic and sexual violence, and an unhoused parent, Congresswoman Bush embodies a new chapter in progressive politics that prioritizes the lives and stories of those most politically vulnerable at the core of its agenda. A testament to the lasting legacy of the Ferguson Uprising and an unflinching examination of how the American political system is so deeply intertwined with systemic injustice, The Forerunner is profoundly relatable and inspiring at its heart. At once a stirring and emotionally wrought personal account and a fierce call to action, this is political memoir the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CORI BUSH is a registered nurse, a community activist and organizer, a single mother, and an ordained pastor. She is serving her first term as the St. Louis Congresswoman. Bush is the first Black woman and first nurse to represent Missouri; the first woman to represent Missouri’s First Congressional District; and the first activist from the movement fighting for Black lives elected to Congress.

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Part One

Chapter 1

I like to wear a T-­shirt that reads “St. Louis Built” because this place built me as hard as it has the fired bricks that make up the walls of the homes seen throughout the community. Fired bricks can withstand heat and overwhelming force. I liken them to the hardest, grittiest parts of my own person. For me, the majestic structures that make up my hometown symbolize beauty in the midst of the storms that life brings.

The asphalt reminds me of the pain and trauma I’ve lived through. I can vividly remember every time my face was pressed up against it, burning hot from the summer sun—­my childhood playground falls, when my domestic assaults spilled out onto the sidewalk, when the police tyrannized us when we protested. So much of what I’ve seen and experienced here helped shape me. St. Louis is my soul and my heartbeat.

Ask most people in the United States what they know about St. Louis, and they will mention the iconic arch that stands regally over the wide and winding Mississippi River. The St. Louis that I know is alive and humming with a diversity of peoples, cultures, and culinary traditions.

Soul food from places like Sweetie Pie’s, Mom’s Soul Food Kitchen, Kingz Turkee Shack, and Mother’s Fish makes me feel connected to my family’s roots. The meat served at Red’s BBQ in Ferguson takes me back to the family cookouts my parents used to host. I head to Cherokee Street for Mexican restaurants like La Vallesana and Black-­owned places like Burger 809 for the salmon melt, greens, and mac and cheese. At Yaquis, you can find me grabbing slices from a warm pizza with friends. In the Tower Grove neighborhood, I sometimes walk blocks before I decide what I’m in the mood for. There’s a bounty offering Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, vegetarian, Vietnamese, Persian, sushi, breakfast, Indian, or shakes and protest signs at MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse.

I love to be reminded of all the people who make up the melting pot that is my hometown. St. Louis has been home to artists like Miles Davis, Ike and Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, Scott Joplin, Josephine Baker, Donny Hathaway, Angela Winbush, Huey, Nelly, and the St. Lunatics. Today, we are home to rising femme rap artists like Bates. These folks make up the vibrant character of this area. Whenever I’m home, I feel this vibrancy and flavor in the wind. We are a sports town with the best fans. We are home to the St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Blues, St. Louis Surge Pro Women’s Basketball, plus a host of great college and high school teams. Next up, major league soccer.

But despite this richness of culture, the truth is that we live in a lethal environment in St. Louis, and we’re dying. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department kills more people per capita than any other metropolitan police force in the country. We consistently have some of the nation’s highest homicides for our population size. A child is more likely to die of gun violence in St. Louis than anywhere else in America. It’s as I said. We’re dying.

Some people think that St. Louis is in the South. It’s not, it’s in the Midwest, but Missouri was a slave state. The legacies of slavery and de jure segregation affect every aspect of society here. Delmar Boulevard, nine miles long, divides Black St. Louis to the north from wealthy and white neighborhoods to the south. The redlining and restrictive covenants that were put in place in the early twentieth century determine where we live to this day. Oppression, division, and separation are threads in our culture.

Many people arrived in St. Louis during the Great Migration, when around six million Black Americans moved north in the early to mid-­twentieth century, fleeing persecution, segregation, and discrimination in the South. Some of them intended to only pause in St. Louis before continuing farther north, and stayed. If you ask Black people in St. Louis where our roots are, many of us will say Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, or Louisiana, a history that you can find in our soul food and in the patterns of our speech.

My paternal great-­grandparents came to St. Louis from Starkville, Mississippi, as part of the Great Migration. My maternal grandfather arrived from Pageland, South Carolina, where a cemetery, shopping center, and several streets still bear his family name: Blakeny. As is the case with many who moved north in that period from 1915 to 1970, racial terror, or at least the threat of it, preceded my maternal grandfather’s move to St. Louis.

My grandfather was a dark-­brown-­skinned child of a biracial mother, and his family lived on the Pageland plantation where they’d been enslaved. I was told that when he returned home after serving in World War II in the Army Air Corps on the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific, he was accused of having looked at a white woman. He got wind that a mob was amassing to come for him, and he hopped on the first bus he could catch headed to St. Louis, where his best buddy from the war lived. There he met, and fell in love with, his friend’s sister, a quiet and jolly spirit. He married her, and she would become my grandmother. Her family had moved to St. Louis from Greenwood, Mississippi, when she was eighteen years old, motivated by a similar situation. I don’t know the particulars of that story, but I do know that the Klan and a white woman were involved. Whatever happened, my grandmother’s brother was never seen or heard from again, and the surviving family packed up for Detroit, where other family lived. They made it only as far as St. Louis.

•••

When I was growing up, my immediate family consisted of my parents, a brother, Perry, who’s two years older than me, and a sister, Kelli, who was born a few months shy of my sixth birthday. My father, Errol Bush, worked as a union meatcutter. I loved seeing him at the local grocery store when my mom sent my brother and me on an errand. He wore a long red coat and smock, white hat, and white cloth gloves that would often be tinged pink from the hours he spent handling meat. My dad was popular. Everyone seemed to know him. And he wasn’t only popular at the grocery store where he worked.

Over the years, I watched my dad lead in every group or institution he was a part of. He was president of our family reunion planning committee, and as such he gathered more than a hundred of our family members from all over the country in St. Louis when I was a child. He was president of the PTA at the Catholic elementary school I attended. I watched him be elected alderman in the City of Northwoods, in St. Louis County, when I was ten. Later, he would be elected mayor. I watched him put his mind to something, work hard, and accomplish it. In my eyes, my dad was a giant.

I watched my mother, Barbara, hard at work every day, juggling home and career. But my mom was also the nurturer who enveloped me in love, with all the hugs and kisses I could want. She called me “tweetie bird,” because I was always hanging around her neck. Once I was old enough to attend school, she became a computer analyst. She worked 8:00 to 5:00 every weekday and some weekends, then came home to take care of us three kids. Each evening, making it all seem effortless, she cooked us a full meal. She made sure we did our chores: we would iron our clothes, clean the kitchen, and otherwise help out around the house. She was never too tired to help with homework. And, oh, how I remember the long sessions poring over my math assignments!

To me, my mother was the smartest person in the world. She always knew how to find the right answer. And not only was she smart, but she was also pretty and stylish. She would answer my...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593320581
ISBN 13 
9780593320587
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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