Thursday, October 4, 2012

An Inspiring Story

I work with someone who has one of those inspiring stories of starting out with everything going against him: the son of a black American GI and an Austrian woman after World War II.  He ended up in an orphanage that was primarily filled with other mulattoes for whom there was really no place in post-war Europe, eventually adopted by a white American couple (along with nine other mulatto kids).  He has an impressive collection of photos and what sounds like a pretty inspiring story of moving up in the world.  If I had any hope of finding a publisher, I would work with him on getting it written; by his own admission, he's not a great writer.

3 comments:

  1. Self-publish as a 2.99 Kindle book on Amazon. I'm sure you're aware of Amazon's e-book royalty structure.

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  2. I am well aware of it; search by books by myself or Rhonda L. Thorne Cramer. But unless you are writing fiction, count on hundreds of books sold, not tens of thousands.

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  3. Could have been worse for him, believe it or not.

    I was reading about the architect of Virginia's "one-drop" race law, enacted in 1924. He was an enthusiast for the sterilization of "defectives" and non-whites. He corresponded with Nazi German race officials, and was very pleased by the German program to sterilize all the "Rhineland bastards". These were the 600 or so children born to German women and black French colonial soldiers stationed as occupation troops in the Rhineland after WW I.

    Incidentally, I also read about George Tillman of South Carolina (brother of Governor "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman). At the 1895 state constitutional convention, he argued against enacting a "one-drop" rule because nearly all South Carolina whites had a little black blood somewhere.

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