Born Paulette Linda Williams on 18 October 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey, to Paul T. Williams, a surgeon, and Eloise Owens Williams, a psychiatric social worker and educator, Shange's middle-class upbringing was marked by educational opportunities and important cultural influences. Her family's affluence did not shield her from experiencing racism as a child, however. When she and her family moved to St. Louis, eight-year-old Paulette Williams was bused to a German American school in the enforcement of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling, and she was forced to struggle against blatant bigotry. Betsey Brown: A Novel (1985) offers a fictionalized version of those years of forced integration, as the young protagonist of the book experiences the same confusion and frustration that Williams must have felt when her new teacher denounced the work of African American poets Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
Neither forced integration nor institutional racism deterred Williams from pursuing her interests in reading and writing. The oldest of four children, she enjoyed the works of canonical American writers such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, as well as the works of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Hughes and Countee Cullen.
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