by Ntozake Shange

Born Paulette Williams in 1948, Ntozake Shange spent five years of her early adolescence in St. Louis, Missouri. Drawing on her personal background, Shange developed Betsey Brown into a novel about a black girl's coming of age in the South during a transitional time in African American history.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Civil rights movement in Missouri. The 1940s was an inhospitable decade for the black citizens of Missouri. A 1949 report from the Missouri Association for Social Welfare (MASW) reads that "there are very few places in Missouri where a Negro can get overnight accommodations at a respectable hotel or eat in a first class restaurant" (Greene, p. 145). In fact, during this era blacks could travel from one end of the state to the next without finding roadside accommodation or a restaurant that would serve them.

In this...