Buy ebook
Overview
Marking seventy years since the Little Rock crisis, Gloria Ray tells the sweeping and intimate story of Gloria Ray Karlmark and one of America’s defining struggles for racial justice.
In 1957 Gloria Ray dreamed of one day studying to become a nuclear physicist. She set her sights on Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and a few years after the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, at fourteen years old, Gloria enrolled.
But as Gloria approached Central High with the other black students on their first day, they were denied entry by armed National Guard troops and an angry white mob. In Gloria’s words, ‘That day my childhood ended.’
The Little Rock Nine, as the students became known, quickly garnered global attention, and the escalating tensions in Little Rock forced President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops to escort them into school. Every day they endured hostility, intimidation, and violence, paying a brutal price for seeking an education. Eventually, rather than accept integration, white Arkansas leaders closed public schools, depriving thousands of young people of a year of learning.
A groundbreaking tale of courage and resistance, this powerful collaboration between Gloria Ray Karlmark and acclaimed journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink tells Gloria’s story for the very first time. Gloria Ray provides essential historical context for this defining moment in the fight for civil rights and features first-person chapters from Gloria, as well as interviews with other members of the Little Rock Nine.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 234mm x 153mm
- 288 pages with 16-page b&w picture section
- 9781761381805
- AUD$36.99
- 2 February 2027
- World English
- Nordin Agency
Praise
‘Åsbrink brings this story to life as she, for the reader, paints these scenes with incredible presence and essayistic sensitivity, thus conveying both astonishment and despair at these incredible events.’
‘Gloria Ray is a deeply personal story in more ways than one, created as a parallel narrative in which the two co-authors take turns to give an account of the past. Elisabeth Åsbrink often returns to her own family history, with its all too many examples of contemporary European tragedies. The Holocaust hangs as heavy a shadow over the book as American racism, and Åsbrink gives explicit examples of how the Nazis were inspired by the South. All in all, the book is thus a hard-to-forget illustration of the worst sides of the 20th century, and is also exemplarily well-written.’
About the Authors
Elisabeth Åsbrink is a journalist and multi-award-winning author. Her book 1947 won the prestigious Letterstedt Prize and has been translated into 19 languages. Her latest book is Made in Sweden.
Gloria Ray Karlmark has a degree in chemistry and mathematics and has worked as a systems analyst and patent engineer, with positions at IBM and Philips in the Netherlands. She moved to Sweden in 1969, and has mainly lived there since then. Her story has never before been told in book form.
Translator
Deborah Bragan-Turner is a literary translator working from Swedish to English. She has a degree in Scandinavian Languages from University College London, and has been a research assistant in the British Library, an academic librarian in a UK university, and an independent bookseller in France. Deborah has translated a range of genres for a number of UK and US publishers and many sample extracts for literary agents in Sweden. She was the editor of Swedish Book Review, the journal of SELTA, from 2015 to 2020.