Margo Jefferson: ‘I was anxious about using the word Negro in a book title’

The author, critic and academic, discusses Negroland, her acclaimed memoir of growing up in an emerging postwar elite in black American society

• Read an extract from Negroland here

Margo Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947. She was for many years a theatre critic at the New York Times and is now professor of the professional practice of writing at Columbia University.

Negroland, a memoir of your growing up in the emergent and precarious postwar elite of black society in America, feels like something you have long contemplated writing. What made you write it now?
Well, you know how writers are. There are some things that you want to acknowledge very directly and there are others that are lurking. It takes a while for them to emerge. This one was lurking.

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