1977 Books is hosting Alabama author, Jamilah Minnicks, for a reading of her new book, Moonrise Over New Jessup. Minnicks describes her book as a love letter to Alabama. Please join us for an intimate evening on Wednesday, January 18 at 6:30pm with this award-winning author and Alabamian.

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MOONRISE OVER NEW JESSUP grew out of Minnicks’ own concerns with the limited way that Black people and ideas about Black social progress have been historically portrayed.

“Regardless of whether the segregation was de jure or de facto, from north to south and east to west, more than 1200 Black communities were founded between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. These were places where folks wished to maintain separation; where they believed that their main impediments to social advancement were the persistent diversion of tax money from the community, voter disenfranchisement, and both state-sanctioned, and extrajudicial, anti-Black violence,” she explains.

“People in these communities founded them to provide safe spaces for us to live and work and love, not to abandon what had been built from the ground up by our foremothers and fathers, and that had existed for generations. Folks wanted to remain where they could ‘see it and be it,’ where their neighbors were professionals, their teachers, all Black, and where they were represented everywhere they looked.”

Moonrise Over New Jessup Synopsis

It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup’s political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

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