Change is not easy, nor does it happen quickly. One need only look at our continuing conversations and conflict over race to understand that truth.
Embark revisits a conversation with E. Dolores Johnson, who explores her own racial identity in her debut memoir.
In 1946, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indiana's harsh laws against interracial marriage. The subject of an FBI search, which concluded she was dead and a victim of foul play, Dolores' mother was raising a family in Buffalo, New York.
As a young woman, Dolores decided to find her white family, and hoped to reunite her mother with loved ones. She writes about her experience in her book, 'Say I'm Dead: A Memoir of Race, Secrets and Love.' Published last June by Chicago Review Press, it is now an audiobook on Dreamscape Media.
Johnson's work has appeared in Narratively, Buffalo News, Writers of Color Anthology, Hippocampus and others. She spent her career as an international business executive in tech. She also consulted corporations, as well as Berklee College of Music, on diversity. Dolores directed the digitization of john F. Kennedy's papers at his presidential library in Boston, which launched at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. She has a BA from Howard University and MBA from Harvard Business School and completed an MFA equivalent Creative Writing Program. Through Delta Sigma Theta, she chairs human trafficking conferences for black girls and serves on the Boston University International Review Board and the Board of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts