The inspiring story of Leslie Morris is told in her unflinchingly honest, powerful and compelling book How Ya Like Me Now!.
At first glance, Morris’ book seems to be just an inspirational autobiography, detailing how a poor black girl from Long Branch, New Jersey overcame emotional problems and defied predictions of her societal demise to earn an undergraduate degree, with honors, from prestigious Simmons College and Master’s Degrees from Boston College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before building an illustrious career in human services and public health. And it is that. But it is so much more. In addition to chronicling the good, bad and ugly of her life’s journey and the close-knit black community of Long Branch’s public housing projects, Morris does two important things that transcend her riveting personal story, both of which make her book a compelling read even if you have no connection to Long Branch and regardless of your racial background.
First, Morris draws a clear and definitive connection between the emotional struggles and destructive behaviors of her childhood and adolescence, and the dangers and pressures blocking the ambitions and driving the poor choices of too many black children today, who too often see poverty, hopelessness, substance abuse, premature parenthood and violence as inevitable. Morris is nationally recognized for implementing one of the first comprehensive school-based programs providing adolescents with access to everything from pregnancy testing and treatment of STDs to mental health and nutrition counseling. She deftly uses vivid snapshots of the situations faced by the young girls she helps to show just what it means to be an “at-risk” black child. Like Harriet Tubman—who, not satisfied with securing freedom for herself, dedicated her life to leading others to the promised land—Morris is a modern-day Moses, working to help embattled black girls to negotiate the deadly snares that she herself escaped as a frustrated, angry and combative “project chick.”
Second, and most meaningful to me as a Long Branch native, Morris provides a historical backdrop of how black people came to Long Branch, carried as much by dreams and aspirations as by buses and trains from the South. Morris explains how blacks migrated from the South, but in many ways, did not leave the South behind. Then she takes this untold black history and personalizes it, bringing insight to the humanity of blacks in Long Branch: one family, one person, one story at a time. Sometimes with love, sometimes with laughter, often with pain and always with truth, Morris makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of black Long Branch, and black America, by filling in the blanks of our hometown’s history.
That said, Morris’s book is an autobiography, and an unflinchingly intimate and personal one at that. I was honored to write the foreword to this book because I strongly identify with Morris’s experiences as a black Long Branch native.
Alfred A. Edmond Jr.
Sr. VP/Editor-in-Chief
Black Enterprise Magazine
|