Privilege And Pressure: A Memoir Of Growing Up Black And Elite In 'Negroland'

Growing up in the 1950s, Margo Jefferson was part of Chicago's black upper class. The daughter of a prominent doctor and his socialite wife, Jefferson inhabited a world of ambition, education and sophistication — a place she calls "Negroland."

In her memoir, Negroland, Jefferson describes the social pressures of her upbringing, as well as the sense of separation that it engendered. She writes that she and other members of the black elite thought of themselves as a "Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians."