Issac J. Bailey was pulling together his memoir at a time when America was in the midst of racial upheaval. Over the past few years, alarming deaths of black people at the hands of the police spawned a boisterous national movement — Black Lives Matter — demanding systemic change. And one of the central tenets of this new era of activism requires that we respect all black lives, those of poor felons no less than those of rich entrepreneurs. It seems a fitting moment, then, for Bailey’s book, “My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South,” to drop.
His story explores the fallout that his large, black South Carolina family experienced after his oldest brother, Herbert, nicknamed Moochie, received a life sentence for murdering a white man in 1982. More than a recounting of the woes of dealing with the justice system in the face of poverty and racism, this searching memoir forces readers to confront a pointed question: Can we see the humanity in black people who have done bad things?
Bailey built a career as a journalist, spending much of his career at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C. With a keen understanding of systemic racism, he often chronicles the injustices visited upon black America. Yet in his book he grapples with his conflicted feelings about Moochie and other family members who got into trouble with the law. He paints the South not as a place of racist boogeymen, but as a complicated society where defining good and bad requires a bit of context.
[For more on this story by John Eligon, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...brother-moochie.html]
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