The Journey

<p>I was born a Negro on March 28 1931 to a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who was two generations away from slavery and had a fourth-grade education. A midwife delivered me helped by my grandmother and aunts and I took my first breaths in a three-room sharecropper's shack on a hardscrabble farm located miles down a dusty dirt road in Falls County Texas twenty-five miles south of Waco.</p><p>So begins John Dearman's unlikely and lucky journey from poverty in segregated and hostile central Texas to law school in Michigan and a prestigious judgeship in San Francisco. With unassuming prose and humility the author gives not just his own experience but the context of the time through his knowledge of the law.</p><p>His family rooted him both in his younger years and his later ones giving him the foundation to succeed. Don't miss this remarkable journey.</p>