Nita Wiggins was born in Georgia just at the time People of Color in America became truly equal under the law--the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Her book Civil Rights Baby is the story of her life in an America that took a big step closer to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence of equality for all.
Throughout her childhood, Nita is an earnest high-achieving student with a goal of becoming a journalist, specifically reporting on sports in Dallas and about the Dallas Cowboys. Her path to Dallas through Georgia and West Virginia was not easy, but Wiggins tells a tale of achievement and growth, until her dream is realized in 1999 and she arrives at KDFW in Dallas--a reporter and weekend anchor covering the Dallas Cowboys.
At this point in the book, the trouble begins and the villains become vivid. The latter half of the book is her fight against bosses and colleagues who undermine her and throw obstacles in her path.
But in the end, her story takes a turn that I could not imagine in an American TV sports reporter. As part of her work in Dallas, she covers Texas-native Lance Armstrong during the years he dominated the Tour de France. Wiggins falls in love with France and Paris and becomes proficient in French. When KDFW ends her contract, Wiggins went to Paris, applied for and landed a job as a professor of journalism at l'Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.
Since 2009 she has been teaching journalism in Paris and doing other consulting work.
The book is full of stories of her interviewing luminaries of the sporting world, including Muhammed Ali, Evander Holyfield, stars of Dallas Cowboys from her era and from the past, some of the greats of NASCAR, and many others.
Early in her career, Wiggins interviewed Rosa Parks. The book ends with a lovely play on words that a city needs parks to be peaceful. Paris has enough parks, Wiggins says, Dallas does not have enough: "Dallas also need Parks--enough people with the tenacity to change the system as Rosa Parks had done."
---------
Two previous posts about meeting Nita at my favorite bookstore in Paris, the Red Wheelbarrow, and talking NASCAR at lunch.
First twenty books of 2022:
Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
First Principles by Thomas Ricks
Political Tribes by Amy Chua
Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson
1776 by David McCullough
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen
