DETROIT WHITE GIRL

McMurray offers a compact personal history of growing up in Detroit before and during “white flight.”

In her first book, the author, a retired attorney, gives a thoughtful account of growing up in a neighborhood on the west side of Detroit that experienced racial change during her lifetime. She sets her story against the backdrop of the socioeconomic history of post-World War II Detroit. McMurray describes a fairly comfortable childhood only marred by her father’s drinking problem and early death. Growing up in what she portrays as an almost exclusively white world, she notes that the demographic diversity she experienced was largely limited to people belonging to different Christian denominations, including Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox faith. The author poignantly recounts her memories of not being allowed to socialize with the few Black kids then in her orbit, never understanding why—she was not in a position then to question the choices made for her (“At the time I didn’t know how to express my feelings, but instinctively it didn’t feel right”). McMurray’s book finishes with an account of her coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement and race-based unrest in Detroit. The author recalls the first Black friends she made as a young adult and regrets the missed opportunities of her younger years. McMurray’s narrative builds effectively but seems to end abruptly. Throughout the book she provides readers a compelling picture of a childhood marked by de facto segregation and too-often-unacknowledged Northern racial prejudice, but readers are left wanting to know more about how the Civil Rights era changed her life and possibly shaped her legal career, as well as her thoughts regarding the current state of the city of Detroit. Still, this is an engaging personal remembrance of a time and place whose story still needs to be told. The text includes a section of personal and family photographs.

A thoughtful, elegiac work that leaves the reader wanting more.