Maryannaville™

Our nation recently lost a powerful voice and a wonderful novelist with the death of Bebe Moore Campbell, age 56. Her writing about topics such as race relations, interpersonal relationships, and mental illness, Ms. Campbell was able to touch her readers’ hearts as well as their minds.

Bebe Moore Campbell was an extraordinarily perceptive author who tirelessly explored the American experience through a variety of perspectives. Growing up in both the North and the South in the 1950s and 1960s, she experienced first hand the numerous ways in which fear and hatred are manifested in the form of racial segregation and oppression. She learned about living amid injustice, about the rage and sorrow it imparts, and about the dignity and resolve required to overcome it. Ms. Campbell drew much of her inspiration and strength from the strong bond she had with her parents.

Her second book, ‘Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad’, is a loving tribute to the warmth of extended family and friends, the strong women in her life who helped mold her character, and the heroic example of her father, whose perseverance after a car accident left him a paraplegic taught her courage and independence. The importance of family dynamics would be a guiding theme in Ms. Campbell’s work and stimulated her interest in the intricate nature of relationships. As Ms. Campbell continued to explore the parent-child relationship, she also delved into the complexities that exist between and within genders, races and communities.

She produced two critically acclaimed novels in the first half of the 1990s set against the backdrop of historical instances of racial violence: ‘Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine and Brothers and Sisters.’ In these novels, Ms. Campbell explored the issues of race, class and gender and personalized them in the form of characters we related to and cared for. Courageous and exceptionally talented, she captured the social and historical forces that cut through out society and divide us. She graphically demonstrated how America’s racial, economic and gender fault lines cut through the lives of individuals, often forcing people into difficult and painful conflicts with others as well as themselves.

Ms. Campbell focused in her later writings on the issue of mental illness. With passion and emotional depth, she explored the horrible consequences of mental illness and the strain that it places on those who love and depend on people suffering from a mental condition. Her work has helped to raise the nation’s consciousness about the issue and has made an invaluable contribution to our society’s efforts to improve the lives of people living with mental illness. Ms. Campbell was a founding member of the Inglewood branch of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and her children’s book, ‘Sometimes My Mother Gets Angry’, won that organization’s Outstanding Literature Award for 2003.

In her work, Ms. Campbell illustrated how oppression and injustice dehumanizes everyone involved. She challenged and inspired us to examine our preconceptions and fears and to open our hearts and minds to those around us. Her powerful voice will be dearly missed, but her legacy cannot be diminished. Surely, her spirit will carry on in the countless others whose lives she has touched both advertently as well as inadvertently.

Bebe Moore Campbell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Author Bebe Moore Campbell Dies at 56

Originally posted 2006-12-13 00:03:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter