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Coming Home to A Familiar Place
I begin the preamble of my memoir, Freaknik Lawyer: A Memoir on the Craft of Resistance with a quote from Tom Wolfe’s character, Captain Charlie, in A Man in Full. Tom Wolfe visited Atlanta in the late 1990s to research his novel about Southern power and privilege and a Freaknik lawyer.
Tom Wolf interviewed more than 100 people in Atlanta for background material. He did not come by The Harvey Law Firm to talk to me. The fictitious Freaknik Lawyer in A Man in Full is not remotely close to the real man.
Tom Wolfe’s omission to talk with me is another example of the power of white privilege operating in the South and throughout the world. The only way to explain this lapse is that Tom Wolfe did not want to hear the Black perspective on race and privilege in Atlanta. Had he spoken to me; I would have been obliged to bear witness to the truth.
My role in the history of the last 50 years has gone largely ignored. Being ignored is the chief reason I wrote Freaknik Lawyer. I wanted to bear witness to the life I have lived and the events I have seen unfold in the last half of the 20th century.
