Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Precious Lord, Take My Hand 2. One Dime Blues 3. Green Animals around the Moon 4. mid*wife 5. Cool Buttermilk, Brown Gravy, and No Chickens under the House: A Dream 6. Esse Quam Videri 7. In This Dark World and Wide 8. Sisters 9. Taking Low to No One 10. Ivory Towers and No Sidewalks 11. Seeing a Thing Through 12. As Long as You Give Us the Equal 13. A Woman on Wall Street 14. Mademoiselle 15. "...For Peace and Justice, Freedom and Dignity for All People" 16. You Follow Me? 17. I Was Glad When They Said unto Me, "We Will Go into the House of the Lord" 18. When the Sun Goes Down, You're in a Valley like This, and You Can Look Up to the Top and See the Sunrise 19. The Little Country Church 20. The World Can't Take It Away Epilogue

"[This] excellent book offers moving portraits of women whose lives have previously received little notice. Their attainments deserve to be recorded, for their sake and as a demonstration of how a repressed people live with dignity and hope." - Philadelphia Inquirer "Hope and Dignity proves that there can be trust and truth between women; that a brutally racist society can damage but not completely deaden the giving heart." - Women's Review of Books "An overlooked chapter in American black history earns fresh attention in Hope and Dignity... Highly recommended." - Los Angeles Times "I haven't been so touched since reading Studs Terkel's Hard Times. The voices of Mrs. Wilson's women are so authentic and eloquent that I kept wishing to have been along with the documentarian's camera, to capture their faces as they told their stories." - Bill Moyers "These are warm and heartening oral autobiographies." - Booklist "This moving oral history examines the lives of 20 extraordinary older black women from North Carolina. By letting her subjects speak largely for themselves, Wilson creates a varied and inspiring tapestry... Sensitive photographs acompany each chapter... Highly recommended." - Library Journal "Utilizing oral history interviews and sensitive photographs, the compilers have reconstructed for readers the lives and characters of 27 elderly black women in the South from all walks of life. The result is less a story of victimization than it is a celebration of human courage, persistence, and nobility." - Journal of Southern History "This book is inspiring. Black women [born]... 60, 70, and 80 years ago had seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but here are some who overcame much. These women are impressive, and this is a needed chronicle... Hope and Dignity is a hymn to the human spirit." - Winston-Salem Journal