Special Black History Month Author Visit & Non-Fiction Book Club Discussion

We’re excited to announce—especially as we lead up to the holiday, honoring the late civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—we will have two events in early February surrounding a recently published book by a Lowell native: Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War by Linda Hervieux. So here’s your chance to catch the former Sun reporter if you missed her event at the University Crossing bookstore in December.

Book Discussion
Thursday, February 4, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM.
The library’s Non-Ficiton book club will discuss this book at our meeting. For those of you keeping track, this means Bread & Roses by Bruce Watson has been pushed back a month and will be disscussed on March 3rd. Also, since Forgotten is so new and locally popular there will be limited copies availble for patrons to borrow. You may want to purchase a copy and have it signed at the….

Linda Hervieux Author Visit
Saturday, February 6 at 1 PM.
The author herself will be at the library to give a talk and sell and sign copies of her book. Both events are free and open to the public and will occurr in the ground floor meeting room.

About the Book (from the publisher):

“In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed baloons designed to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, but it was an award he would never receive—the nation’s highest decoration was not given to black soldiers during World War II.
Forgotten is the story of an all-black battalion whose crucial contriubtions on D-Day have gone unrecognized ot the present. In this extraordinary blend of military and social history, Linda Hervieux brings to live the injustices of 1940s Jim Crow America and finally pays tribute to the valor of these brave young men.
Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Forgotten tells the tale of these hereoic men whose contributions to one of the most extraordinary missions in modern history have been overlooked. Like thousands of other African Americans, members of the 320th—Wilson Monk, a jack-of-all-trades from Atlantic City; Henry Parham, a bus porter who fled Virginia’s sharecropping country; William Dabney, an eager seventeen-year-old army volunteer from Roanoke, Virginia; and Samuel Mattison, a charming romantic from Columbus, Ohio—were sentabroad to fight fro liberties denied them at home.
In England and Europe, these soldiers discovered freedoms they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens, and they would carry these experiences back to America, to fuel the budding civil rights movment.
Beautifully rendered, Forgotten offers a vivid account of the tension betwen racial politcs and national service in wartime America and a moving narrative of human bravery and perserverance in the face of injustice.

About the Author:

Linda Hervieux is a journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Fodor’s Paris guide, among other publications. A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, she lives in Paris, France, with her husband. This is her first book.