Member JuliusThompson

The saga of Andy Michael Pilgrim is a journey through the sixties in A Brownstone In Brooklyn, the seventies in Philly Style and Philly Profile and the eighties in The Ghost of Atlanta.
The reader follows Andy as he matured in the turbulent sixties in Brooklyn with the Civil Rights movement, his working career as a sportswriter in the seventies in Philadelphia watching the influence of drugs and gangs destroy young people’s lives, and in the eighties in Atlanta where he faces demons from his youth and see the effects of reverse migration of African-Americans from the northern cities back to the new south.
Andy’s thirty-year odyssey from Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Atlanta showcase new life-altering situations and problems that faced African-Americans in the last half of the twentieth century.

I grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York and attended Bushwick High School. The sixties in Brooklyn was an era that had a personality, a feel , and a life-force that changed a generation. I felt this energy and experienced these fires of social change.
After high school, I spent the next four years riding the "A" train to Harlem, in upper Manhattan, to earn my Bachelor of Arts degree from the City College of New York. At CCNY, which was located just a few blocks from the famous Apollo Theater, Wednesday afternoons were hard on the undergraduates. The matinee performances of the major R&B groups of the times were more tempting than attending a boring college lecture. Most of the time I succumbed, but I attended enough classes to pass my courses and eventually earn a college degree from one of the best universities in the country.
At CCNY, literature instructors like Prof. Thomas Tashiro, fueled the fire in me to become a writer!