Thank you, author Maureen Gilmer, for sharing your story! “This book about my family is a true tale of civil rights from about 1800 to 1910 New Orleans.” Book to be released 2014!
“In nineteenth-century New Orleans, Jean Benjamin Esnard and his family struggle to conceal their mixed-race ancestry and pass as white in the increasingly hostile racial environment of the post-Civil War South. Their secret begins to unravel, however, when their son, Adrien, is born darker than his siblings and labeled “C” for “colored” on his birth certificate. As desperation sets in, Jean Benjamin and his wife, Florentine must make the heartbreaking decision to separate the family in order to save it.
In Jumping the Fence, Maureen Gilmer shares the extraordinary true story of early civil rights activists—her ancestors—who stopped at nothing to protect each other and their assets in the struggle against slavery and segregation.” http://www.jumpingthefence.net/