In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby

A powerful account of growing up Black during the era of the civil rights movement from historian and minister Mark Morrison-Reed. In these pages he wrestles with racism, the death of Martin Luther King, Black radicalism, and his experience in an interracial family.

Mark Morrison-Reed was caught in a tortuous shift in America. Born on the South Side of Chicago during the 1950s in a twilight zone between the races, he was raised on the cusp of what was to come. A Black hippie, he tried to reconcile the “make love not war” ethos of the white counter-culture with the demands of awakening Black power consciousness. Morrison-Reed, himself of mixed-race ancestry, went on to marry an Anglo-Canadian and raise two multiracial children. He served as minister to predominantly white Unitarian Universalist congregations. In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby gives voice to the unspoken story of those African Americans who were among the first to bring racial diversity to their neighborhood, school, church or workplace, to the increasing number of partners in interracial relationships and those blessed with and yet struggling to raise multiracial children in a polarized world.

Rev. Dr. Mark D. Morrison Reed is the author and editor of several books, including Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism, The Selma Awakening: How the Civil Rights Movement Tested and Changed Unitarian Universalism, and Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy: Black Power and Unitarian Universalism, all from Skinner House Books. He has served as co-minister of Unitarian Universalist congregations in Toronto and Rochester, New York, and as an affiliated faculty member at Meadville Lombard Theological School and the coordinator of the Sankofa Archive there. In 2019, Rev. Morrison-Reed received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism.