No Color Is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston

About this book

No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity fate and compassion as two menone Jewish and one African Americanset out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984 Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns a fifty-two-year-old black man complained that although he felt very important no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade Cole and Stearns in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration recovered Stearns life before his slide into madnessas a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houstons desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. While other southern cities rocked with violence Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall Martin Luther King Jr. Leon Jaworski and Dan Rather all of whomalong with Stearnsmaneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly. Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America and especially on issues of power authority and mental illness.