Product Review

After years of teaching in Philadelphia's ghetto, Ruth Jones didn't have a clue about what went on when her pupils left in the afternoon. She did know that their mothers often didn't pick them up on time, that they were out late going to movies, etc., but everything else about their lives was shrouded in a mystery made all the more profound by civil rights imagery that had no application to their lives. When she and her husband E. Michael Jones moved to Europe, they found that, once over the language barrier, there was nothing strange about the foreign country. Germany felt more like home than Philadelphia, the city they had called home their entire lives. Niggas in Denial explains that paradox.

Niggas in Denial is the story of Caroline Peoples, who is now serving seven consecutive life sentences for murders she committed on the South Side of Chicago. Caroline is one of the monsters created in American ghettos - drug and alcohol abuser, thief, "dancer", prostitute, and murderer - but a human being too, who decided to tell the truth, no matter what it cost her, a truth E. Michael Jones shares in this book.