The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family

by Sheryll Cashin

Book Overview

During Reconstruction, Herschel V. Cashin was a radical republican legislator who championed black political enfranchisement throughout the South. His grandson, Dr. John L. Cashin, Jr., inherited that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586484222
• ISBN13: 9781586484224
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The Agitator's Daughter

The Agitator's Daughter by Sheryll Cashin is a wonderful book exposing a personal look at one family's significant contribution to African American voting power in the United States. The impact this family had on the civil rights movement went beyond its base in the Birmingham Alabama region and highlights how dedication and stamina can bring about change even if at personal costs. This book ought to be required reading for any student of American history and the author commended for her diligence in putting together a well written and thoughtful American memoir.The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family

An Extraordinary Read

Full disclosure: I was a former student of author Sherryl Cashin (former being the key word here--there's no incentive for me to provide anything but a truthful review). In the classroom we could pick up on her dedication to providing high quality instruction and issues of equality. Even these traits offered little clue of the illustrious family line described in her new book, The Agitator's Daughter. The book takes a honest and emotionally open look into the accomplishments, motivations, and struggles of an African-American family that has been politically prominent for several generations. The Agitator's Daughter will likely cause all who read it to reflect on their own "inheritance." While I am not smart enough to identify genius, Cashin make masterful connections between her lineage and the progress of both African-American rights and relationships between individuals of various socioeconomic backgrounds generally. Let's face it--many people will receive nary a nickel of financial inheritance from their parents. In this memoir Cashin reflects on the priceless gifts children and adults receive from their parents, loved ones or if that term doesn't apply, relatives. This legacy includes an abundance of knowledge about their family's past and the strength and will to persevere despite obstacles placed in their path, no matter what their background may be. These are invaluable lessons that echo throughout life. Cashin shows how this legacy makes it possible for individuals to instill within themselves self reliance, work ethic, and the need to help others and/or engage in formalized service activities, whether overtly or covertly. Cashin reveals her feelings towards her inheritance in a very candid manner by telling her intriguing family story. The family history lovingly passed to her from her father served as a motivating factor for writing this family memoir. Cashin notes that "[a] confident man tends to talk about himself, and Daddy is more confident than most." She greatly benefited from her father's talkativeness and passes the knowledge given to her by her father on through her memoir. The memoir also synthesizes information from archives research, family documents, and an ancestry website. Cashin first traces her family line through five generations. She begins with the biracial union of an Irish slaveowner and "mulatto" slave. The author's great-grandfather Herschel Cashin was one of the couple's seven children. He eventually became one of Alabama's first Black lawyers and a proponent of political rights for African-Americans. Herschel Cashin played a substantial role in Reconstruction gains for African-American progress and equality. He used the law and legislation to obtain voting rights for Blacks, and worked with other trailblazers such as Booker T. Washington, one instance in the book showing that "a disempowered people will always have disagreements about how to proceed." As another book reviewer stated,

A Wonderful Tale

Full disclosure. Sheryll is a colleague of mine whose office is two doors away. I have known her since she started teaching and have nothing but the highest regard for her, both personally and professionally. That said, Sheryll has written an extraordinary book. At one level, it is the story of four generations of privileged black professionals who have been deeply committed to to racial and social justice, particularly for blacks in the Deep South whose struggles for such justice she describes through her family's efforts in politics, education and professional life. She traces the history of the black struggle for equality from Reconstruction to the present day, using family stories as the focal point for political events. Her family knew the leaders in every generation and they appear both as historical figures and real people as the history unfolds. If that were all that the book was about, it would be worth reading. But it is very much more. it is a story of her family with all its strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, laughter and tears. Sheryll is fortunate that her family, to a substantial extent, kept the papers, photographs and memorabilia from generation to generation and, in this generation, the memorabilia now include the oral histories that Sheryll was able to take from her relatives while they (or, in the case of her father, are) alive. Not all of us are lucky enough to have those resources available nor, if we are, the skill to make them come alive. Sheryll's family is one that believed, and still believes, that with privilege goes the responsibility to improve the lives of those who do not share that privilege, no matter what the social and financial costs may be. And, as she makes clear, costs there are that members of the family must bear, each in their own fashion. Her father is a fascinating and complex man with whom Sheryll has had a deeply loving and complex relationship. She does not avoid confronting both the love and the anger she felt over the years. Indeed, it is the deeply personal nature of her writing about her family that is the most moving part of the book. Those who love Faulkner, about whose South Sheryll is writing, or Wallace Stegner as he traces family history through Angle of Repose, will respond immediately and viscerally to this book. Everyone else will be drawn in by Sheryll's ability to integrate history, politics, justice, family and feeling. Read it!

An Inspirational Tale

Professor Cashin's book is a stunning achievement-moving, historically relevant and inspirational, the more so because she tells her family's story with honesty, warts and all. The measure of this book, and any good book is the level of intellectual stimulation in engenders in the reader. The measure of an outstanding book is the level of intellectual stimulation it engenders in the reader and the emotional tingle generated by sensitive treatment of subject matter and the deployment of appropriate language. This combination induces self-searching in the reader. Having completed it yesterday, my mind remains in a state of excitation. My emotions continue to tingle. I am inspired once again to feel that any change, anything, remains possible, which is something marvellous to experience two years short of fifty, idealism long sandpapered away by life. Professor Cashin's father, for whom she plainly bears a complex and profound love, and whom she plainly and justifiably holds in so high regard, must now know his daughter has, in her own poignant and sensitive way, made a telling contribution to the cause to which he dedicated his life. Her mother, whose influence over Professor Cashin was plainly as great as her father's must be looking down upon her daughter and smiling in quiet contentment. David Myers Port of Spain Trinidad and Tobago

The Agitator's Daughter

The Agitator's Daughter is a great book. Sheryl's straightforwardness about her family allows the reader to actually experience the struggles and triumphs' of Four generations of Cashin's. The family research is outstanding. The book allows you to flow into the life of a privileged upper class Family, as the author examines her families saga as African American officeholders, doctors, lawyers, etc. The writers efforts to share her families dedication to bring about change in the south; their work ethics and the significant contributions made by this family illuminate the saying "to much is given, much is required." This memoir is an excellent book, I've referred it to several book clubs!