Eva Rutland

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I was born in Atlanta Georgia during the olden days, when pot was a cooking utensil, webs were for spiders and civil rights were for white folks. We lived in the house my grandfather built. He had been a slave and built that house six years after the civil war.

My mother was a school teacher; my father a pharmacist. I attended segregated schools all my life and finished at Spelman, the black woman’s college in 1937.

After college, during the Second World War, I had the very good sense to marry Bill Rutland. He worked as a civilian at the Tuskegee Army Airbase where Uncle Sam reluctantly trained colored pilots for the first time.

After the war, the armed forces integrated and Bill and I moved west to California where we raised our children. It was the early 1950s and blacks and whites were just beginning to mix, at least a little bit.

My book When We Were Colored, A Mother’s Story, was first published in 1964, I wanted all mothers to know that my black children were just like their white children; filled with all the joys, and insecurities of childhood, just as precious and just as fragile.
I think my story is as relevant today as it was when I wrote it. It goes beyond black and white. It’s really about the fears that all mothers face as we struggle to raise healthy, happy, productive children.

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