Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism
by Nita Wiggins

2021’s Civil Rights Baby shows the shifts of 2020 The new edition of Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism is an honest and personal perspective presented by a well-traveled, educated, and principled black woman. Nita Wiggins’ 2021 release addresses the rights landscape in her native country in the wake of significant changes. As a decorated television journalist and the daughter and granddaughter of generations of black Americans, she is a sought-after thought leader on three continents.

Wiggins’ updated Civil Rights Baby considers the social shifts that have occurred as recently as 2020—for example, the videotaped police murder committed by then-officer Derek Michael Chauvin, the election of Sen. Kamala Harris as U.S. Vice President, the Congressional testimony of three 100-year-old (and older) survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, and the Me Too public pressure from (mostly) women and women’s groups that forced hundreds of highly placed men out of their positions in politics, movies, and television around the world.

The author of Civil Rights Baby was born into the American South during the Civil Rights push of 1964. She faced many of the intersectional issues embedded in the topics above. In 2014, she created the term economic lynching of careers, concluding that it is a national narrative that parallels and contradicts the idea that America is the noted “land of opportunity.”

The central question of her memoir becomes: Do laws designed to eliminate racial and sexual discrimination succeed—or fail—for her and her generation?

Other poignant questions: Can the civil rights baby, Wiggins, ultimately live the audacious life she conceived for herself when she was an 8-year-old? Can she live the fullness of her vision—one for which she worked fastidiously as a pre-teen, adolescent, and adult?

Wiggins’ writing draws the reader into previously private corners of her life, including an emotional crossroads that no one should have to face.