I’m happy to say that the book is finally out and getting into folks’ hands. Sometimes Farmgirls Become Revolutionaries: Notes on Black Power, Politics, Depression and the FBI, by Florence L. Tate & Jake-ann Jones, was a decade’s worth of labor of love.
The relief that it finally got done has recently been sorely tempered by the death of my brother in spirit, Florence’s son, Greg. I am not in a place to write more about him, so I’ll stop. What’s written below stands, although it was written before his departure. – jake
Black Classic Press is publishing it. I have to thank the bad to the bone Tate Brothers, Greg Tate, and Brian Tate, for sharing their mom with me all those years ago.
Greg and I had been friends and had worked together decades ago on his play My Darling Gremlin, and when I moved down to Florida he told me to look up his mom — Florence Louise Grinner Tate.
It took me 5 years to do that, but when we met in 2010 it was love at first snicker (and lord did we snicker!). Finding out about her amazing past led me to want to work with her on her memoir…
Although she passed away in 2014, she made me promise repeatedly before then that I WOULD finish the book, with or without her. I had hours of tape, tons of interviews, and her voluminous papers, photos, letters, etc., to build from, and now, basically what will be a decade after meeting her, it’s on its way out.
I won’t say much more about it right now. Here’s an article I wrote about her for Hope for Women Magazine in 2012 (under my other name, J.A. Morton) — when the memoir was tentatively being titled, The FBI’s Most Wanted Press Secretary (and here’s the FaceBook page, still to be retitled! https://www.facebook.com/mostwantedpresssecretary/:
