Chat with Mother of Orphans Author: Dedria Humphries Barker

“One generation’s secrets are another generation’s history,” - Dedria Humpries Barker

To celebrate Women's History Month, author Dedria Humphries Barker will discuss her book, Mother of Orphan's: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man's Widow.

About the Book: Mother of Orphans is the compelling true story of Alice, an Irish-American woman who defied rigid social structures to marry and form a family with John Henry Johnson, a Black man, in Ohio in 1899. Alice and John had three children together, but after his death in 1912, Alice mysteriously surrendered her children to an orphanage. One hundred years later, her great-grand daughter, Dedria Humphries Barker, went in search of the reasons behind this mysterious abandonment, hoping in the process to resolve aspects of her own conflicts with American expectations of working mothers, and conflict in mixed-race families.

About the Author: Dedria Humphries Barker is an author, speaker and journalist. A native of Detroit, Michigan, she is the third of thirteen children born to Mary Jane Leigh and Andrew John Humphries, a Detroit police officer. She graduated from Detroit Public Schools and Wayne State University, holds literary arts certificates and publishes in national, regional and local markets.

Host or Publisher Parkman | Detroit Public Library