Webber, Thomas L. 1947–

(Thomas Lane Webber)

PERSONAL: Born July 14, 1947, in Minot, ND; son of George W. (a clergyman) and Helen (a social activist) Webber; married Andrea Bertocci (a physician), June 8, 1968; children: Aili, Matthew. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1969; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY.

CAREER: Writer, novelist, social service worker, and educator. College for Human Service, New York, NY, coordinator and teacher of American history, social science research, and systems analysis, 1974–. Founder and executive director of a residential treatment school for adolescents in the foster care and juvenile justice systems.

WRITINGS:

Deep like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865, Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, Scribner (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer and novelist Thomas L. Webber is an instructor in history at the College for Human Service in New York, NY. Webber is also a career social service worker and the founder of a residential treatment school for teens in foster care in the New York neighborhood of East Harlem. At one time, however, Webber wanted nothing to do with the then-unfamiliar and frightening streets of East Harlem. In his memoir, Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, Webber describes how in 1957, his father, a Protestant minister responding to what he called a "direct call from God," moved the family from comfortable surroundings on Manhattan's Upper East Side to the uncertain neighborhoods of East Harlem. Webber was strongly, bitterly opposed to the move at first, but his father was intent on living where he worked, and the family reluctantly relocated. Torn from his surroundings where he was a scholarship student at the all-white Collegiate School for Boys, Webber found himself immersed in an unfamiliar culture of black and Puerto Rican working-class families, often the only Caucasian child among classrooms and playgrounds full of Hispanic and African American kids. There, he experienced what it meant to be discriminated against because of his color. Gradually, however, Webber adjusted to his new surroundings and began to make friends as his peers learned to accept him. He successfully passed one of the most important street initiations, gaining admission to neighborhood basketball courts and pick-up games. He earned a best friend in Danny, a canny young African American with aspirations for a career in show business. Through it all, he tried to maintain a connection with his former, more affluent friends, but was disappointed to discover that the dividing line between the Upper East Side and East Harlem, 96th Street, was just as effective as a barrier between two cultures that rarely intermingled. Webber "developed an impressive confidence and agility in each of his worlds, but his efforts to reconcile them are sporadic," noted Library Journal reviewer Janet Ingraham Dwyer. Years later, however, Webber still lives and works in East Harlem at the treatment center he himself founded. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Webber's book an "exemplary coming-of-age memoir."

In Deep like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865, Webber examines three crucial questions regarding the quality and availability of education to slaves in the middle of the nineteenth century. He examines what white slaveowners expected their slaves to learn; what the slaves actually did learn; and the methods by which they learned it. Using primary sources, such as slave narratives and recollections by former slaves, Webber assembles a picture of slave education that describes what slaves knew and understood about the world in which they lived, and how they went about learning more. Webber suggests that most slaves ultimately rejected the education provided by their white masters because it was designed to keep them docile and largely ignorant of the world around them. Instead, slaves relied on peer groups, their own highly developed communities, and their own methods of education based on common experience and background. Webber "pictures a self-reliant black community that struggled with considerable success to create and maintain its own separate system of values and ways of understanding and dealing with the world," observed Thomas J. Davis in the Journal of Negro Education. Ronald D. Cohen, writing in the Journal of Southern History, called the work a "well-written, well-research, and insightful study."

Webber told CA: "My first book, Deep like the Rivers, tries to present the world as it was understood and lived in by American Slaves. As much as possible it describes this 'world view' in the words of slaves or ex-slaves themselves. Although I began writing in order to meet the various requirements of an undergraduate and graduate education, it has now become for me a kind of therapy. By writing about social and personal issues that concern me I am able to deal with them more directly and honestly in my life. Writing is also an outlet for my imagination. Like acting, writing is a way for me to experience people and events that I am not able to experience, and sometimes would not care to experience, in real life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Webber, Thomas L., Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, Scribner (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 1979, Donald Spivey, review of Deep like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865, p. 854.

Booklist, August, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, p. 1894.

Crisis, September-October, 2004, Jabari Asim, "Life in East Harlem, a Community Colored by Both Promise and Peril," review of Flying over 96th Street, p. 52.

Journal of Negro Education, autumn, 1979, Thomas J. Davis, review of Deep like the Rivers, p. 550.

Journal of Southern History, February, 1979, William K. Scarborough, review of Deep like the Rivers, p. 129.

Library Journal, June 1, 2004, Janet Ingraham Dwyer, review of Flying over 96th Street, p. 150.

Publishers Weekly, April 26, 2004, review of Flying over 96th Street, p. 48.