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Warren Brown grew up in segregated New Orleans - black, Catholic, middle class. Martha McNeil was from white, blue-collar Houston. It was the 1960s and integration was becoming the law, but it wasn't the reality. There were still "colored only" doors and drinking fountains, whites-only schools and libraries. Warren wasn't allowed to take holy Communion at the "white" church. Martha's closest girlfriend abandoned her when, at college, Martha befriended a black man.
Both Warren and Martha were "affirmative action hires" at The Washington Post in the early 1970s. They worked together for more than twenty years; becoming friends as they shared the ups and downs of life. Then Warren became sick with kidney disease. A kidney donated to him by his wife failed. He was on the verge of death when Martha, informed she was also a blood type match, donated her kidney to her friend.
Warren and Martha chronicled their experiences surrounding the surgery in a series of articles written for the Post. To them, it was a simple story of friendship, a successful operation, and a happy ending. But the extraordinary popular reaction to their articles, especially among blacks, revealed that their story was something more: it was a success story about integration.
Now, in Black & White & Red All Over, the friends tell the whole tale: of their childhoods in the segregated South, of their meeting and deepening friendship, of Warren's brush with death, and Martha's decision to help save his life. This book chronicles the intersection of two lives that, but for the changes in American society of the last half-century, would never have occurred.
