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Newtown Quakers to hear author of memoir about race and class

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Wendy Sanford and Mary Norman will speak via Zoom at 9:45 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 29, about Sanford’s book, “These Walls Between Us,” to the Newtown Quaker Meeting adult class at 219 Court St., Newtown.

The program will be aired in the Meetinghouse and directly on Zoom (newtownfriendsmeeting.org). The public is invited.

Sanford is a Quaker who describes in the book her relationship with her parents’ summer domestic helper on Nantucket, Mary Norman, a working-class African American woman about Sanford’s age from the segregated South. Their relationship starts when Norman is 15 and Sanford is 12.

Their different backgrounds make real friendship between them almost impossible, yet a 60-year, bi-racial friendship continues through their caring for each other and their mutual commitment to Sanford’s mother and father until their death, Norman as caretaker and Sanford as the elder child.

Norman became the first black guard in the Mercer County prison system while Sanford earned a divinity degree from Harvard and became a campus minister.


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