Bebe Moore Campbell

Writer

• Born: February 18, 1950
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: November 27, 2006
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Campbell’s writing—fiction and nonfiction—addressed themes of race, gender, and class with insight and authority. She explored many types of relationships: those between men and women, African Americans and whites, parents and children, and people and their communities. After a relative received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Campbell turned her attention to inequities in mental-health treatment and attitudes toward mental illness within the African American community.

Early Life

Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Doris and George Moore. Both were college-educated, and Doris had earned two master’s degrees, one in sociology and the other in social work. Shortly after Campbell’s birth, the family situation changed dramatically: Her parents divorced and an automobile crash left her father a paraplegic.

After the divorce, Campbell led a divided childhood. She spent the school year in Pennsylvania, under the watchful eyes of her mother and maternal grandmother, and her summers in North Carolina with her easygoing father and his mother. In spring, fall, and winter months, she became acquainted with the guidelines set by fine society: proper speech, proper demeanor, proper manners. In the summer, she learned about fun, spontaneity, and laughter. She got firsthand experience with the blatant racism of the South and the less overt but equally sinister racism in the North.

Campbell attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls and, in 1968, enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh. She graduated summa cum laude in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. She taught for five years in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., but felt slightly discontented. After taking a writing class with author Toni Cade Bambara, she determined that she wanted to spend her days as a writer. By this time, she had married Tiko F. Campbell, an architect, and had given birth to a daughter, Maia. She and Tiko later divorced.

Campbell received many rejection notices in her first years of submitting short stories and articles for publication, but eventually saw her work published in Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ebony, Seventeen, and Black Enterprise. She also became a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. In 1977, her father, whom she deeply admired, was killed in another car accident. In 1984, Campbell married banker Ellis Gordon, Jr., and added a stepson, Ellis Gordon II, to her family.

Life’s Work

Campbell’s first major published work was a piece of nonfiction based on interviews of more than one hundred couples. In Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage (1986), she explores the unexpected difficulties in such unions. Campbell believed in equal opportunity but was skeptical of the prospects for happiness for women who did not find intellectual or emotional fulfillment in homemaking or child-rearing.

Campbell also wrote fiction, and these works always had a purpose, a teaching moment. She saw writing as an extension of her classroom lessons. In her critically acclaimed Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992), she drew on an actual event, the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black Chicagoan who had been visiting his grandmother in Mississippi. Unfamiliar with southern ways, Till reportedly whistled at or teased a white woman; he was captured, murdered, and mutilated within hours. In her fictionalized version of these events, Campbell depicts the effects of racist violence not only on the victim and his family but also on the lives of the perpetrators and the community at large.

Campbell’s next work, Brothers and Sisters (1994), also was based on an actual event: the Los Angeles Police Department’s beating of Rodney King and the riots spurred by the officers’ acquittal. Brothers and Sisters examines the problems inherent in interracial relationships. It deals with sexual harassment, affirmative action, and class warfare from the perspectives of white and black characters, both male and female.

Singing in the Comeback Choir (1998) addresses tensions and problems in black communities. In the novel, Campbell questions what obligations successful African Americans might have to their old neighborhoods. She called for some personal sacrifice, some sense of moral or ethical responsibility to help those in need.

In Seventy-two Hour Hold (2005), Campbell turned to one of her later years’ greatest concerns: inequities in mental-health treatment for whites and African Americans. She believed that African Americans were less likely to admit to emotional problems and were reluctant to seek treatment for mental illness. In many cases, people who sought help were not taken seriously or received shoddy treatment. Campbell understood the feeling because when her family learned of a relative suffering from a bipolar disorder, they kept the matter secret. Campbell was moved to confront the perception in African American communities that mental illness was embarrassing, an admission of weakness. Her 2003 children’s book Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is about a young girl coping with her mother’s psychological problems.

In late February of 2006, Campbell received a diagnosis of neurological disease. She died of brain cancer on November 27, 2006. In the days leading up to her death, she shared her thoughts with fans through her Web site. She expressed optimism and hope for recovery, asked readers for their prayers, and vowed to live each day as it came.

Significance

Campbell received numerous awards and grants for her writing and her service to the community. She received a Body of Work Award from the National Association of Negro Business Women in 1978; a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant in 1980; an Image Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1994; and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill’s Outstanding Literature Award in 2003 for Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry.

Campbell helped to provoke dialogue about gender, class, race, and mental illness. She tried to remove the stigma from psychological illness and founded the Inglewood, California, chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Campbell went beyond the themes of racial turmoil and dysfunctional relationships in her writing and invited deeper investigation of the roots of these problems.

Bibliography

Campbell, Bebe Moore. “Bebe Moore Campbell: Her Memoir of ’A Special Childhood’ Celebrates the Different Styles of Her Upbringing in a Divided Black Family.” Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly, June 30, 1989, 82-84. Instead of stressing problems inherent in a family breakup, Campbell highlights some of the advantages in her particular case.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “A Conversation with Bebe Moore Campbell.” Interview by Claudia Dreyfus. The New York Times, June 28, 2005, p. F2. Interview in which Campbell talks about a reticence in churches to accept pharmaceutical treatments for mental disorders, instead advising parishioners to pray. She emphasizes the importance of dealing with the problem through getting professional help.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Interview with Bebe Moore Campbell.” Interview by Jane Campbell. Callaloo 22, no. 4 (1999): 954-973. An extensive interview in which the writer discusses the influences and role models for her writing and style.

Jones, Suzanne W. “Childhood Trauma and Its Reverberations in Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine.” In Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, edited by Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Examines Campbell’s fictionalized take on the notorious lynching in literary and social contexts.