His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.įor one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise.
He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey.
He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown.
0 kommentar(er)
