An assistant professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, Melita Garza pursues research on English- and Spanish-language journalism in the 20th century and how the media socially construct reality. As a Chicago Tribune staff writer, Melita Garza authored a feature in 1995 on AJ Verdelle, who wrote about life in the 1960s from an African-American perspective in her debut novel, The Good Negress.

1. Melita Garza

2.  An assistant professor at Texas Christian University in
Fort Worth, Texas, Melita Garza pursues research on
English- and Spanish-language journalism in the 20th
century and how the media socially construct reality.
As a Chicago Tribune staff writer, Melita Garza
authored a feature in 1995 on AJ Verdelle, who wrote
about life in the 1960s from an African-American
perspective in her debut novel, The Good Negress.
A key theme posed in the book involves the "high-
handed assimilationist” ethos prevalent within the
educational system of the time.

3.  For the protagonist, 12-year-old Denise, her part-time
job cleaning bathrooms and Southern American
English dialect are seen as a barrier to advancement.
Her teacher even bars her from after-school diction
classes, which are her only route to higher education
and “speak(ing) the language of the nation.”
Ms. Verdelle based the story on her own experiences
as she struggled to adapt to academic life at the
University of Chicago, where she ultimately excelled.
By the late 1980s, Ms. Verdelle had broken through a
number of the barriers, portrayed in intimate terms
through the protagonist, and later founded a statistics
and analysis company based in New York.