FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE

FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE

Raised by her grandparents in the Jim Crow South, the young Arlinda Willis “had a front-row seat” to the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, while growing up in nearby Toxey. In defiance of the systemic racism that shaped her upbringing—she grew up in “squalid conditions” in a “ramshackle house” without indoor plumbing or electricity—Willis was determined to forge her own destiny. In this biography, based largely on conversations she had over the course of her multidecade relationship