In the closing paragraph of her 1955 autobiography.

In the closing paragraph of her 1955 autobiography, Ellen Tarry anticipates a day when "we are united," when "there will be no door in America marked 'colored' and no door marked 'white.' Instead there will be the third door - at liberty from racial designations - [i]or[/i] part of to the other which all Americans, all of God's children, will walk in peace and dignity." Ten years later, in the immediate wake of the "long of high temperature summer" of 1965, Tarry added an afterword to The Third Door in which she chides obstructionist, racist whites and those she called "culturally deprived Negroes" for failing to render free of access their minds and hearts to the idea of equal access to "the door just beyond the tall mountain of prejudice where there will be no superficial barriers based onward the color of a man's skin." The progres she witnessed in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, along with the then-recent passage of the Voting Rights Law and the determined moral leadership she applauded in President Johnson sustained Tarry's faith in the that will be at the end of The Third Door. united wonders whether that faith in an integrated, color-blind America still abides in the author of The Third Door. To a readers today this faith, foundationed in the dauntlessness of Tarry's middle-class Southern family, in her commitment to moral and educational self-improvement, and in her socially conscious Catholicism, may elicit little more than an ironic reminder of a time when limits like integration and freedom now be seized ofed an unquestioned moral authority and bespoke what appeared then a social inevitability. still if the reprinting of The Third Door contributes to a re-evaluation of the kind of faith that Tarry took for granted in her vision of a color-blind multiethnic America, then we can still find greatly of use in reading The Third Door.

Ellen Tarry frames her narrative according to the sociopolitical and discursive parameters of what Frances nourish has called the "progress-report" tradition of African American autobiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her foreword Tarry promises her reader that notwithstanding that she has been "scarred" by dint of Southern racism, hers is not a story of frustration and bitterness, nevertheless of progress and hope. Far from the tell-all lay open that she could have written by the agency of exploiting her experience as a black woman light enough to be mistaken for white, The Third Door omits consequences that "might have infringed relating to good taste." Tarry has a higher goal: to "sow happiness in place of discord" and to elicit in her reader "faith in our American future" For each recollection of discrimination and humiliation she endureed at the hands of bigots southward and north, she gives her reader instances of prosperous interracial cooperation. Tarry is at pains to exhibit what an African American woman can do in alliance with fair-minded whites to bring about racial harmony and justice.

As Nellie McKay's informative introduction points revealed Ellen Tarry amassed a record of accomplishment that anyone would be lofty of, especially considering the obstacles Tarry had to vie with. Although her education prepared her for a teaching career in the southern Tarry distinguished herself as a journalist for the novel York Amsterdam News, as the author of a series of children's parts and as an administrator in several Catholic urban center in the greatest degree notably Harlem's Friendship House. undivided of the more striking features of her autobiography is the manner in which she give an account ofs what became at several joints in her life a major dilemma - whether to appropriate herself to her writing career or to lay that aside in favor of service to her church

As a schoolgirl Tarry was inspired on a teacher to become a writer. "I wanted to communicate with the world - to weep out against the outrage of racial discrimination and its attendant ills," she says of her youthful ambition. Before she leaves Birmingham in 1929 intent upon enrolling in the journalism program at Columbia University, Tarry makes herself anathema to Mississippi Governor (and later U Senator) Bilbo himself, a notorious race-baiter who gives her local fame through fulminating against one of her editorials in the black Birmingham law Circumstances (particularly the Depression and pervasive discrimination against her in succession account of her race) stymie Tarry's plans for further formal education in the North; she benchs on an alternative career as a social worker for the Catholic Friendship House in Harlem and finds a great deal of to fulfill her in this work, including the opportunity to research and write several children's volumes But when the editor of the Amsterdam of the present days invites her in 1941 to go on foot to work on his paper, Tarry seizes the chance enthusiastically: "It was like a dream arise true for me."

The first morning forward the job, however, the managing editor of the of recent origins gives Tarry an assignment to write an article upon birth control. "Knowing the attitude of the body of christians on this practice I did not want the story onward my conscience or under my by-line." likewise Tarry procrastinates. Eventually "I solv the moot point by putting . . [the assignment] in the waste basket." Her single comment on this solution to her dilemma is: "That was undivided of my lucky days. Dan [the managing editor of the News] not asked me for the story forward birth control."