Clifton L. Taulbert

Author and lecturer Clifton L. Taulbert is perhaps best known for his memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989), about his experience of growing up in the racially charged Mississippi Delta. Born February 19, 1945, in Glen Allan, Mississippi, in his memoir he writes about his childhood during the civil rights movement, but rather than focus on the growing conflict between white and black, he chose to focus more on the bonds of community and family, which included his mother and grandparents and an extended family of aunts and uncles. A second memoir, The Last Train North (1992), details his decision to leave the Delta following his graduation from high school and follows his career with the Air Force through the 1960s, where he reached the rank of sergeant. He also describes meeting for the first time his father, a preacher, in St. Louis. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Other awards he has received include the 27th annual NAACP Image Award for Literature and the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award for Nonfiction, and Time magazine named him one of America’s outstanding black entrepreneurs.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Oral Roberts University and a graduate degree from Southwest Graduate School of Banking at Southern Methodist University. As president and founder of Building Community Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he speaks throughout the world on the timeless and universal ideas he encountered while growing up in the Delta.

Taulbert’s other nonfiction books include Watching Our Crops Come In and Eight Habits of the Heart (both published in 1997), The Journey Home: A Father’s Gift to His Son (2002), and an essay in Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (2002).

Taulbert has also written three children’s books for children aged 4-8: Little Cliff and the Porch People (1999), Little Cliff’s First Day of School (2001), and Little Cliff and the Cold Place (2002).