When the Whippoorwill Sang is a unique memoir. Arthur Lee Ford, Jr. makes the common, everyday – perhaps even mundane – aspects of southern rural life, regardless of race, interesting and exciting. Unlike many of the memoirs set during the era of segregation, which usually cover unique events and exceptional stories of racial conflict, Ford’s story focuses on the subtle constraints imposed on all rural African Americans in the segregated South and the central dilemma that defined their lives – a bounded existence imposed on an otherwise happy individual with boundless aspirations and abilities. While burning crosses and nooses hanging from trees might more graphically convey the racism of the segregated South, it is the much more commonplace internal turmoil and emotional damage inflicted upon both black and white southerners during that era that is hardest to grasp and the most difficult to erase.
When the Whippoorwill Sang makes it crystal clear that no episode in American history is as rigidly defined by racial lines as generally thought and even more importantly that black and white southerners probably have much more in common that anyone is comfortable admitting.

Arthur Lee Ford, Jr. was born in 1947 at Shreveport, Louisiana. Although his family’s home was located in Bolinger, Louisiana, Ford spent much of his youth working the cotton fields in the nearby sharecropping community of Wardview (also known as the Lake Bottoms). An inquisitive youth, Ford had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and education. Aggravated by the social limitation of the segregated Deep South, Ford fled Louisiana for California the day after he graduated from Carrie Martin High School. Having witnessed firsthand the violence of the 1965 Watts Riots, Ford relocated to the more peaceful community of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he studied at Western Michigan University. After serving several years in United States Army, Ford returned to Kalamazo, where he married his wife Beverly, with whom he raised six children, and launched several successful business ventures, including his own trucking company. Ford has a tremendous passion for harness racing, music, history, and in his younger days, golf. When the Whippoorwill Sang is the first of many books that Ford plans to write.