Flowers for Brother Mudd

About the Book

Beyond overcoming, Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans’ memoir is one of hope and resilience. Flowers for Brother Mudd: One Woman’s Path from Jim Crow to Career Diplomat explores the paradox of an African American and a Catholic - a minority within a minority - who craved a wider future. Find out how a girl from Louisville, Kentucky’s Smoke Town forged independent-mindedness to survive a segregated society. Learn what propelled this “colored girl” to jet across the world for three decades in a career that she chose at age 16. This former diplomat recounts the cushioning love of her upstanding, social studies teacher father, who rose from tobacco farming to head a school in coal country; and imaginative mother from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She salutes the Ursuline Sisters; educators at Morgan State and American Universities; and in India where she went on a Fulbright. In the face of a bleak future if Civil Rights changes hadn’t come, she shows how a person of color could thrive and strive to tell her story to the world.

About the Author

Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans fulfilled her dream of working in the Foreign Service; in New Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, Taipei, Hong Kong, Brussels, Libreville, Bujumbura and Brazzaville. From Washington she supported civic education in South Africa; and she led public diplomacy in eight French-speaking African countries. Lauded for outstanding achievement of U.S interests, since leaving the Foreign Service, she leads memoir courses in Northern Virginia where she lives with her husband, Belgian writer Claude Krijgelmans. www.judithstory.com