At first, Allen Ballard thought that he would write a history book about the African American experience in the mid-twentieth century, dissecting chapter-by-chapter the tumultuous journey that his generation made from segregation to full participation in American society. The respected historian and professor had two nonfiction works and two novels already in print, but publishers were not interested in his proposal.

Undeterred, Allen reframed his vision and decided to tell his own remarkable life story. In 2007, while he was home recuperating from hip surgery, he started to rework his content into a memoir stretching from a Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by the Great Depression to a post-Stalinist Soviet farm, where Ballard stayed with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev.

More than three years and many revisions later, Breaching Jericho's Walls: A Twentieth-Century African American Life, released from the State University of New York Press.

Allen’s life offered a strong channel to explore the African American experience. His mother traced her ancestors back to a Revolutionary War soldier, and after her divorce, supported her family by working as a nurse. As a young man, Allen enrolled at Kenyon College in Ohio as one of the school’s first two black students. He served in the military in the American South and attended graduate school at Harvard University, becoming one of the first black Russian specialists. As an academic, he travelled the world, experiencing Paris, Cambridge, and Manhattan, as well as the emerging Soviet Union.

 “Allen is a born storyteller who has had a fascinating life, so despite a heroic effort to rein himself in, the first draft had too much story,” says Renni Browne, Ballard’s longtime editor and the founder of The Editorial Department. Working together over three drafts, author and editor cut more than a quarter of the length, from 479 manuscript pages to 342.

Renni and fellow editor Shannon Roberts have worked with Ballard on his two award-winning novels, Carried By Six and Where I’m Bound, which was named a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, but he saved special praise for Renni’s work on his own story. “As a result of her editing skills, many readers find the book almost impossible to put down,” he reports.

Today, Allen Ballard is Professor of History and African Studies at the University at Albany–SUNY and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at City College of New York.  He credits the inspirational roles that individuals like civil rights leader Paul Robeson, Olympic athletes Jesse Owens and “Long John” Woodruff, and scholar Alain Locke played in his own journey, and in the journeys of generations of African Americans who bridged the gap from a legacy of slavery to a country that would elect a black man as president.

See photos of Allen at Kenyon College and find out more about his work, including his earlier nonfiction books The Education of Black Folk and One More Day’s Journey, at  http://www.allenballard.com