She was the author When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story and, No Crystal Stair and is the winner of the 2000 Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement.
[3] Eva Rutland published her first memoir in 1964 (The Trouble With Being Mama: A Negro Mother on the Anxieties and Joys of Bringing Up a Family).
In 1964, she published a family memoir as a kind of antidote to the public fear about change and race — issues she was intimately familiar with as her own children attended newly integrated schools.
[5] No Crystal Stair, Eva Rutland's first mainstream novel, chronicles six decades of American history through the experiences of Ann Elizabeth Carter Metcalf and her family.
Rutland's semiautobiographical novel takes its title from a stanza in Langston Hughes' 1922 poem "Mother to Son."