Why read Separate Pasts?

Book cover of Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South

Book description

The author of this book recalls his boyhood during the 1950s in the small hometown of Wade, North Carolina, where whites and blacks lived and worked within each other's shadows.

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Why read it?

1 author picked Separate Pasts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Melissa Walker

Author

Separate Pasts is McLaurin’s account of his 1950s boyhood in the tiny hamlet of Wade, North Carolina, years when the Jim Crow system still reigned. He describes the complex, interconnected lives of the town’s white and black families, and his own confusion as he tried to make sense of the contradictions he observed in his world. A painfully honest account of a white boy’s reckoning with the legacies of segregation and oppression, McLaurin reveals how his own relationships with black neighbors undermined the racist beliefs he was taught.

From Melissa's list on The best books for first-person accounts of life in the twentieth century South.