Customer Reviews

Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (Brown Thrasher Books)

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McLaurin's book is a touching recollection of growing up in the South during the 1950s. His rich narative describes not only the difficulties all teenagers face, but explores how these difficulties are made even more difficult in a changing environment. While so many imagine the white teenagers of the Little Rock school integration as pictures of young whites during the 1950s, McLaurin paints a picture of a young man sensitive to the plight of blacks in the Jim Crow South. A very good book, highly recommended to those who wish to get a detailed portrait of the 1950s South

McLaurin has written a valuable and beautiful book. It deserves a place on the shelf with "Coming of Age in Mississippi" as a document of life in the segregated South and of the moral challenges that segregation presented to those who lived in the system.

Since few people in respectable circles today would admit to having supported segregation, it is rare to read honest accounts from White southerners who admittely accepted the system and went along with it, as most did at the time.

This book is an interesting read for that reason. He speaks matter of factly about his own acceptance of the prejudices of his era and area, as he punches a black boy who uses his mouth on the same needle that he does to blow up a basketball without realizing why at the moment, although he is usually pleasant in hiis relations with the black customers who frequent his grandfather's general store in Wade, NC in the 1950s.

However, he comes across people who challenge everything he is led to believe about Blacks. There is the African-American schoolteacher who forces him to refer to her as "Miss" and most of all, his unlikely friend Street. Street is a self-educated free spirited intellectual who is amazingly accurate on biblical, astronomical, and constitutional facts who lives in a cave by himself. The local Whites dismiss him as crazy and eccentric, but Melton comes to see that Street is not only accurate in his facts, but represents the tragedy of racism through the inability of Street to make a living from his knowledge. One of the most interesting characters in all of Southern biography, one could easily picture Louis Gosset Jr. or James Earl Jones portraying Street in a film version of this book.

I would strongly recommend this for exposing young people in particular to a seldom-heard side in writings about the segregation era.

This is a recollection of a boy's life growing up in a world that was segregated racially, specifically the world of American rural South in the fifties and early sixties. The author had more contact with the lives and culture of local black people than most young white people of that period because he worked in his grandfather's small grocery store that primarily served black people. In that regard, his experiences are atypical for his region, more like that of young people in other areas of America, though the author seems not to recognize that.

Yet the book affords a window on a time and place that changed dramatically in the closing years of the 20th century. For what it shows about the white perspective of that era, it is interesting.

It is also interesting for its male perspective on the experience of puberty in such a world. We know a lot about the female sense of this experience, but as a woman, I found reading about the boy's experience enlightening. Having been told 'there is no way a woman can understand the way sex dominates boys' thoughts in adolescence,' I appreciated the author's chapter on the way his burgeoning manhood informed his experiences and views, particularly his views of black women. It struck me that in his case, adolescence itself was something of a leveler.

Yet, the reader looking for sharp insight or the unified experience of a memoir will be disappointed. The book is marred by the absence of a unifying thesis or theme. Its relation is chronological, with little attention to coherence. It jolts from chapter to chapter with a decided lack of literary skill.

I also found it marred by a certain sense of piousness on the part of the author at having "overcome" the world in which he was reared. Those of us who grew up in the South of the same period recognize the great complexity of racial or any other kind of integration of groups so sharply separated for so long a time. One does not "overcome" a limited perspective: he enlarges it. As developmental psychologists remind us, our seminal early experiences imprint our ways of viewing the world, limiting to some extent our visions in adulthood. Evidence of this is clear in the book, but the author seems innocent of its implications.

I did not find this book a page-turner, and because of its lack of an organizing theme, I sometimes opened it merely so that I might complete it. Yet it has value for its recreation of one boy's viewpoint on growing up in a society with sometimes equally large populations of black and white people, but where equal opportunities and shared cultural experiences often do not exist. It is the serious account of a man who lives not far from where he grew up and who has experienced change from inside the mid-South.

For those looking for a more nuanced book about the experience of growing up white in the segregated South, this might not prove useful. But if you can get a remaindered or good used copy, it's worth a read.

Warning to other students!!!! It's an alright book, but there are random sporadic pages that are blank!!!! Waited too long to pick it up and now I'm stuck with this bad copy. Check your copy when you recieve it!!!!

More than anything this book gives us a narrow but probably accurate view of how the concept of race was played out in a small Southern Community. Did all Southern towns, both large and small, go through these changes? That does not appear to be the author's focus but he does give us a glimpse.

I lived in a much larger Southern City so I simply did not see or hear the interactions of which the author speaks-but they were probably there. One thing that the author could have left out was his physical/sexual reactions to black teen girls who entered his father's store. Here, it appears, that the author is busy reinforcing the old myth that white males secretly desire every black female they see.