Bookworks Presents Shelf Awareness for Readers: A Difference of 50 Years

Amid the flurry of Office Depot trips and backpack selections that come around this time of year, it's incredible to think how different the back-to-school season looked 50 years ago. The Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down in 1954, with the intent that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed"--an ambiguous time frame that left room for many districts to drag their feet. In Prince Edward County, Va., for example, no action was taken until a 1959 court order required that county schools integrate. Instead of complying, the county board of supervisors opted to close public schools completely. This closure, which lasted for five years, is the focus of Kristen Green's Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County. As a native of the area, Green's account moves between memoir and history to tell an important, if sometimes shameful, story of the fight for equal education in Virginia.

Robin Talley's Lies We Tell Ourselves takes a fictional approach to the same issue, following two girls on opposite sides of the desegregation debate in a Virginia high school: Sarah Dunbar, one of the first black students to attend the previously all-white school; and Linda Hairston, the white daughter of the town's most vocal opponent to desegregation. Talley's account of Sarah's experiences entering the school is detailed and emotional, and the novel fully brings to life the very personal experiences of those students at the forefront of integration.

Talley's novel is striking for many reasons, not least of which is the careful transformation of Linda over the course of the book; she moves from mirroring her parents' racist opinions to forming her own opinions of race based on her own experience. This same metamorphosis is captured in Jim Grimsley's memoir, How I Shed My Skin, as Grimsley recounts the tacit racism he was raised with, and how his experiences attending an integrated school proved the first step in overcoming hatred. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm