The day I learned I was a racist.

• Author: McLaurin, Melton A.
• Position: Excerpt from Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South

The Day I Learned I Was a Racist

His name was James Robert Fuller Jr., but everyone called him Bobo. He was a year younger than I, and I had known him all my life. He lived in a small white frame house in the black neighborhood behind Granddaddy's store. There seemed to be nothing unusual or special about Bobo; he was just another black boy. But Bobo, a child I often looked down upon because of his blackness and his poverty, showed me the emotional power that racial prejudice and segregation held over whites as well as blacks.

We grew up in Wade, North Carolina, a village of about 1,000 people, during the 1940s and 1950s, when rumblings of racial prejudice were in the air, but before the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. The village was located in the heart of southeastern North Carolina's cotton and tobacco country. Coming of age there, I was well-versed in racist dogma, having been instructed from birth in the ideology and etiquette of segregation. In 1953, Wade was almost a perfect microcosm of the rural and small town segregated South. The social patterns of the village had emerged after Reconstruction, had been refined by the turn of the century, and had not changed much since. The Wade of 1953, I later learned, differed little from that of 1933, or for that matter, except for the presence of automobiles and electricity, from the Wade of 1893. It was unimaginable that mine would be the last generation to come of age in the segregated South and that the Wade I knew would soon collapse beneath the irresistible pressures brought to bear by the forces of social change.

I knew Bobo's entire family. James Robert, his father, was a huge man, nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, who appeared even taller to a 13-year-old white boy. He had the physique of many fine athletes--long, thickly muscled arms, long legs sweeping upward to a short waist, above which rested a powerful, well-formed torso. James Robert drove a truck for the Tart Lumber Company, making short runs to scores of hamlets in eastern North Carolina and Virginia. He was a soft-spoken man with a gentle voice and blue-gray eyes. I remember him climbing down from his cab, his long legs stretching to meet the ground, and I recall the easy, loping strides that moved him away from the truck. I also remember him drunk, for like many of Wade's poor male residents, black and white, he turned to the bottle to escape his problems. At such times he was a sad figure even to a white youth: he was a giant to be pitied, his physical size somehow overwhelmed by the circumstances of his life, few of which he determined, and most of which he could not avoid.

Bobo's mother was named Jeanette. Of her four children, Bobo was the oldest. Although Jeanette was still young, probably less than 30 when Bobo was 12, she, like most black women of the village, had few skills that the society valued. For women like Jeanette, who possessed little formal education, there was but one opportunity for employment: she "worked days' as a domestic, as did many of Wade's black women.

Jeanette was quiet, gentle, unobtrusive; all in all she seemed a terribly vulnerable figure. Yet she held her family together. She looked after James Robert, mothered her children, maintained the household, and brought home a supplemental income. When the family fell behind in its payments for the groceries purchased on credit from Granddaddy's store...