Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights (Perspectives on a Multiracial America)

Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times—the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights era—highlighting tensions between memory and reality.

Author Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities—how these white southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and forgotten.

Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial inequality.