How I shed my skin : unlearning racist lessons of a southern childhood / by Jim Grimsley.

PART I. BIAS -- Freedom of choice/black bitch -- An awkward fight -- Tiger Beat, Teen, Ebony, and Jet -- Black and proud -- The sign on the wheelchair -- The kiss -- PART II. ORIGINS -- The hierarchy of place -- The learning -- The fight in the yard -- White nigger -- Divinely white -- Good old boy -- Johnny Shiloh -- The shoe man -- The uncomfortable dark -- The maid in the weeds -- PART III. CHANGE -- Integration -- The J. W. Willie School/bag lunch -- The drowning -- Robert -- No longer separate, not really equal -- Cheap -- The mighty Trojans -- Some of us dancing -- The human relations committee -- Protests -- God gave me a song -- The smoking patio -- Horizons -- Mercy -- Commencement -- Reunion.

"In August of 1966, Jim Grimsley entered the sixth grade in the same public school he had attended for the five previous years in his small eastern North Carolina hometown. But he knew that the first day of this school year was going to be different: for the first time he'd be in a classroom with black children. That was the year federally mandated integration of the schools went into effect, at first allowing students to change schools through 'freedom of choice,' replaced two years later by forced integration. For Jim, going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option: his family was too poor to consider paying tuition, and while they shared the community's dismay over the mixing of the races, they had bigger, more immediate problems to contend with. Now, over forty years later, Grimsley, a critically acclaimed novelist, revisits that school and those times, remembering his personal reaction to his first real exposure to black children and to their culture, and his growing awareness of his own mostly unrecognized racist attitudes. [This book] is both true and deeply moving, an important work that takes readers inside those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established."--Provided by publisher.