38 pages • 1 hour read
Melton A. McLaurinSeparate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Epilogue-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
On Christmas Eve 1984, McLaurin is back in Wade. McLaurin is now a professor of history living in Wilmington, North Carolina, and has two daughters. Things have changed. His grandfather and his grandmother Ma Ma are dead, and his father sold the store. His father clings to rural traditions, driving a huge new truck and drinking bourbon from paper cups. Every winter, Daddy’s friend Earl kills hogs for him. Daddy has no use for the lard due to his cholesterol. His father suggests they drive to Dora Lou’s to bring her some lard. His gift to Dora Lou replicates the paternalistic approach to race relations of McLaurin’s youth. McLaurin realizes that his father remains part of the Wade of the past. This is the Wade that McLaurin has left behind. The separate pasts of him and his father become clear as they drive through the town.
Afterword Summary
McLaurin lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina, as a historian and university administrator. Wilmington is a port city with beautiful beaches, and McLaurin often visited as a child. Racial inequality and conflict shaped Wade and Wilmington.
McLaurin traces the historical connections between the two communities in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of segregation in North Carolina. In 1894, a coalition government of Populists and Republicans (the Fusion coalition) supported by African American voters took control of the legislature. The Democrats represented the elite of North Carolina, in both plantations and industry. The Fusion coalition expanded the voting franchise for African Americans and poor whites. Municipal election victories for the Fusionist slate followed. A growing African American middle class emerged. A backlash occurred. In the 1898 election, the Democrats ran on an openly racist slate. After a Democratic victory on November 8, they wrote the “White Man’s Declaration of Independence,” which demanded the resignation of African American members of municipal government. This proclamation of white supremacy resulted in racial violence and the deaths of several African American citizens.
By 1900, Democrats swept to power statewide. African American voters were disenfranchised, and segregation was enacted. The Wade of McLaurin’s youth was shaped by these policies. One hundred years after the events in 1898, McLaurin writes that the legacies of segregation and racism have not gone away.
The afterword ends on a personal note. Back in Wade, McLaurin visits Allen Smith, an older man who is now retired but worked at the Veteran’s Hospital in Fayetteville. McLaurin asks how race relations have changed since desegregation. Allen says, “Oh, it’s still there. It’s always there, just below the surface, in just about everything.” McLaurin leaves Wade, “filled with a deep, sorrowful anger” (176) at the persistence of racism.
Epilogue-Afterword Analysis
In the Epilogue and Afterword, McLaurin introduces the idea of a separate past. People remember the past differently. White people who benefitted from segregation attempt to justify their forebearers; African American citizens call for reparations and an acknowledgement of the horrors of the past. McLaurin describes an ongoing racial divide. In the Epilogue, he situates the idea of separate pasts within an encounter between him and his father. Both McLaurin and his father are preoccupied with the past. His father clings to the rural rituals he knows and social interactions that make him comfortable. McLaurin recognizes that he “remained, spiritually, emotionally, a resident of the Wade I had left and to which I could never return” (164).
In the Afterword, he uses the idea of a separate past to describe a more significant societal divide. As a historian, he argues that without acknowledging the past objectively, we cannot move towards a more racially just society. He calls for “commemorative undertakings as means to achieve a common goal of creating a less racially divided society” (169). While McLaurin’s memoir describes a period of rapid change and liberalizing racial attitudes, he ends his memoir on a pessimistic note, reminding the viewer of the need to “continue to struggle with the difficult necessity of confronting our separate pasts” (176). Through his autobiographical reflections, McLaurin models how we might recognize the racism in society and our histories to move past racist attitudes.
