After a court decision, children struggled to enact integration.In 1966, Grimsley (Creative Writing/Emory Univ.; Jesus Is Sending You This Message: Stories, 2008, etc.) was an elementary school student in rural North Carolina when three black girls joined his formerly white classroom. He did not know then what caused the change from the Freedom of Choice system that had maintained racially separated schools, and he did not know how to behave or what to think, except to mimic adults' racism. "I was raised," he writes, "to keep black people in their place and to see to it that they stayed there." His new classmates, however, convinced of their civil rights, had no intention of being subjugated. In this sensitive memoir, Grimsley probes the past to discover what and how he learned about race, equality and democracy "from the good white people" in his family and community. Interacting with black children for the first time, he felt he was at a crossroads: "I would either learn to be a better bigot, or I would learn to stop being a bigot at all." Evoking in vivid detail his school and social environments as he moved through the grades, he recalls that by high school, many white families were sending their children to a private institution, and the author was outnumbered by black classmates. Being part of a minority, though, was not new for him; throughout childhood, he felt different from others because he was a hemophiliac who could not participate in sports or roughhouse with other boys; he also began to realize that he was gay. The author, returning for his 40th high school reunion, saw little change in the South, where people "still teach racism to their children without a second thought." Although proud that he and his classmates made history, the culture of hatred he recounts in this revelatory memoir still, he notes sadly, persists. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, the actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek," recounted the story of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She told King that she planned to leave "Star Trek," and he persuaded her to stay. "Stop! You cannot!" she recalled him saying. "You are the first nonstereotypical role in television.... For the first time, not only our little children and people can look on and see themselves, but people who don't look like us... from all over the world, for the first time, the first time on television, they can see us, as we should be." As a white boy growing up in Jones County, N.C., in the 1960s, Jim Grimsley watched Uhura "with fascination": "Uhura occupied a role that had no parallel in my world, and since I had no prejudice as to what a starship lieutenant should look like in 500 years or so, she was fine with me." Grimsley is the author of 11 books of fiction, including the earthy and disturbing novels "Winter Birds" and "Dream Boy"; his new memoir, "How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood," is written from the point of view of a white Southerner in the time of desegregation. Under North Carolina's Freedom of Choice program, black students could choose to attend white schools. There were three black girls in his sixth-grade class. Grimsley impersonates his younger self with great skill and delicacy. His voice is finely calibrated to recreate a certain innocence and wonder at the grown-up world and its curious ways. He also shows a courageous willingness to reveal a degree of meanspirited naïveté, as when he reports saying to one of his new African-American classmates, "You black bitch." (To which she responded, "You white cracker bitch," much to his dismay.) The first time he saw Ebony magazine, he was astounded: "I had never seen black people depicted in this way before, as if they were just like white people." A self-described "sissy" who suffered from hemophilia, Grimsley realized that he was gay at around the same time he developed an understanding that black people were in fact no different from white people. But he doesn't pretend that simply sitting next to black classmates suddenly changed his way of looking at the world; he acknowledges that the process occurred over many years and much searching. Perhaps the most incisive parts of this memoir are the sections wherein Grimsley examines how a white Southern boy might learn to be a racist. One of the most extraordinary passages in the book is a catalog of all the casual ways the N-word was easily deployed around him from early childhood, even by his parents: from racist nursery rhymes to racist similes - smelling like, dressing like, dancing like, with hair like ... and on and on. This Southern world really did change in 1968, with the court-mandated desegregation of all the schools in rural Jones County. And largely because of white flight to private academies by the families who could afford it, blacks would eventually outnumber whites in the county's public schools, nearly two to one. Grimsley navigates this turn of events with sensitivity, telling of a walkout after a white teacher said, in class, that black people were "the scum of the earth." "The school itself, and the community behind it, made no effort to teach us how to see past our differences," Grimsley writes. He's also attuned to irony and surprise. In civics class he debated political issues with one of his black teachers, who also happened to be a Nixon supporter, while Grimsley felt an allegiance to Hubert Humphrey and the Great Society, already recognizing himself as an outsider and as Other, having more in common with black folk than with white folk. Back in the present, Grimsley goes to a high school reunion, and is left with the puzzlement of why only one other white classmate showed up. An elegiac reminder that 40 years later, those tensions have not been entirely laid to rest. RANDALL KENAN, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of a novel, "A Visitation of Spirits," and the book-length essay "The Fire This Time."

Accomplished narrator Leyva brings his considerable versatility to the new memoir from acclaimed novelist Grimsley, which recounts his experiences growing up as a white person in rural North Carolina during the school desegregation struggles on the 1960s and '70s. Grimsley, who has made a name for himself in the realms of both Southern and gay fiction, homes in on how his effeminate mannerisms and nagging sense of being an outsider led to a special affinity with black female students in the earliest days of integration, when he was still in elementary school. Leyva makes his most memorable contributions as a vocal performer in these compelling exchanges between Grimsley and his friends. The delicate dance between being an outsider and being coconspirator in breaking down the Southern social order shines through, particularly in Leyva's portrayal of Violet, the African-American girl who responds with confidence when Grimsley uses a vulgar racial term upon their initial introduction. Leyva also does an effective job of conveying the nuances and complexities of the present, when Grimsley experiences his hometown's current racial polarization during a class reunion. An Algonquin hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In 1966, when North Carolina began its first efforts at desegregation, Grimsley was 11 and steeped in the culture of white superiority. All the hardworking, ­churchgoing white people he knew thought race mixing was a sin. He'd grown up around black folks, but they were mostly an undifferentiated mass of people with no individuality. But as an adolescent listening to white kids looking forward to George Wallace setting things straight between the races and black kids looking forward to the revolution, he found himself wondering if the revolution would free him, as well. He'd already seen that poverty had distinguished the whites who could dodge desegregation and those who couldn't, his hemophilia had long set him apart from the rough society of other boys, and his sexual inclination was threatening to be even more distinguishing. The hubbub of race and desegregation gave cover to his own struggle with sexuality, freedom to discover his own identity, and, to his personal credit, space to truly examine the assumptions built into his youth. Looking back some 40 years later, acclaimed writer Grimsley offers a beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist