Bearing Witness - Growing to Maturity in Shades of Dark and Light: Storied Life Events on the Road to Racial Understanding, 1945-2000 (Paperback)

This uniquely creative history traces author Felton's life-passage as a white man, interacting with Black persons throughout formative and young-adult years. The book's two parts interweave both nonfiction narrative and short fiction into a compelling whole. Recent reports declared Americans had the least diverse "friendship groups" of any society. Addressing this problem, Part One follows the author's involvements integrating Oak Ridge, Tennessee schools; personal effects of 1954's Brown v. Board of Education; contacts between Black and white communities in the West/Midwest; and meanings from 1965's Watts Riots. Part Two is a fictional rendering of the postwar experience of a young white boy being raised by a Black woman in mid-century Tennessee. The book's thrust and advocacy show how contacts on elemental levels between the races can be enriching, meaningful, and life-changing. A trenchant text bearing moral lessons without preachments, Felton's ninth book is a "must-read" for the contemporary racial conversation.