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Segregation

The noted writer and educator tells of his boyhood in the West Virginia town of Piedmont, where African Americans were second-class citizens but family pride ran deep.

You wouldn’t know Piedmont anymore—my Piedmont, I mean—the town in West Virginia where I learned to be a colored boy. The 1950s in Piedmont was a sepia time, or at least that’s the color my memory has given it.

The Birth of Jim Crow

In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans.

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