Separate Pasts Mclaurin Summary

Amariye Taylor-Tillis In the memoir Separate pasts, Melton A. McLaurin tells is life story on how he forms friendships in the 1950's with both races. The novel was a moving tale that examined the raciest times that plagued our vast history. The people who challenged his personal beliefs or undermined the system of segregation the most in the novel where Street, Betty Jo, and Bobo. Their impact on McLaurin well change his life forever.
McLaurin at a young age never understood how much race played a part in his life, but he had the decency to be kind hearted to every person he came across no matter the color of their skin. He discussed how segregated the tiny town of Wade was and how divided it was. Making it very clear that blacks would never be deemed equal. One of the people that impacted McLaurin the most was Street. Street was very …show more content…
McLaurin portrayed people of color to have more power than white people but with segregation they never could really tap their full potential. The strengths of the novel is how he treated black with respect, the vivid pictures he painted with a wide verity of stories he showed us and, also how he depicted Wade and how with inference you could tell that Wade wasn’t changing its town ways for a long time. The weaknesses of the novel was we heard only one side. We feel McLaurin was a good person to people of color because of what he told us but, we have no idea if they felt the same or still felt that they were less than a person in his presence. It surprised me how inhuman whites felt people of color where. How they felt we were only good for house work and if we exceeded pass their expectations we were deemed as "crazy", whites made blacks feel that if they did anything then expected they had to be insane. The novel "Separate Pasts" allowed me a glimpse in a part of time I wouldn’t want to live in. Our nation has come so far from those days, but there is still work to be