In Georgia

In Georgia, a collection of eight stories and a novella, is set in Georgia just before school integration in the South. The title story focuses on a white family relocated to Georgia from the North, and the moral compromises they must make to live peacefully among their white neighbors, and the compromises they resist making. This story shows some of the effects the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 had on the South and on this particular family: the Boy Scout leader who had made the early part of his career in the North but who did not want his children going to school with black children; the discovery by white children who had never known black people except by reputation, of what segregation meant to other human beings; the violence of white supremacist groups and the cover-up of this violence by elected officials. These stories show, in different ways, how both oppressors and oppressed are prisoners of the same system. Most of the stories in this collection are autobiographical.