Won Over

"What was it like growing up white in Mississippi as the Civil Rights Movement exploded in the Fifties and Sixties? How did white children reconcile the decency and fairness taught by their parents with the indecency and unfairness of the "Mississippi Way of Life," the genteel euphemism applied to the pervasive Jim Crow regime? How did the Civil Rights Movement influence white kids coming of age in the most segregated place in America? Won Over, a memoir, examines these questions as it traces the journey of United States District Judge William Alsup, born white in 1945 to hard-working parents in Mississippi. They believed in segregation. But they also taught their children fairness and decency and therein lay the conflict, a struggle at the core of the human predicament in the South. As Won Over recalls near its outset, the author's earliest doubt about the system came at age twelve when what he'd thought stood as an abandoned shack in the bottom of a sand quarry turned out to be a school for black kids as he saw them playing in the mud outside its door. Won Over is a coming of age story of white boys in Mississippi, their journey on the monumental question of race in America, and how they were won over to the right side of history."--Provided by publisher.