A book of eight autobiographies · 1919–1957 · Louisiana to the Eastern Cape
Just the Way It Was
White Southerners Remember Jim Crow
Seven ordinary Southern White people (neither Klan members nor civil rights workers) wrote down their life stories. Each one tells what they saw under segregation, what they did not see, and what they told themselves about it. An eighth voice, a White South African, remembers apartheid from the inside.
You can read them here, and put your own question to any of the eight.
What is here
Three ways in.
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01
The Eight
Who each of them was, where they lived, and a passage from their chapter. Every narrator also has a page of their own, with long extracts from the book.
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02
The Reading Room
Choose one of the eight and put a question to them. The answer is written by AI from that narrator’s chapter alone, and shows you the passage it came from. Where the chapter is silent, it says so rather than guessing.
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03
The Book
All eight life stories in full: 400 pages with family photographs, maps and footnotes, in paperback, hardcover and ebook.
Walter (Andy) Anderson, Jr. spent sixteen years collecting these life stories. All seven American narrators, Andy among them, remembered legal segregation the same way: it was just the way it was. Andy and Fr. Joseph are the only two still living. Here you can read them, and sit down with each of them, one question at a time.
The Eight
Select a portrait to open the chapter, or read all eight excerpts
Walter (Andy) Anderson Jr.
Author and narrator; counselor, Charlottesville
The youngest of the seven American narrators by sixteen years, and one of the two still living. He grew up in a Louisiana mill town in the last years of legal segregation: separate doors at the doctor's office, two drinking fountains side by side on the same water line, and a Sunday hymn about all the children of the world sung in a church where no Black family sat.
“The injustices of segregation that are so evident to us today, we largely ignored or did not recognize at all.”
Pat Anderson
Andy's father; chemical engineer, WWII infantry officer
Raised on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in a family where Confederate ancestry counted for more than money. Two of his great-grandfathers fought for the South. He served in North Africa and Italy, then spent a career in a multinational company, and remembers the plant photograph in which the Negro employees were all grouped at the back.
“Until the 1950s, strict racial segregation was the law in the South and seemed natural to me and to everyone I knew.”
Ted Lala
Andy's father-in-law; telephone lineman, then supervisor
A Sicilian family in the Wards of New Orleans: a grandfather who rented a meat stall behind Café du Monde, a father who dried macaroni by day and repaired barrels at night. Ted worked forty years for the telephone company. He was called names himself, by his closest friends.
“I grew up surrounded by Blacks when segregation was so ordinary that nobody thought about it.”
Dorothea
“Government girl,” 1942; later a rehabilitation counselor
The oldest of four sisters, raised poor on the edge of Staunton by a father who slapped her mother most weeks and a mother the neighborhood whispered about. She warned Andy she had only four or five memories worth having. She was amazed at how much came back.
“I hardly noticed the Blacks I saw almost every day while I was growing up.”
Catherine
Navy doctor's wife; six cities in twenty years
The most private of the eight, and the clearest about why she agreed: she wanted readers to know that the lives of the people she knew in the South were nothing like the scenes in Civil Rights newsreels. She is also the most candid about the limits of her own seeing.
“Many of us did not see the injustice of segregation, but it is also true that we meant no harm to Blacks. We certainly did not hate them.”
Nancy Virginia Shroyer Bain
Farm daughter, Blair Park; lifelong Albemarle County
Born on a 200-acre farm in the peach-and-apple country west of Charlottesville. By the time she finished high school she knew someone in almost every White family in her corner of the county, at least by sight, and about a dozen Black people in all.
“I wasn't sure I could describe something I hardly noticed until it was almost over.”
Don
Norfolk boyhood; Tidewater family since Reconstruction
All he knows of his family is what his mother told him about her side: Tidewater Virginia since shortly after the Civil War, and a great-great-grandfather who fought for the South whose rank nobody would say. His is the only chapter in which a family member belonged to the Klan.
“Their attitude was more like, ‘Let them lead their lives, and we'll lead ours.’”
Father Joseph Wittstock
Abbot, Holy Cross Abbey; White South African under apartheid
The eighth voice, and the one that turns the book outward. He immigrated in 1987, when apartheid still looked permanent. Not until he read Andy's chapter did he learn that America had once had a system like the one he grew up inside. The two men then spent dozens of conversations comparing them.
“Until Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994, I was reluctant to tell our customers where I was from because I was still ashamed to be associated with South Africa as a White person.”
The Reading Room
Ask them what you would have asked.
Andy talked with each of these people for months, sometimes years. Six of the eight have since died. What is left is the chapter each of them wrote. Here you can put your own question to it. Choose a name, sit down, and take your time.
The answers are written by artificial intelligence from that narrator’s chapter, not by the narrator. What that means, and where it can still be wrong.
You are talking to an AI, not to the narrator. It answers only from that narrator’s chapter, and shows you the passage each answer came from.
The narrators use the words of their time, including racial slurs. Answers quote them as printed.
Questions and answers are kept for 12 months, without your IP address or anything else that identifies you, to improve the Reading Room. Please don’t type anything personal. How this works · Privacy
AI-generated from the narrator’s chapter, and kept without identifiers. By sending a question you agree to the terms of use and the privacy notice.
The places they remember
Photographs from the book
In 2011 and 2012 Andy went back to some of the places in these chapters, with Dorothea and Nancy Virginia, and photographed them. The captions are the book’s own.
Dorothea · Chapter 4
Nancy Virginia · Chapter 6
“I wasn’t sure I could describe something I hardly noticed until it was almost over.”
Charlottesville, 2003
Two students stayed behind after class.
For twenty years Andy taught a course at the University of Virginia. Once each term he told his students what he remembered about race under Jim Crow. His point was simple: people can live beside an injustice for years without seeing it, especially when the injustice works in their favor.
Afterward, two students asked why he had not said more about the racial violence. He told them he had not seen any. They thanked him and left unconvinced. He realized two things. They might be right. And the only way to find out was to ask other older Southern White people, while there was still time to ask them.
“I had not seen any racial violence, personally, and doubted many other Southern White people had.”
The injustices of segregation that are so evident to us today, he writes, “we largely ignored or did not recognize at all.” The book asks the question hiding under that sentence: what are we failing to see now?
The Method
Sixteen years, eight lives, one question.
These are not interviews dressed up as memoir. Each chapter is a life story told in the narrator's own voice, written with Andy over months of conversation and revision, and checked against United States census records, local newspapers, and county histories wherever that was possible.
A note on language: the narrators use the words they used at the time, including “Negro,” “Colored,” and worse. Andy left them in. Reading them is part of reading the book honestly.
The Book · 2026
Read all eight in full.
Just the Way It Was: White Southerners Remember Jim Crow collects all eight life stories in full: 400 pages, with family photographs, maps, and footnotes, in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.
Published 14 October 2026 and available on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, paperback, and hardcover. Designed by Sarah E. Holroyd at Sleeping Cat Books.
- PAPERBACK
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- HARDCOVER
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- EBOOK
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