38 pages • 1-hour read
Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
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Key Figures
Melton A. McLaurin
Melton A. McLaurin is the protagonist of Separate Pasts, and we see the effects of segregation through his eyes. McLaurin is a professor of American history, and in this memoir, he explores America’s histories of racism through his own experiences growing up in Wade, North Carolina. He uses his autobiography to explore the segregated South at a moment of change. McLaurin was born in 1941 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and grew up in the nearby town of Wade. He grows up in a well-off family with deep roots in Wade. McLaurin is the oldest of six kids. He works in his grandfather’s store throughout his youth.
McLaurin is a thoughtful young man who questions received authority. His interactions with people in the town demonstrate that he is social and curious about other people. He appears to be well-liked and polite. The memoir charts his transformation from accepting segregation to questioning the premises of white supremacy.
McLaurin keeps his memoir focused very tightly on issues of race and segregation. While his memories guide the book, he does not appear as a strong actor driving the incidents. As a result, we do not get a strong sense of him as an individual. McLaurin thus becomes something of an everyman—an ordinary boy growing up in the South—a position that makes him an effective messenger for the book’s central ideas. McLaurin is interested in how history intersects with the lives of individual people and is motivated by a desire to deepen the understanding of race in America. He focuses on human connection and the people who changed his views on race.
Lonnie Mac (Granddaddy)
McLaurin’s Granddaddy, Lonnie Mac, is an important character in the memoir. McLaurin works in his store. McLaurin admires his “emotional toughness, his obvious intelligence, and his personal integrity and independence” (20). His maternal great-grandfather, John C. Bain, moved to the village of Wade from a farm. John built a home for the family in Wade and established the family’s social standing. Poor business decisions by McLaurin’s grandmother’s younger brother jeopardized the family’s economic status. Lonnie, a yeoman farmer, salvages the family’s financial standing through a series of intelligent, shrewd, and ambitious choices. After his farmhouse burns, Lonnie uses the insurance money to build his store.
Lonnie is confident but aloof and stern. A small, skinny man, he is barely five foot seven. McLaurin writes that Lonnie never weighed more than 120 pounds and had tiny hands and feet. An illness damaged his vocal cords, and he has a “harsh, rasping, high pitched voice” (14), which McLaurin says added to his formidable presence.
He is proud of his social standing in the community. Despite his business success, his marriage is a failure. McLaurin’s grandmother, Ma Ma, spends 12 years in an institution, and Lonnie devotes little attention to his son, Merrill. Lonnie makes “no effort to rebuild the shattered American dream—the family, the home, the image of the successful member of the community” (14), and the store becomes his life. Like many white people in his generation, he upholds racial stereotypes and segregationist doctrines. However, his behavior towards individual African Americans is often more nuanced and undermines his “heated racial rhetoric” (114). Often, his kindness is demonstrated in paternalistic behavior to members of the African American community. Lonnie died in a car accident several years after McLaurin left Wade for college.
Merrill and Thelma McLaurin
McLaurin’s parents, Merrill and Thelma, are not prominent characters in the book. Merrill has a complicated upbringing as his mother is institutionalized. His father moves into his store and rents out the family home. Lonnie focuses on his business and devotes little attention to raising his son. Merrill boards with a schoolteacher and is taken care of by an African American man named Jim. McLaurin says that his father did not talk about this period very often, and he doesn’t have detailed knowledge of his father’s early life. His father moved to Charlotte to become a barber, and there he met Thelma, the daughter of poor tenant farmers in South Carolina. Despite her poverty, she finished high school and enrolled in business college.
Merrill and Thelma marry and return to Wade in 1940, where they move into Lonnie’s house. His father finds work at a barbershop at Fort Bragg. He goes on to become a part time-agent for a large insurance company. McLaurin describes his father as lucky, and he finds success in sales, eventually moving into sales full time. He is active in local politics. The family is well off and respected in the community. McLaurin notes that they had two cars, went on vacation, and were never short of cash. The family attends a Presbyterian Church.
They regularly hire African American domestics or yard workers. Like Lonnie, they broadly support the logic of segregation. For example, Thelma tells McLaurin he cannot date a young girl named Charlotte because her great-grandmother was mulatto. His father’s paternalistic racial views change very little despite integration. His mother becomes more aware of the “corrosive effects of racism on the human spirit” (172), shifting her racial attitudes. His parents come across as reliable, stable, and set in their ways, forming a foil for McLaurin.
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