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Primarily the concern of white southern liberals and radicals, white-authored dramas of social inequality appeared with increasing frequency during and after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Many describe post-World War II childhoods, but as historian Melton McLaurin (author of his own racial coming-of-age story, Separate Pasts) points out in “Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography,” the majority of all southern autobiographies that have appeared from national and academic presses since 1940 have “rejected racism” (24 n. 4). A number of autobiographies describe late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century childhoods and present whites’ own versions of dramas of social inequality. One of the best known of these earlier memoirs is Lillian Smith’s influential 1949 autobiography Killers of the Dream.

Throughout the book, Smith emphasizes the subtlety and constancy with which white children were socialized into the southern racial system. “Neither the Negro nor sex was often discussed at length in our home,” she explains: