Scalawag

Peeples gives us a remarkably intimate account of a youth misspent learning how to be white and therefore how to ignore the miseries caused on both sides of the color line by segregation, poverty, and violence. Just as important, he brings to life a maturity devoted to putting aside such childish things in order to fight against such miseries. This is an arresting personal and political account of the transformative power of freedom movements. - David Roediger, University of Illinois, coauthor of The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History White southerners have long had 'a rage to explain,' but only a few have told about the South from a white working-class point of view. Scalawag is a riveting coming-of-age tale: the first-person story of a poor boy's moral education. Overcoming the injuries of class and the crippling lessons of white supremacy, Edward Peeples went on to become a foot soldier in a long struggle for human rights. We are in his debt, and in the debt of his historian collaborators, for a memoir that illuminates a whole landscape of local activism too often eclipsed by a popular narrative focused on a few iconic events and individuals. - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, coauthor of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World A dazzling first-person account of a lifetime in the civil rights struggle, as a white southern boy grows up in Richmond, Virginia, grows out of his Jim Crow upbringing, and becomes a 'race traitor' scalawag. - Peter Wallenstein, Virginia Tech, author of Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law--An American History You can't get out of your moment of history unless you get outside your comfort zone. Ed Peeples definitely got out of his comfort zone and into a new moment of history. And we are all the better for it.... [He] gives each of us hope that our actions, however small they may seem, really can make a difference and change the course of history. - RPECNews, Newsletter of the Richmond Peace Education Center For those of us committed to social justice, Peeples's life and work remind us that the journey can start, and often should, right in our own backyard. - Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning