Jim Grimsley was an 11-year-old boy growing up in Jones County, North Carolina, when the first black children enrolled in his all-white school.
It was more than 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education and Grimsley’s whole world was about to change. Grimsley gets into this in his new memoir, in which he describes the racist environment in which he was raised and how he began to rethink his assumptions.
Host Frank Stasio talks with Grimsley about the first year of integration and why he decided his book, How I Shed My Skin, (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill/2015) needed to be a memoir.
Grimsley is speaking May 21, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Center for Documentary Studies. Grimsley will also be participating in an author event at Pittsboro McIntyre's Books on Saturday May 23, 2015 at 11 AM.
