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Scalawag: A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism * Edward H. Peeples with Nancy MacLean * Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014 * xii, 218 pp. * $30.00
Scholars and students of the civil rights era in the South will welcome this memoir by Edward H. Peeples, Associate Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Peeples, born into a segregationist family in Virginia in the mid-1930s, ultimately rejected the racist beliefs of his upbringing and embraced the cause of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, Peeples championed a number of human rights causes, primarily in central Virginia. Scalawag, a first-person account of his life, offers a unique and valuable perspective on civil rights activism and the struggle for social justice in the South during the later twentieth century.
Peeples was born in Richmond in 1935. His family boasted a privileged southern pedigree on his fathers side, but by the late 1930s the elder Peeples struggled to maintain steady work, in part because of a penchant for alcohol. The family was relegated to working-class status, and conflict between Ed and his father plagued Peeples's youth. In 1952, Ed's mother split from his father and moved with her two sons to Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated from high school there in 1953, spent the summer in Cleveland, Ohio, and then enrolled at Richmond Professional Institute (the forerunner to Virginia Commonwealth University). Despite some initial challenges, Peeples remained at RPI for four years, graduating in 1957 with a degree in physical education.