Life on the Color Line : The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black

From Publishers Weekly
Williams, dean of the Ohio State University College of Law, tells the affecting and absorbing story of his most unusual youth. Born to a white mother and a black father who passed for white, Williams was raised as white in Virginia until he was 10, when his mother left. His father brought his two sons back home to Muncie, Ind., in 1954 and sank further into drink. The two boys were eventually taken in by Miss Dora, a poor black widow. Williams's many anecdotes are a mixture of pain, struggle and triumph: learning "hustles" from Dad, receiving guidance from a friend's mother, facing racism from teachers and classmates, beginning a clandestine romance with a white girl he eventually married. And while his scarred, grandiloquent father was never reliable, he did instill in young Greg-though not in Greg's brother-sustaining dreams of professional success. Along the way the author decided, despite his appearance, he would proudly claim the black identity that white Muncie wouldn't let him forget. Williams ends his narrative when he reaches college; in the epilogue, he regrets that "there were too many who were unable to break the mold Muncie cast." Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Williams's coming-of-age years were hard. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother left when Greg was still in grade school, not to be seen for more than a decade. His father soon lost his business, and the rest of the family set out from Virginia for Muncie, Indiana to be near relatives. To Greg's amazement, having lived his short life as white, his fair-skinned father's relatives were black. Facing a lifetime of choosing whether to be black or white and, whatever his decision, opprobrium from both races, Greg opted for black. Today he is dean of a respected law school, a man who in the 1950s Muncie of his youth might have been patronizingly called "a credit to his race." "A credit to the human race" is more like it. Recommended for all libraries.
--Jim Burns, Ottumwa, Ia.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
The title sounds like tabloid sensationalism, but Williams' memoir is, in fact, a moving story of growing up on both sides of the nation's racial thicket. Williams' mother was white and his father was able to "pass," so their children, growing up in northern Virginia, thought they were Italian. The parents split up in the mid-1950s, and Buster Williams' alcoholism drove him into bankruptcy, so the charming ne'er-do-well took his two older boys to his darker-skinned family in Muncie, Indiana (just miles across town from their maternal relatives, most of whom no longer acknowledged their existence). Buster Williams encouraged Greg to study and aspire to great things and taught younger brother Mike to hustle, but he was unable to care for the boys and allowed a pious widow to take them in. In grade school and junior and senior high, Greg had to prove himself to both races over and over again: white girls were off-limits, of course, but the sight of him with African American girls of various shades also caused consternation. School records were marked to make sure teachers would realize he was "colored." Life on the Color Line follows Williams to college and to a brief, painful reunion with his natural mother. A powerful tale of a young man's struggle on the cusp of the nation's racial conflicts and confusions. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
This autobiography presents the unusual story of a man who grew up believing he was white, but who discovered he had a father who has passed for Italian but who was actually half black. The family's split began his journey along the color line and the author's personal explorations of the social and economic differences between white and black worlds. -- Midwest Book Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
The author recounts the shock he experienced when he learned that his father's relatives in Muncie, Indiana, were poor and black, and describes the prejudice that he and his brother endured from both sides. Reprint. NYT. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.