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

This term refers to a person who descends from more than one race, often African American and Anglo American. Tony is biracial, the child of a Black mother and a white father from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Because his father is biracial, Williams and his siblings are automatically cast as “colored,” which at the time these events occurred, was an unrefined term that ultimately meant the same as being Black. Williams discovers several biracial individuals in Muncie, including his best friend, Brian Settles, who don’t disclose their roots. While some people use the term biracial, many others prefer to use specific backgrounds to denote someone with a diverse racial background. 

The term “color line” refers to the arbitrary division between African Americans and Anglo Americans. For Williams, this term is both figurative and literal. It can refer to the racial divisions in a school or neighborhood, which he experienced from one side in Virginia and from the other side in Muncie. It can also refer to the rights and privileges automatically extended to one race and prohibited for another. An example is the exclusion of Black riders from the “whites-only” waiting room in the Louisville, Kentucky bus station.

The Klan, which sprang up in the aftermath of the Civil War a century earlier, is a theoretically secret organization dedicated to suppressing Black liberties and rights and to extending white privilege by using violence and intimidation to achieve its goals. Although most consider the Klan an institution of the American South, Indiana (and specifically Muncie) had a strong Klan presence through the middle of the 20th century. The Klan infiltrated civic government and political parties and maintained a powerful dominance over racial matters.