The Eight · 1919 – 1957
The Eight Voices
Seven ordinary Southern White people, neither Klan members nor civil rights workers, wrote down their life stories. Each one tells what they saw under segregation, what they did not see, and what they told themselves about it. An eighth voice, a White South African, remembers apartheid from the inside.
Collected 2003 – 2024 · Page last updated 28 August 2026
01
Walter P. (Andy) Anderson, Jr.
The youngest of the eight by sixteen years, and the only one still living. He grew up in a Louisiana mill town in the last years of legal segregation, and he wrote his own life story first so that his co-authors could see exactly what he was asking of them.
02
Pat Anderson
Raised on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in a family where Confederate ancestry counted for more than money. Two of his great-grandfathers fought for the South. He served in North Africa and Italy, then spent a career in a multinational company.
03
Ted Lala
A Sicilian family in the Wards of New Orleans: a grandfather who rented a meat stall behind Café du Monde, a father who dried macaroni by day and repaired barrels at night. Ted worked forty years for the telephone company. He was called names himself, by his closest friends.
04
Dorothea
The oldest of four sisters, raised poor on the edge of Staunton. She warned Andy she had only four or five memories worth having. She was amazed at how much came back.
05
Catherine
The most private of the eight, and the clearest about why she agreed: she wanted readers to know that the lives of the people she knew in the South were nothing like the scenes in Civil Rights newsreels. She is also the most candid about the limits of her own seeing.
06
Nancy Virginia Shroyer Bain
Raised among the “Black pockets” of rural Albemarle County, Virginia, in a house where Black women worked and Black neighbours lived a field away, and where the arrangement was never once discussed.
07
Don
Raised in Norview outside Norfolk, in a family with a Confederate ancestor nobody discussed. The last of the seven to write, and the one who worked hardest at the question of what he had been taught without noticing.
08
Father Joseph Wittstock
The eighth voice, and the only one who is not American. A White South African who grew up under apartheid in the Eastern Cape, read Andy’s chapter, recognised his own childhood in it, and wrote the Afterword.
Why these eight
Andy Anderson taught at the University of Virginia for twenty years. Once a term he told his students what he remembered about race under Jim Crow. In 2003 two students stayed behind to ask why he had not said more about the racial violence. He told them he had not seen any. They left unconvinced, and he realised the only way to find out whether they were right was to ask other older Southern White people while there was still time to ask them.
The study was approved by the University of Virginia’s Social Sciences Review Board in 2008. Each narrator was asked the same questions again and again, over years, until the memories came back in detail, and each chapter was checked against census records, local newspapers and county histories wherever that was possible. More about the method.
All seven of the American narrators remembered legal segregation the same way: it was just the way it was.