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Interracial Family Prevails In 1920s Alabama

In The House At The End Of The Road, W. Ralph Eubanks tells the story of his white grandfather, James Morgan Richardson, and black grandmother, Edna Howell. Jim and Edna married around 1914, in defiance of his middle-class family.

The Richardsons eventually built a house at the end of a dead-end road in a black community in rural, southern Alabama. There, they raised a biracial family in spite of living under Jim Crow.

"Jim and Edna lived openly and as normally as possible," Eubanks writes, "as part of the community's life rather than hidden away at the end of the road."

Eubanks, a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, talks about his new book with Neal Conan.

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