Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

As a teenager, Seidule moved with his family to Walton County, Georgia, east of Atlanta, where his father had become a school superintendent. After joining the football team of the local high school, Seidule noticed the abysmal conditions of the field and the putrid smell from a nearby chicken slaughterhouse. The school had been founded only a few years before, on the cheapest land available, with the aim of giving white families an inexpensive alternative to integrated public schools. Such schools emerged as a practical alternative after direct challenges to desegregation failed. Private schools could exclude Black children ostensibly on the basis of merit, while many formerly all-Black schools closed. As a football player, Seidule faced off exclusively against other white kids, and while this spared him from having to play against future Heisman Trophy winner (and later Senate candidate) Herschel Walker, he regrets having been part of a system that maintained de facto segregation.

The city of Monroe had a 50% Black population when Seidule lived there, but he had few friends or even acquaintances in the Black community. This disconnect is in part the legacy of brutal racism in the county, including numerous lynchings and widespread Ku Klux Klan activity.