The Color of a Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

This novel takes place in 1955, placing it near the beginning of the civil rights era, which ran from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. The end of the civil rights movement also marked the end of a racial caste system called “Jim Crow.” Discriminatory, segregationist laws called “Jim Crow laws” began right after the end of the Civil War in 1865. These laws segregated Black and white communities. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling cemented segregation into practice, which dictated that segregation was constitutional under the “separate but equal” doctrine; this ruling upheld the state’s Jim Crow laws.

In practice, resources that Black facilities and communities received were never equal to those that white communities received anywhere in the United States. Lily draws her white principal’s attention to this when she tells him about the nurse’s office at her old school, housed in a closet with the cleaning supplies, and the state of their books. This non-equal reality would eventually lead to the passing of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Browns, represented by Thurgood Marshall—a minor character in this novel—won their case in a unanimous decision in which the court declared that separate educational facilities were unequal by definition.