As a good southern woman\, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager\, she volunteered as a March of Dim es quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelt er. Later\, she married\, reared two daughters\, renovated a 1941 Colonial home\, practiced her French\, and served as the bookkeeper for her husban d&rsquo\;s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society.\n
But there wer e the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern&mdash\;make that American&mdash\;white women have settled on in the name of convention and\, to be honest\, inertia. For Fentress\, her dodges both behind her f ront door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually\, along with cl aiming a personal second act at midlife\, she realized the most urgent com munity work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she k new well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million studen ts in the South enrolled in all-white &ldquo\;segregation academies\,&rdqu o\; a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history\, she found ed the \;Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schoo ls\, which has been featured in the Washington Post\, Slate\, Forbes and o ther publications. "The Steps We Take" tells how one woman reckons with bo th a region&rsquo\;s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human\, through moments painful and darkly comic\, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white souther n woman today.
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This program brought to you in partnership between the Prince Geor ge&rsquo\;s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George&rsquo\;s C ounty Memorial Library System.
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