Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times , the Washington Post , and The Atlantic .
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 Southern woman today..
The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region\'s history and her own past.
To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post , Slate , Forbes and other publications.
She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white segregation academies, a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today.
Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in.
For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss.
But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern--make that American--white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia.
She followed the scripts she was handed by society.
Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband\'s business.
As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter.
As a good Southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others.
Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location, she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning.
She\'s also a seasoned Southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one.
Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times , the Washington Post , and The Atlantic
