Segregated Peace: an essay on Colored People
             Integration was a main theme or topic in this memoir. It played an important role
             in the time when Gates was growing up and had a big affect on him throughout his book.
             Integration changed the way Gates viewed, whites, blacks, restaurants, hairstyles, church,
             school, etc. He went from a conformist to a rebel to an Episcopal. His community changed
             with him and the older generation of course did not take to integration as well as most of
             the younger generation did. Integration was considered a good thing to most people and
             others believed that Blacks had lost something through the whole ordeal. They believed
             that they had lost the close knit family ties that segregation indirectly created. Gates sums
             up the way the community felt about integration in one of his last sentences in his memoir.
             He writes, "All I know is that Nemo's corn never tasted saltier, his coffee never smelled
             fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes gathered to say goodbye to themselves,
             their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly
             enforced anti-Jim Crow laws."(Gates, 216)
             It was hard for blacks to integrate into all white schools after being surrounded by
             blacks for most of their lives. Whites weren't the only ones to critique black attitude and
             black style, blacks did it to themselves. Gates writes that when he was a child he
             remembered that when blacks were admitted to all white neighborhoods or schools,
             Negroes were the first to censure other Negroes(Gates, xiii). His father would say things
             like, "Don't go over there with those white people if all you're going to do is Jim Crow
             yourselves(Gates, xii). Even Gates writes, "I always reserved my scorn....for someone too
             dark, someone too loud, and too wrong."(Gates, xiii). The way Gates writes it, blacks
             would scrutinize their own kind. ...