38. She spent her childhood in the Jim Crow-era South
The young Nina not only had to deal with terrible poverty, but the horrors of the Jim Crow Laws. These enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. The Jim Crow Laws made it clear that whites and blacks had to be separated because of the inferiority and wickedness of black people, and in North Carolina, even libraries had segregated areas for readers. Books couldn’t pass from black people to white people or vice versa, and even the North Carolina State Militia was segregated. Growing up with Jim Crow, Nina’s fury at such injustice later blossomed into Civil Rights activism.
