Red, White, Black, and Blue

William M. Drennan Jr. and Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr. grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. Both were born in 1942 to families deeply rooted in Appalachia, but with one key difference. Bill Drennen's parents were white and wealthy, and Kojo Jones was born into a hardworking, middle-class black family. They could play on the same Little League baseball team, but the boundaries set by segregation regulated most other aspects of their social and family lives. In 1955 Charleston's all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated, and ironically it was this attempt to bring the races together that widened the chasms of class, race, and choice that separated Bill's and Kojo's life experiences for the next forty-five years.