When I was 12 years old, I sewed a Confederate flag onto my jacket. I didn’t intend to make a stand or provoke my classmates, most of them African-American. I just didn’t know any better.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up there, Richmond, Virginia, was a hundred years past the Civil War, but remnants of the Confederacy still cast long shadows throughout its former capital. As a white Richmonder I saw the flag decorating caps and T-shirts, flying from houses and museums. I never stopped to question its presence, much less consider its meaning. I believed that Gen. Robert E. Lee and the other Confederate leaders whose statues lined cobblestoned Monument Avenue were heroes. Why else would they sit on pedestals?

I was more preoccupied with finding my own place in the city. My family had moved from Chicago when I was seven, right after my father died of a heart attack. Richmond was my mother’s hometown, and she wanted to be near her family as she grieved.

At my new school, my classmates teased me for talking “like a Yankee.” My fourth-grade teacher made us call the Civil War the “War Between the States,” reflecting the Southern belief that the states had fought solely for the right to make their own laws. She taught us that most slaves had been happy, singing spirituals as they planted tobacco in their homespun clothes.

At my summer camp in North Carolina, where the elite families of New Orleans, Savannah, and Atlanta sent their daughters, we sang “Dixie” in the dining room. I learned to stand every time the song started and raise my fist when we got to the line “In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie.”

These lessons hardly prepared me for my assignment to a black school when Richmond started mass busing in 1971. My mother could have found a way out of it, like most of the other parents in my neighborhood. She was a daughter of the South, a graduate of segregated schools. Yet her years in Chicago had shown her that integration worked, at least in our small Hyde Park neighborhood. When busing started, my older sister and I were probably the only white children in Richmond who had already gone to a racially mixed school.

That left me, at the age of 12, caught between a hearty chorus of “Dixie” and my personal experience that going to school with black children was no big deal. I was one of 106 white students assigned to join 513 African-Americans at Binford Middle School. Each day I stepped off the bus to face hundreds of children who viewed me as the enemy and either ignored me or made fun of me. I remember those months in a physical way: my head down, shoulders hunched to avoid the constant glares, elbows, and jostling in the halls. Many of