Barbara Hilyer came to Ashland to teach school, and spent her whole teaching career in town. It was early in that career--but well into her life--that she got some startling news about herself: she was not entirely white.
Her father had taken advantage of his light skin to "pass" as white, and did the same for his family. But he never told them in his lifetime. Barbara Hilyer's journey of discovery up a family tree she never knew is described in her book Legacy Lost: Passing Across the Color Line.
She shares the details of her own experience, and what it says about our country's ongoing struggles with race, in a chat on the JX.