Copyright, permissions and takedown

01The book and the chapters

Just the Way It Was: White Southerners Remember Jim Crow and its eight chapters are copyright © 2026 Walter P. Anderson, Jr. Each narrator wrote their own life story as a co-author, over months and often years of work with the author. The chapters used by the Reading Room are the printed chapters, unaltered.

The text, design and code of this site are copyright © 2026 Walter P. Anderson, Jr., except where noted. Book design is by Sarah E. Holroyd, Sleeping Cat Books.

02How the narrators consented

The study behind the book was approved by the University of Virginia’s Social Sciences Review Board in 2008. Each narrator took part knowingly, wrote their own chapter, read it, and agreed to its publication under the name or first name that appears in the book. Several chose to appear by first name only, and that choice is kept here.

What we do instead is keep the room as narrow as it can be made. A narrator in the Reading Room says only what that person wrote, in that person’s own chapter, with the passage attached to the answer. It holds no opinions of its own, invents no memories, adds nothing from outside the chapter, and answers nothing the chapter does not cover. Every place the room appears, it says that the answers are artificial intelligence and not the person. That is the whole of what the room is permitted to be.

Fr. Joseph Wittstock and the author are living and speak for themselves. For the seven who are not, the person who speaks for them is their family, and section 3 is addressed to them.

03Withdrawing a narrator from the Reading Room

If you are a member of a narrator’s family, or hold that narrator’s estate, and you would rather they were not in the Reading Room, you do not need a reason and you do not need a lawyer. Write to the address in section 6 with the narrator’s name and your relationship to them.

• We will acknowledge within 2 business days.
• We will remove that narrator from the Reading Room within 5 business days of being satisfied who you are, and sooner where we can.
• Removal takes the narrator out of the room entirely. Their chapter stays in the book, which is theirs and was published with their agreement.
• If more than one family member asks for opposite things, the room stays closed for that narrator until the family has settled it. Silence is the safer default.

The same applies to a living narrator who changes their mind, at any time, for any reason.

04People named inside a chapter

The chapters describe other people: neighbours, employers, teachers, domestic workers, family. Some of them are named. If you are one of those people, or a member of their family, and something in a passage shown on this site is inaccurate or should not be published about you, write to us. We will look at the passage, and where a fair reading supports it, we can prevent that passage from being quoted by the Reading Room without touching the book.

05Photographs

Every photograph in the book and on this site has been included with care and with sincere efforts to locate all copyright holders. A few images remain unattributed despite extensive research. If you recognise an image and can help us update our records, we welcome your outreach, and we will credit it or remove it, whichever you prefer.

06Asking for something to be taken down

Whether your claim is copyright, a right in your own name or likeness, privacy, or accuracy, one address handles it and one process follows.

TODO: designated agent name and postal address for copyright notices
peggyannanderson1@gmail.com

Please include: what the material is and where on the site it appears; who you are and how to reach you; what your claim to it is; and, for a copyright claim, a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised, and that the information in your notice is accurate. A signature, electronic or physical, is enough.

We acknowledge within 2 business days and act within 5 business days. Where a claim is arguable, the material comes down while we look at it rather than after. This site has no advertising and nothing to lose by being cautious.

07Quoting the book and the site

Quote short passages with attribution to the book, in the ordinary way: title, author, chapter and page. The Reading Room gives you the page for exactly this reason. Please cite the book rather than the chatbot, and please do not present a generated answer as a statement by the real person. For anything longer than a short quotation, write and ask. Permission for classroom and scholarly use is usually given and usually free.

08How this site was made

The Reading Room answers with artificial intelligence, and that is said plainly wherever the room appears. The site around it, its code and much of its explanatory copy, was also built with the help of an AI assistant, under human direction and human editing. The chapters, the book and the narrators’ words are entirely human, and no part of a narrator’s chapter was written, completed, paraphrased or corrected by a machine.