An Authentic 1950 Charlotte Story

A blue-and-white teacup doesn’t sound like a doorway into history, until you hear what it unlocks in Half Truths. Recording live from the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with author Carol Baldwin to talk about her debut young adult historical novel set in Charlotte in 1950, a city shaped by segregation and the unspoken rules of the Jim Crow South.

Website: spotlight4success.com

Transcript

Welcome From The NCRA Floor

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to American Book Company Spotlight for Success. I'm your host, Danielle Pintozi, and today we are at the NCRA conference in North Carolina. And beside me, we have our special guest, Carol Baldwin. She is an author, and we are so excited to have you on today. Um, what brings you to the NCRA conference?

Why Write 1950s Charlotte

Researching Voices And Lived Experience

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Uh, my book. So that's my debut novel, a historical novel that takes place in Charlotte, in North Carolina, in 1950. And I wanted to tell reading teachers of, and there are not too many librarians here, but I want to tell the world about my book, and so this is a good place to come to talk about it. What inspired you to write this novel? Well, it takes place in Charlotte in 1950, as I said, and I am not a native to Charlotte. I came here uh here is I came to North Carolina about 40 years ago, moved to Charlotte, and I was very curious to know what it was like in Charlotte before civil rights. That was the big impetus for this. And in Charlotte, a lot of buildings get torn down, the history isn't kept too well. So I was also curious about the history that was underneath my feet. You know, as I walked around, what could have happened here? And what is your novel about? Well, the short version, the short answer to that is that it's about a white teenager named Kate Dinsmore and a black girl, Lillian Bridges, and the surprising discovery they make in the novel about the two of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Lovely. And let's see. What was your research process when writing this book?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

So it was a lot. It took me about 18 years from the time that I began it till the time that I held the book in my hand because I it was my first novel. I'd never written a novel before. I'd written nonfiction and published nonfiction, but I didn't know a thing about writing fiction. So I had to figure that out. But I also um there was a lot to for me to learn about what Charlotte was like in 1950. I wasn't born then, I wasn't here. What was life like? And so I read a lot of books about Charlotte and I interviewed about a hundred people, many of them who were living in Charlotte or knew somebody who lived in Charlotte. To get, I really wanted to get the atmosphere of Charlotte. And because it involves a white girl and a black girl, I really wanted to particularly make sure that the the black voice and the black experience was authentic.

Blue Willow China And The Mystery

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Wow, that's amazing. Um I noticed that you're wearing this pin here and your earrings, they're matching.

Getting The Book Into Schools

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah, so this is um this was given to a friend of mine, a good friend of mine who has the who was a mentor for my book, and it's Blue Willow China. And the Blue Willow China surfaces in the book, so this is like my brand now, it's Blue Willow China, and it shows up both in Kate's, so Kate moves to Charlotte and she does um sleuthing and some discovery, and she investigates what's in her grandmother's attic. She moves into with her grandparents, and there she finds Blue Willow China. And she had read a book, you may or may not have heard of this book, it's called Blue Willow. So it was takes place in the 30s. It was a Newberry Honor Award in the 30s, and so she read had read that book, so she gravitated to the China, and then later on in the book, she is um she's watching a grave being disinterred in Charlotte, and it's Lillian's great-grandmother's grave, and they find something in that grave, and it's a blue willow china teacup, and so that's how the girls start thinking about oh, how are they related? And what is this relationship? Wow. So that's why so blue willow china is one of the clues of the family mystery, and that's the attic. That's a picture of the attic where um where Kate is living. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Okay, so you have it here, guys. Half Truths by Carol Baldwin. Where can we find your products?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Well, you can find it right here at NCRA, but most of you aren't here, but you can find it on Amazon. So yeah, that's probably um, or if you go to my website website, Carol Baldwin Books, there's some links there to some indie bookstores that also have it.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Is there anything else you'd like to share with the NCRA community?

SPEAKER_00 4:50

I have aspirations of seeing this book in schools. I would really it's a it's a tough battle to get into schools because of book banning and because of very a lot of rules about it, but I really think that combining this book with something like hidden figures, which is what I talked about today at the conference, was using these two books together. I think that that gives students, today's students, a viewpoint into the Jim Crow South. And so I really hope to see it in schools. I wrote it for young adults, but right now most of my readers are adults. They are the ones who are reading it. But I'm hoping that they're gonna buy it and share it with their grandkids or their children.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

And you had mentioned that you presented here at the conference um Hidden Figures. Uh, what was that presentation like? What do you talk about?

Awards And What Comes Next

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Well, um what so Hidden Figures was one of the many books that I read when I was researching. And so the more I thought about half-truths and hidden figures, I saw their connection. Because here you have two young girls in 1950 who are dreamers. They are trying to enter a world, a professional world that's not really open to them. Um Kate, I think I mentioned she wants to be a journalist, and Lillian wants to be a research scientist. So in 1950, neither of those were things that were really open to women. And um, Hidden Figures is obviously about the four women who were working at the Langley Air Force Base, and they were the ones who broke the barriers. So we have the Dreamers and the Trailblazers, and I just think that that connection is just awesome. And sometimes I think, I mean, obviously my characters are all fictional, even though I built the book around a lot of people and places in Charlotte. I think about what it would have been like if Lillian could have met those four women who worked as computers at Langley Air Force Base. Now, Carol, has your novel won any awards? It's won a few, and it's only been out a year, so I'm pretty excited about that. So the first award that it won was the Coming of Age Award, the bronze medal from Reader's Favorites, and then I I won an award from the North Carolina Historical Society. It was an award of excellence because they recognized the research that went into it. I won the Hindys Award for uh Women in Fiction, and I'm a finalist in an award that I don't know if I'm gonna win or not, it's the Sila Award. But the biggest award that I uh received was it's the Young Adult Literature Book Award for 2025. And so when I got that email, I was like, I was in shock. I didn't know, like, what is this? What is this? I was so excited.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

That is so impressive with this only being published now for a less in a year? Yeah, just less in a year. Yes. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

So thank you for asking that.