Safe From the Neighbors by Steve Yarbrough

Luke May is the main character in this novel. He has a wife and twin daughters. The family lives in a small town in Mississippi where Luke is a high-school history teacher. As the novel begins, his daughters have just entered Ole Miss as freshmen. The threads of the story are events occurring in the present time and events which happened in the the early 60s, especially 1962, when James Meredith becomes the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi.

Luke's father was a somewhat reluctant racist, probably not uncommon in that time and place. His father's good friend and their neighbor was a man named Arlan. However, Arlan was more affluent, he had a sexy extroverted wife, and this friendship becomes complicated as sexual and racial tensions increase. Luke grows up not understanding much of what is going on, but begins to seriously question his father's involvement in the murder of Arlan's wife and his father's role in the riots surrounding James Meredith's enrollment when Arlan's daughter moves back to fill in as a French teacher in the school where Luke teaches. Luke's parents are still alive, although his Mother has Alzheimer's.

While this is a novel with the common modern themes of love and sex and angst of aging, the author also writes of the racial turbulence of the 60s, a theme that is currently being reprised, IMO, as the proposed site of a mosque in Manhattan is being vehemently and viciously opposed. I like the way some writers of fiction place their stories on a broader historical canvas, as does this author.