Racism in the South has always been a very real and horrible problem. Ernest Gaines accurately describes the atrocities that black Americans experienced in A Gathering of Old Men. "Gaines's strength lies in his quietly companionate depiction of the plantation Blacks in his native Louisiana...." (Peden 239). The whites in the novel are the representation of the stereotypical white person in the 1970s. Gaines shows every white point of view towards blacks in this novel through the progression of the most backward to the most forward thinkers. Each white character in Ernest Gaines's novel, A Gathering of Old Men represents some different aspect of the stereotypical southern white person of the time.

Gaines uses characters such as Beau and Fix Boutan to help cement the image that all while people wanted things the way they used to be. Although Beau never has a real part in the story, he...