Understanding Changing Times

Dear Boo and Bubble,

Even though we seem to struggle with it still, your world is an integrated one where discrimination based on race is against the law.  As you grow older, you will have classmates, friends and colleagues of all races – Blacks, Whites, Latino, Asian.  Seeing faces of color in positions of leadership will be commonplace. Your very first U.S. President is the epitome of integration being 50% Caucasian and 50% African-American.  And statisticians tell us that in the next forty years, Whites will be in the minority in our country.

You probably can’t comprehend that when I was a child, even up until my senior year in college, I had no personal interaction with black people other than the acceptable relationship between a child and a maid.  We didn’t eat in the same restaurants, nor sleep in the same motels, nor, heaven forbid, swim in the same swimming pools. When the laws of the land began to knock over the obstacles to equality like dominoes, making it illegal to deny black people access to public places, my hometown of Greenville, SC, officially closed the Cleveland Park swimming pool, filled it with dirt and converted it into a rose garden rather than run the risk of blacks and whites sharing the same water.

Even churches were resistant to embracing the concept of integration, but they subliminally laid the groundwork for God’s broadmindedness.  In every Sunday School class, you could hear little angelic voices singing the poignant words of a children’s hymn -“Jesus Loves the Little Children…all the children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.  Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

As is the case with humanity in general, love for the individual seldom translates into acceptance of the group.  But make no mistake - in the South when I was young, the African-American community played an integral role in the personal lives of our families as well as the society at large. 

My next blog posts come from recollections of that time.  Some are handed down, some are my own personal experience.  Hopefully, they will be illustrative of what I mean.