![]() I never considered that a legitimate prejudice, since it's all any of us wanted to do then. They said that all the niggers wanted to do was play ball and screw white girls. My contemporaries were suspicious of them. A few years later I wrote this poem: MERIDIAN I couldn't believe how blacks were treated there. I was from a border state, (KY) and an area where few blacks lived. to serve at the new Naval Air Training Station there and wait for an opening at the Navy's training center at Memphis Tenn. In 1962, the US Navy sent me to Meridian Miss. I suspect they thought that culture still existed, but fortunately we have made a few strides along the way.Ī Young, White Stranger in the Deep South Having grown up in Texas, I am sure that if the men who killed James Byrd a few years ago had committed that crime in the 1950s, they wouldn't have even been arrested. While we still have a lot of problems growing out of race, we have made progress. Things may have been changing by then, but the change was still going slowly. It goes without saying that they were all over-achievers. ![]() There were three black students in my law school class at the University of Texas in 1975, out of 500 students. ![]() I also know the first black woman licensed to practice law in Texas: Charlye Farris, who was admitted in 1953. I found out that he was the first black graduate of the University of Texas Law School. My father, a reporter, got to know the black attorney (George Washington) who represented Freedom Riders in Houston, and he came to our home with his family. I remember it and I know the people who helped change it. What really gets me about all this is that it wasn't that long ago. Some of the teenagers would always say, when two Mexican-American girls got on the bus toward the end of the route, when seats were few, "Don't let those Mexicans sit down." I did, though, when I could. It seemed very rude to make women and men use the same restroom.īecause our school had no black students, a lot of racist attitudes were directed at Mexican-Americans. I remember the little things, like the first time I realized that the gas station where we did business had three restrooms: women, men and "colored." I recall being particularly appalled (I was about 11) that the "colored" restrooms weren't separated by gender. The Alvin schools only integrated in 1966 because Dickinson closed its separate and unequal high school. Mitchell didn't pick us up (he kept the bus at home) was because he was driving into Alvin to pick up all the black children to take them to the "colored" schools down the road in Dickinson. It took me several years to figure out that the reason Mr. Mitchell drive by in one of our school buses. ![]() Every morning, while I waited for the school bus (we lived in the country), I watched our neighbor Mr. I went to segregated schools until my senior year in high school, in 1966. Jim Crow was still strong, but my parents taught me that racism and segregation were wrong, so I learned at an early age that the accepted way of doing things is not always the right way to do it. I am white, and grew up outside of Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Being curious but ignorant, I asked him, "Are you a nigger?" His mother heard me and came out the door wielding a large knife and angrily told me, "Get away from here." I never told anyone about this experience, but I have been supportive of minority rights since that day. When I was a child living in Navy housing in Wisconsin, I happened upon a black child playing near his back doorstep. Seeing Discrimination for the First Time.My Colege Roommate - Another Special Memory.A Young, White Stranger in the Deep South.Other Marginalized Groups Experience Jim Crow |
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