As I walked this morning in a gentle rain this all-too-eager leaf caught my eye. Too many dreary days apparently made her think it was time to turn red and fall to the ground. (Clicking on the picture enlarges it.)
As I look forward to the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, in which I took part, I want to trace my awareness of racial issues.
My earliest memory is my first sight of a black woman. I was about four, I guess, and with my father in a market in the little town where I grew up. I was standing staring at her when my father whispered, "Stop staring at her. She's the same as you." A very early teaching about racial equality!
I found out as I got older that she, the only black person in our little town, was a servant in the household of two old maiden ladies who were sisters. I later wondered whether she might have been a descendent of slaves who worked for their family.
I was probably about eight when my mother dropped my cousin and me off for the first time at a movie theater in a nearby town. In our own town's theater we always sat down front on the right side,
so my cousin and I sat in the same place in this theater. Before the movie started a white man hurried down to us and said, "You don't want to sit here. This is where the n.....s sit." We didn't even know what that meant, but we could tell by his haste and his worried voice that it was something very bad. We jumped up and followed him back to a seat in the middle of theater. An early teaching about segregation.
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