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When I was almost a teenager, back in the early 60s, my friends and I used to ride the bus downtown to window shop and buy ice cream and just generally waste time. Back then all the stores were in the center of town and everyone dressed up and rode the bus there to shop. Although I grew up in the industrial mid-west, not the south, I recall that during that time, black women were not allowed to try on hats in any of the three major downtown department stores. In fact, I recall more than once seeing a black woman ushered out of the store for trying to use a dressing room at all, to try on anything.

One of my most vivid memories from that time was of riding the bus back home one evening about the same time people were getting off of work. I was sitting across from a black woman near the middle of the bus when a very elderly, frail-looking white woman boarded. The black woman immediately stood and offered her seat to the old white woman, and the white woman accepted it without an thank you, then very carefully pulled a white hankie out of her purse, unfolded it, and laid it across the seat before sitting down on it. I caught the black woman's eye and she shook her head at me in shared disgust and astonishment. She moved to an empty seat near the back of the bus while the old white woman just rode along snootily, protecting her white butt from any black contamination with her white handkerchief.

I'll be 55 in March, so it's not like this happened two hundred years ago in Alabama. It happened in a Northern industrial city where people prided themselves on knowing better. But they didn't know better. By the time I got to high school and swimming was a major part of phys-ed, the big controversy was on whether the black kids were going to get in the pool or not. Lots of white parents would not allow their kids in the pool if the blacks were going to be using it, and had to write notes making up excuses why their kids had to be excused from swimming. The really sad thing was that the black kids, knowing this to be the case, absolutely refused to go in the water at all. They'd suit up and huddle in a corner away from everyone else and nothing, I mean NOTHING, could blast those kids into that pool. They barely even looked up the whole time we were in gym.

In my senior year of high school we had a race riot that started in the lunch room when someone threw a tray. At first it looked like a food fight, but then a wave of people came rushing through the halls and things were

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