2 of 33

Write now Article Tools

Page 2 of 2

flying through the air, furniture, utensils, clothes... everyone was running and screaming and there were police sirens and cops everywhere, just like that. It happened in a heartbeat. For weeks afterward only a handful of kids showed up. No one would send their kids to school. I was one of the ones did show up for school, not that I was all that brave or virtuous, I just had parents who weren't about to pay for books I wasn't using. Their attitude was, hey, we paid for these books, you go to school, the end. i remember the few of us who were there hardly did anything at all except talk about who said what about whose sister and how that was probably what started the riot. I think it was just in the air. It was about the same time as the Detroit riots. We didn't invent riots. We were kids.

My best friend and I got involved in trying to repair things. It was kind of pitiful. We would go to these race relations meetings and we would be the only two white people there-two nerdy white girls in a sea of really honked off black kids. We listened to a lot of arguments about whose grandfather did what to whom, and why chocolate cake is call Devil's Food Cake but white cake is called Angel Food Cake, and whether the best civil rights leader was Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, and assorted other topics that had no impact on anything whatsoever. Well, almost no impact. My parents yanked me out of the school civil rights club, saying that it was just going to end in me marrying some black guy and ruining my life. So much for activism at seventeen.

Now, Barack Obama may well become our next president. Racism is still a shameful legacy in this country, and an open sore. But it's getting better. It really is.

Learn more about this author, Pamela Grundy.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

• << previous page
• 1
• 2

Add your voice

Know something about Memoirs: Becoming aware of racism?
We want to hear your view. Write now!