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racism aren't happening anymore would be as naive or dishonest as saying that other crimes don't happen despite being against the law.

I often hear someone say that black people should just get over slavery or infer that the effects of slavery are too ancient to influence a black person's life today. Maybe blacks would have gotten over slavery by now if slavery had been the end of their mistreatment and not just the beginning. That they were freed from slavery with nothing but the clothes on their backs could have been worked through if they had not also been denied access to a good education, restricted in their business aspirations and denied a vote in their own government. We forget that these conditions legally continued on until our recent past and there no doubt at least two generations of black and white Americans still living today who know firsthand what we did from our positions of power and how hard we fought to maintain our status quo.

It was just a over 50 years ago that small black children in some states had to be escorted to school by armed guards, on orders from the President, past crowds of angry white people, even though their right to be there had already been established in court. And just over 40 years ago four families lost their little girls to racism in a church bombing and I'm sure they are still missed today by their sisters, brothers and parents. And now we say stop playing on white guilt or that racism doesn't exist anymore? As long as people who were the victims are still suffering from the losses and the memories, no one should suggest that it's all in the past.

What do we think happened to all the racism of those angry white people in the 1960's? Some of them became enlightened and later publicly said so and there is less of this sentiment today among whites as a direct benefit of desegregation. But do we really think that the racism of those who would rather threaten or harm a black child than let him or her sit next to their children in school somehow just disappeared or died out without at least some of it being passed on to the next generation?

A black man could not even sit down for a cup of coffee in one of our restaurants as late as the mid 1960's without getting arrested but we think those same black men and their children should have all risen above that by now and have no problem going in and feeling welcome to take a seat in a bank or a corporation today. That so many of them do feel comfortable in the bank and have

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