Colored

I don't remember how old I was when I first noticed the signs. But they were everywhere: if not "Colored," then "White Only." I spent most of my youth and young adulthood in Birmingham, Alabama, once described as the most segregated city in the country. Hyperbole perhaps, but if so, only slightly.
Years later in Southern California, it was hard for my students to believe what everyday life was like where I grew up. They were incredulous when I explained that a co-worker and I couldn't sit down in a restaurant and have a cup of coffee and conversation because he was black and I was white. The least that would've happened was that we would've been asked to leave. I don't need to describe the worst.

My co-worker at the United States Postal Service, Charles, told me that his father had had to sit down and have "the talk" with him, "the talk" that would help him avoid the wrath of the redneck. There were things black folk couldn't do, places they couldn't go. I myself remember that only on the last day of the Alabama State Fair, Saturday, were black families allowed to enjoy what whites been enjoying all week. As hard as it is to be a decent father under any circumstances, imagine what it would be like to have to tell your children that they aren't as good as children of a lighter skin color.

I remember going to the movies many times as a youngster, admission one thin dime. The black patrons sat only in the balcony if they got in at all, and I never saw a black person at the refreshment counter or in the bathroom. It was "normal," just as it was "normal" to see all the black people crowded into the rear of a city bus even if the front seats were unoccupied.

Thank God Charles and I lived long enough to see all this change. We lived long enough to share a meal in the restaurant of our choosing in Birmingham, Alabama. We lived long enough to attend together a Stokely Carmichael speech on the campus of an all-black college in Birmingham, Alabama. We lived long enough to see all those ugly, dispiriting signs come down. But Charles is gone now, and I haven't lived long enough to see the hatred disappear that put those signs up in the first place.