Nancy L Moore
Livingston, MT
We lived in DC 1964-65 and one day a kid from the inner city offered to mow our lawn. He so wanted to do a good job he was starting to cut it too short. So my dad sent me out to offer him some lemonade to get him to quit, but nicely. We sat on the stoop & I tried to converse but was shocked that I couldn’t understand a word he said. To me, that starkly showed how integration couldn’t fully happen when we virtually spoke different languages. It really saddened me. This was my first introduction to an American black person. Before that, growing up in a small college town (Pullman, WA) all I had met were Africans who spoke the Queens English. 2 years later, back home, a black girl was in our high school and my sister and I were sickened by how the same kids who were brutal to anyone new went out of their way to welcome her. She saw through them & we became her only “real” friends.
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