Deborah Owens
Laurel, MD

The greatest gift my parents gave me was believing that it was cool to be a little black girl. My first incidence of racism was when I visited a beach in Michigan on a field trip with a group of black kids and all of the white people got out of the water. I was nine or ten years old and did not fully understand what happened until some explained what happened on the bus ride home. I certainly knew about Jim Crow laws because I would visit my grandmother in Alabama every summer and remember the “whites only signs on the restrooms and water fountains.” My parents raised me with unconditional love and because we lived in Southwest Detroit I grew up with Hispanics, Arab Americans and Caucasian. From my point of view everyone was different so we were all the same.