You might hurt the man’s feelings
Paul J. Mercer, Lakewood, NJ These words were from my father in the very early 50s. My Dad and I were watching the world go...
Black horse will ride white horse
Don Pittsburgh, PA Stated in spring of 1963 by negro at the time with no agitation or explanation. As a white person I thought comment...
Sequence: Negro. Colored. Afro-American. Black. African-American
Alonzo Felder, Durham, NC. Called by many names over the years.
White-skinned negro: community of one.
Jada Golden Sherman, Boston, MA. I’m so frustrated with people’s limited understanding and acceptance of genetics, and upbringing. The labels ‘white’ and ‘black’ are over-generalized....
Their house smells like anyone else’s
Steve Llanso, USA Pretty white and wholly ignorant, isn’t it? Here’s the back story: I grew up in the ’50s and 60s in northern New...
Excuse me, are you a Negro?
Jean Pierce Morrow, State College, PA I grew up in a suburb of West Philadelphia in the 1950s. My town had two elementary schools, and...
Parents gave me Confederate flag: protection
Steve Morris, Seattle, WA. In the mid-1950s my father made a business trip from our home in Connecticut to Florida and back. He decided to...
What happened to the word “negro”?
Amy Connelly Provo, UT In teaching about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to my high school students, I had to pause and do some research...
Leave identity issues to other people
Phyllis W. Allen, Fort Worth, TX. I am a sixty year old woman who has lived through segregation, integration, Colored, Negro,, Black, African American, segregation,...
THEIR FIRST “NEGRO” HAD A TAN.
Theil Baumann Ramsbey Smithfield, RI Everyone was so friendly when my family moved when I was in second grade. It was because, a classmate told...
I didn’t know Mary was black.
Carolyn Kay Conover, Harrodsburg, KY. It was 1964 and Mary and I had been friends since starting 1st grade together. We’d buy milkshakes at lunch....
First mistake was bringing the Negro
H. Ulfheim, Erie, PA. The first mistake was bringing the negro to America. The next mistake was making him a slave and giving him a...
Eisenhower’s Negro caddy was too slow.
Karen Brinkman, New York City, NY. Cleaning out my mother’s attic, I came across a vase wrapped in a newspaper page from 1957. This sentence...
Many southern Negroes never learned reading
Ted Hochstadt Falls Church, VA This is approximately what my mother said to me when I asked her why our African-American cleaning woman could not...
You think I’m Black. I’m not.
Omari N.F. Santa Barbara, CA Race is something we made up and nothing good has come of it (valiant struggles to overcome its many ills...
Race: Nonexistent. Humanity is a continuum!
Joe Gandalf, Pickens, SC. At age 5 I was told that “negroes” (the polite term in the 50s) were no different from any one else....
…but, Daddy, what is a Negro?
Harvetta Asamoah Gathersburg, MD At 4 years old, while watching attacks on TV with dogs (at that age dogs terrified me under any circumstances), trembling,...
