Julie Simon
Los Angeles, CA

In 1959, members of the Collins Park community (New Castle, Delaware) firebombed the home of one of the first Black families to move into the neighborhood. On the second occasion, the house was destroyed. Historian Yohuru Williams has written about this event and it is included in the Encyclopedia of African-American History, 1896 to the present. My family of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors wondered if the world they had emigrated to was any better than the one they left behind. This event is the dominant memory of my childhood, though I did not witness it. The racist whites did not modify their speech, their hatred and their savagery. It was all out in the open and terrifying.