Thoughts inspired by Brown v Board of Education.

I finally had a chance to read Sunday's Parade magazine. As you might already know, the cover story this week was about the upcoming 50 year anniversary of Brown v Board of Education. The writer, David Halberstam, talked about some of his experiences observing segregation and racism back then, one incident in particular involving Louis Armstrong. "... what I remember clearly all these years later," he wrote, "was his bus having to stop along the side of the road so that this proud and joyous man could slip into the bushes to answer the call of nature. In that America he was not allowed to use a gas-station toilet."

Several years ago a dear friend of ours was visiting one evening. He is retired military, like the husband, and perhaps inevitably they drifted into reminiscing about their active-duty days. Jim is of an earlier military generation than the husband, though, and so the husband listened more than talked, fascinated by Jim's stories of that previous era.

One of the stories was this: Early in his military career, Jim was transferred to an Air Force base on the west coast. For those of you not familiar with the military, when you are given orders to a new location it is up to you to make your own way there (unless for some reason it would be impossible to do so.) They'll cover the cost, but you generally either drive or use civilian transportation. After all, there are better uses for military planes.

So, Jim took the train from North Carolina to California, and as the trip went along, the train began to get crowded, especially in the black cars. Jim might have been serving his country, but his uniform didn't mean as much as the color of his skin. He rode with the other blacks in their carefully segregated passenger cars, which only kept filling up. Eventually, somewhere in the Midwest, Jim gave his seat to an older woman and stood in the aisle for the rest of the trip to California.

Now, Jim told this as an amusing story about crossing the country standing up. The segregation he mentioned only in passing, something thrown out as an incidental detail almost not worth mentioning. It hit the husband and myself, though, with greater impact than anything else he said that night.

My parents were young hippies in the 60s. They lived for a brief time in the South, when I was a baby, and were horrified by the racism they saw. It wasn't long before they fled back to the Pacific Northwest where they raised my brother and myself on stories of how horrible the South was. Being too young to remember anything about the civil rights struggle, and growing up in a (at that time) remarkably white area of the country, all I knew of racism was those stories. I grew up thinking of discrimination as a freakish and bizarre evil, something that used to exist in the olden days in places strange and twisted, but thankfully now mostly eradicated.

Of course I know better now, but those teachings lingered in my mind, forming a foundation for my perceptions of the world - until that night. I had never consciously realized that this man I loved, respected and admired, who I hoped would act as a surrogate grandfather to the children I looked to someday have, had been the target of that kind of ugliness. Reality broke over me like a wave with his story, leaving me breathless with horror. It made me sick to come face to face for the first time with the fact that there really were people in the world who just wouldn't ever see anything about him but his skin tones, who would never allow themselves to see his generosity, his great heart, his kind spirit.

I wish I had something pithy to say, something profound to wrap all this up, but I don't. Anything I write seems trite and foolish. Jim still has to deal with racism every day; I still feel sick at the thought. I'll never really understand what he's been through and I can't fix it for him, but I grieve anyway. And there we sit.