(Sorry, Larry. My mom taught me that this is rude, but...)

Larry is about my age, I think. So this means that he was an impressionable child when the civil rights struggle began in earnest in the South.

I don't know what he heard at the dinner table of his extended family. I know what I heard at mine: arguing. The South has no corner on the racism market.

The insight I think I may have now that I didn't have before is the one in which a little boy sees Federal marshals coming into communities like his, and maybe near his, to inflict the will of the national government on reluctant civic institutions. When I was enjoying that relatively new invention, the television, and then the new innovation, the color television, I was having fun. He was watching grown-ups from his part of the world beat up on each other over race. These kinds of things will make a child think.

If, as a child, I saw people from far away (Washington) come into my neighborhood and force my neighbors to do something, I might be inclined to be suspicious of the people who thought they could do such a thing. And I would be just of an age to understand that Goldwater was a Great Man (almost everyone I knew said so), without understanding quite what the politics were that made him one.

If I saw people hurting each other over something like drinking out of the same water fountain, I, with a child's understanding of justice, might be inclined to think that the whole race thing was silly and dumb, but would be too little to dare to say so.

And if I had grown up in the South, I would have had a better chance of meeting and talking to a person of another race than I had in the North at that time, so I would've had firmer ground on which to base an opinion about segregation. Where I grew up, segregation wasn't enforced by law; it was de facto, which is much, much more insidious. Legal segregation was a bigger insult and a bigger barrier, as well as being downright dangerous -- a guy could be arrested! But the other kind is just as much an obstacle in its way, and one that responded much less readily to civil rights pressure than did segregation in the South.

So it would make me mad when people brought up race all the time. But those people who do may have been raised in the North, whose history of racism is much more convoluted.

Regards--
Mary Anne