It was not yet history when I was in school. It was current events, happening in real time.
I lived in a diverse community, too. There were Black students at my junior and senior high, as well as some recent immigrants and some foreign exchange students.
Neighborhoods in the North were segregated by custom, not law. But there were 4 public high schools and 3 parochial high schools. The distribution of Black neighborhoods meant that all of the public high schools were integrated. Racism certainly existed, but there were also friendships between Black and White students. That led to a foolish mistake that I made in the summer of 1966 when I was 16.
I spent that summer on an island off the coast of SC. My brother was stationed there in the Navy but was away in Savannah for ship repairs and only got home every other weekend. My SIL felt overwhelmed with a 2 month old baby and a 14 month old toddler, so I was there to help out and keep her company.
My brother and SIL had a small bungalow in an all White military community on the island. There was a separate Black community on the other side of the island. There was one general store where both Blacks and Whites shopped. In between the 2 communities and the store the area was rural.
One day I was walking to the store about a mile away. Halfway there I saw a young Black kid around my age walking down a dirt road that led to the blacktop road that I was on. We both reached the point where the roads met at the same time. He turned onto the blacktop road headed in the direction of the store.
It seemed rude to me if I didn't speak. So I said, "Hi" and walked beside him since we were going the same way. He quickly said, "I can tell by the way you talk that you are not from around here so you don't know how to act. I don't know what you are doing here, but I am not interested in any Yankee activism. I want to keep my neck. Black men and White women here do not walk together or speak to each other. So you walk behind me and don't say another word to me."
Then he took a couple steps ahead of me and never looked back.
I felt like an idiot. I had seen the dogs and hoses on TV at home in Erie. But I had forgotten where I was and how dangerous it could be for races to interact in SC. I realized that he wanted to be in front of me so it would not look like he was following or stalking me.
There was nobody else on the road so we had not been seen. But if we had, it could have been disastrous.
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