My father later remembered that he was not anxious as we drove through Virginia, but once we crossed the North Carolina state line, he took a deep breath, shook his head and sighed, “Well, we’re in the South now.” He had lived through segregation in the North; once while riding his bike along 43rd Street in Chicago, he cycled across State Street and was chased back by a group of white boys. Still, the South seemed more dangerous, more violent, more unpredictable.

A Southerner by birth, my father had moved to Chicago from Augusta, Ga., in 1939 with his mother when he was 3, taking part in the massive exodus of African-Americans from the South. When he went back to Georgia to visit his relatives during the summers, he was forced to follow Jim Crow rules for how a black boy ought to behave. Boarding a city bus in Atlanta, my father took the first available seat, in the front. His grandmother grabbed him and pulled him toward the back. Uninitiated in the South’s racial customs and shaken by the bus driver’s menacing look, my father turned to his grandmother and asked over and over, “Why, why, why?” My great-grandmother was unflappable and strong-willed, and she left my father’s questions unanswered because it was better not to offer an explanation of laws that were inexplicable anyway.

As my father later recalled, these events made a permanent impression on him as a child. He was left feeling terrified of white people , who seemed to have the power to control every move that a black person made. It would take a long time for him to think otherwise.

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