In their own quiet, unassuming way, my parents were integrationists, back in the '50's, and we lived in a part of town that was studied by sociologists as a model of integration. It didn't seem very integrated to me, but maybe at the time, it was more integrated than most places. Black people were certainly a part of my everyday life. We shopped together, went to school together, took public transportation together. But there was always a quiet, unspoken divide.
Until I met Karen Dempsey, the daughter of NAACP chapter leaders in our area. I enjoyed playing with the black children at a private summer school program for gifted students that we all attended on scholarships, as 'representatives of the community.' I told her once in casual conversation that I believed in integration, and after that, we used to walk arm in arm up and down the main avenue in our town, and stand in front of a diner that refused to serve 'colored,' until we were chased away. She told me her parents wanted us to do this 'in support of integration.' We did it several times over the period of about a month that summer. We were eleven years old, and both named Karen, which seemed very special to me at the time. Karen Dempsey wore her hair in a french twist, which I admired very much.
It was my first political action, and predated any awareness of the civil rights movement, which was, just about then, heating up in the south. Martin Luther King, Jr., was becoming an active force to be reckoned with, a pacifist disciple of Gandhi, who believed that conscience and character could transform society. He gave all he had to give, in a bid for a more human and humane society. Today we honor his sacrifice.
And at this time of year, I often recall walking with a young black girl, both of us in ridiculous shoes we called 'pumps,' and wearing false-pearl necklaces, up and down Germantown Avenue in the sunshine, clasping each other firmly at the waist.
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