Racism was an ugly fact of life in the America of my early days, but I didn’t give it much thought. In our all-white town, Wilmington Massachusetts, miles from Boston’s black ghettos and farther still from the absolute segregation of the southern states, racism was not a subject for discussion; neither at home nor in our schools or our churches.
All my baseball heroes were white because there were no black players in the Major Leagues until 1947, when the color bar was lifted so that Jackie Robinson could join the Brooklyn Dodgers. It took another three years for pro basketball to admit a black player, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, who had to clown with the Harlem Globetrotters until the New York Knicks let him in their locker room. We didn’t hear of black war heroes because military units were segregated by race, and the bravery of their soldiers was given no publicity.
Although slavery had been abolished in America’s south at the end of the civil war, blacks there still faced discrimination in every aspect of their lives: kept from voting by rigged registration rules; banned from the best schools and even cafés; forced to ride in the rear of buses. It is fair to say that the USA did not become a truly democratic nation until July 2, 1964 (five days short of my 30th birthday), when President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill banning discrimination in voting, jobs, education and public services. Another milestone, of course, was the election of a multi-racial president, Barrack Obama, in 2008.
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