A Thought About Juneteenth.

When I started first grade in 1950, I was in a segregated public school. Five years later, when I started the fifth grade in the same school, half my classmates were black. My school was located in the middle of Washington, D.C., where the schools were segregated until Brown v. Board of Education, and the D.C. schools, being on federal property, had to integrate right away.

Several of my white classmates said nasty, racist things about the new black kids. They were obviously repeating what they heard at home.

My new black classmates, on the other hand, all seemed happy to be in this new environment and made it clear with gestures and words that they wanted to be friends.

Second story.

Sometime in the Summer of 1957, my father and I went to see the Dodgers play the Braves. Except we didn’t go to Ebbets Field; we drove across the Bayonne Bridge and went to the minor league ballpark in Jersey City where the game was played because Walter O’Malley, owner of the Dodgers, wanted to show everyone that he could play his team anywhere at all.

By the time we got to the park, the only tickets were standing room beyond a three-foot outfield fence which was used by Jersey City as a garbage dump. My father found a comfortable, office chair to sit in, I stood on a pile of garbage with three or four older…