Even Donald Trump Can’t Keep the World from Changing.

In 2005, my wife and I spent a weekend at the Hilton Head Inn in South Carolina. My wife attended a medical conference, and I played golf. The first night we had dinner in the resort’s dining room and were waited on by two young white kids, a boy, and a girl.

These two young waitpersons couldn’t have been nicer and more solicitous of our needs if they tried. They behaved exactly the same way to the three diners seated at the next table, who were a man and woman in their 30’s, plus an older woman who was clearly the mother and mother-in-law of one of the two younger guests.

Aside from the fact that we hadn’t brought my mother or mother-in-law to the resort with us, there was one fundamental difference between us, and the guests seated at the next table — they were black.

I lived in South Carolina from 1976 until 1980. If you had told me back then that blacks would be doing anything in the Hilton Head Inn dining room other than mopping the floors after the guests had eaten their meals and left the room, I would have told you that you were out of your mind.

If I had been a plantation owner in South Carolina in 1850, and you had told me that 15 years later those slaves on my plantation would be as free as I was and would have the same political rights that I enjoyed, I would have…