Is Trump a Racist? Are You Serious?

From the time I started elementary school in 1950 until the beginning of the 5th grade in September 1954 I attended a segregated school. We weren’t living in South Carolina or Louisiana. We were living on Hamilton Street between Georgia Avenue and 14th Street in — ready? — Washington, D.C!

That’s right. The D.C. public schools were segregated until Brown v. Board of Education in 1953, and because ‘the District’ (as we called it) was federal property, the schools had to be integrated right away.

The first year they integrated one school as a ‘pilot,’ which happened to be my elementary school, West School on Farragut Street. The following year the entire school system changed.

As soon as the schools integrated, my neighborhood, which had been all-white, also began to change. Which is exactly what happened in every community which was legally or de facto segregated in the good ol’ days — the days when America was ‘great.’

This country is the only country which had a slave system that did not allow for manumission of any kind. The last ship bearing slaves from Africa arrived here in 1806 and yet by 1865, when slavery was abolished, just about every man, woman and child with a black skin was still a slave.

Slavery with its attendant justification which we call ‘racism,’ is America’s…