Sublime

The teacher looked at her, looked away, and instead called on a White hand as soon as it was raised. As the Black girl’s arm came down, I could see her head going down. As I saw her head going down, I could see her spirits going down. I turned and looked up at the teacher, who, of course, was not looking at me. She was too busy engaging a favored W

In a startling scene that underscores the absurdity of white supremacist practices, the police officer charged the driver for driving a bus that was “too yellow.” The officer’s “reasoning” was that the bus was deceptive—too closely resembling a school bus.

White men were always extending offers of work to Elwood, recognizing his industrious nature and steady character, or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

Most people said he was half white, but Eva said he was all white. That she knew blood when she saw it, and he didn’t have none.

But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.

Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes—or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as “colored people”—were going to use. He didn’t want them “mixing” with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that “t

In Atlanta, a few months after my visit with Walter, I would go to a Bearden exhibition at the High Museum. The pieces depicted his youth in Charlotte, North Carolina, before his family moved north. There was also a video installation showing in the center of the exhibition room. Albert Murray sits alongside Bearden in much of it. They talk about h

In 1964, eight years before I was born, my family moved from Titusville to Ensley. Ours was the third Black family on the block. And the last White man on our block, which changed from White to Black across a few years, diligently kept up a sign that read “Zoned for whites.” Each morning on the way to school, the neighborhood boys kicked it down. E