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59 SafeguardingYour Child’s Future There is an old superintendent in my plant who comes by every now and then and calls out to me, “Hi, boy.” It isn’t that he is hostile. As a matter of fact, he wants to be friendly. Up to now he has gone by so fast that I haven’t had a chance to tell him what I think. But one of these days, very soon, this is what I am going to tell him. “Look, man, I know you don’t mean any harm but it is time you learned a few things. Maybe you’re too old and won’t live to see it. But the people I’m thinking about are your grandchildren and the young folks coming up. “I am quite sure that when you think of security for the younger generation, you think in terms of defense against Russia, and keeping the communists from taking over the country, and prosperity and things like that, as if that is all that is necessary. But the main problem of their future, their relations with people in the world we live in, you are not thinking about at all. “Because you’re white and I’m colored, you consider me a minority and that I will just keep on being a minority. You don’t stop to think that only a few years ago the idea of colored ambassadors and colored prime ministers never occurred to anybody in this country. But today there are colored ambassadors and colored prime ministers and ten years from now there are going to be a lot more. And your grandchildren and those of their generation whom you old folks have been trying to protect from associating with colored kids in schools and parks, these same grandchildren of yours are going to have to face these colored folks. And it isn’t going to be enough for them to say that the reason they didn’t associate with me and my children was because their parents wouldn’t let them. “Right now, to you I look like a minority, but what looks like a minority is really a majority and I happen to be one of that majority. Ten years from now I might stomp on somebody, and I won’t be stomping on him because I’m mad or full of hate but just because I won’t be able to get out of my mind all the time you called me ‘Boy.’ It might just happen that one of your grandchildren is that somebody.” [ November 21,1959 ] Ward.indb 59 12/21/10 9:27 AM ...

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