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To the best of my knowledge, there were no African Americans living in DeKalb County, Indiana, when I was a boy growing up on the farm in the 1950s and ’60s. We lived about a mile from a small town of perhaps a thousand citizens. There were a few streets of dilapidated shacks, owned or rented by poor whites, which everyone referred to as “Niggertown.” There were “sundown laws” that prevented African Americans from remaining in the small rural villages between the hours of sundown and sunrise. It was well known by everyone that the philanthropist who built the public park in a neighboring town (and named it after himself ) had put a restrictive covenant in the deed which speci¤ed that the park would be removed and the land would revert to his heirs in the event that any African American should ever choose to live within the sancti¤ed, white city limits. So much for racism as something peculiar to the southern states. It was, and it remains, as much at home amid the corn¤elds of the Midwest as it ever was in the cotton ¤elds of the South. What makes the racism I grew up with so heinous in retrospect, and so different, is that no one even knew any black people. They only knew that they feared and hated “them” in the abstract , and I think that this abstract fear and hatred are what Hannah Arendt had in mind in her famous phrase “the banality of evil.” I did not embrace this state of affairs, nor did I rebel against it. It was just “the way things were,” as so many have said, from sea to shining sea. Yet change was de¤nitely blowin’ in the wind. Black-and-white TV news7 / Portrait of the Artist as a Young White Man Robert Ely reel footage of Bull Connors raging, of vicious police dogs attacking children , and of water cannons turned upon innocent protestors are all engraved in my memory like gouged steel. So are the images of thousands of black Americans marching up Dexter Avenue toward the old capitol in Montgomery after the long trek from Selma. What was going on, anyway? The only person I actually recalled as a “Negro” was a kind man who had untangled my ¤shing line from some brush near his boat as Dad and I cast for bream from the river bank when I was twelve. I waved “thanks,” and the gentleman tipped his hat to us. Who were all these other “Negroes” on TV? I had a map puzzle of the United States as a child, and I could easily point to Alabama, name its capital city, its major commodities, and its surrounding states. But where was it really? For my father (a World War II vet who had traveled the world and found little to his liking), the Klan “had the right idea,” and whites who lived south of our own county line were “hillbillies.” (Indeed, some who lived north of us were “hillbillies” too, in his judgment.) Dad really didn’t discriminate . He was deeply prejudiced, frightened, and hateful of any race, religion, nationality, region, or hairstyle not known on our small farm. In short, he was an angry man and a bully, and he died of his anger at a young age. As for learning about Alabama and its rich mixture of people, well, we once traveled as far south as Nashville, Tennessee, but Dad didn’t like it, and we left quickly. Sometimes, for “amusement,” the older, meaner boys at my country school would cruise to industrial Fort Wayne in neighboring Allen County. There, they would drive down Hannah Street, in the black district, with whif®e bats. They would stop at street corners where they summoned young black boys, and sometimes men, to their car windows, and then whacked ’em upside the head with their bats and sped off, squealing their tires. Truthfully, I never did this. I never even came close. I did not associate with that kind of crowd. I was clean-cut and decent. Mama made sure of that. I got good grades and drove the Homecoming Queen (white, naturally) on the back of a convertible (also white) in the parade. Funny, though, how “what goes around comes around,” as they say. A couple of years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I was peacefully walking in the lobby of my college dormitory, minding my own business...

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