I completely forgot this morning that today was Martin Luther King Day. It occured to me on the looooong drive from Houston to Baton Rouge that I am just enough older than everyone else in this blogging community to have lived through things that you probably won't believe.

I was born in New York and lived there until I was 8. I'm sure everything was integrated, but I don't recall what color anyone was -- and that's the point, I think, it didn't matter at all. But then we moved to Dallas, and it was a different world. Blacks and whites had separate schools, separate drinking fountains, separate waiting rooms at train stations, separate swimming pools, separate movie theaters, anything you can think of except buses. We all rode the same bus, but blacks had to sit in the back. I remember being horrified at first, but when you're young and you want to fit in, you go along with what everyone else is doing. Over time, I literally never knew a black person in any capacity except cleaning a friend's house or sweeping the floor in the hair salon. I do remember one impassioned argument with a friend (?) in which I asked how she could let the black woman in the salon touch her all over her face, but refuse to sit next to her on the bus. That only earned me a really ugly nickname, and did not begin to make my well-on-her-way-to-being-ex-friend re-evaluate her position.

Even in college, there were no black girls. But then I took a summer job in a coffee shop, and made my first black friend. She was a cook; she was funny and full of fun and smart as could be. We went on break at the same time one day and were laughing and talking as we walked down the hall to the break room. Unthinking, I walked on in, then realized she was hanging back. "Come on" I said.

She answered "I can't go in there."

This is the moment I think of when I hear the phrase, it was as though something had sucked all the air out of the room. I was stunned. She wasn't a color, she was my friend, and the thought that she was prohibited from going certain places enraged, saddened, shocked, and shamed me. For the first time, I got a good look at prejudice and it tore a hole through me.

If this happened now, I would unhesitatingly go with my friend Carolyn to the "colored" break room. The fact that I would have been fired on the spot would be a sort of medal of honor. But it was then (1963) and I walked on into the "white" break room with the other waitresses, most of whom were missing teeth, drank up their paychecks, and had several "gentleman friends" who seemed to make monetary gifts to them on a regular basis.

It happened again several months later, this time with the athletic trainer from the college. He would recruit the kids from the south to drive home and share the gas money. We stopped outside a honkey tonk in the Texas panhandle, and he asked one of the boys to go in and get him a coke. He said "I can't go in there." This was the kindest, most generous man you would ever hope to meet, and the whole car erupted in fury at the idea that he would be discriminated against. And Rosie, God love him, told us not to be angry: "They just don't know any better."

So thank God for Martin Luther King, who solidified a movement that removed those stupid and evil laws and barriers. Thank God all of you were not prevented from knowing people of other races, so you could judge a person by the content of his character, and not the color of his skin. It is not a perfect world today, but compared to what it was in my youth, it is a different, and much better one.

I hope my friend Carolyn's world is much better now, too.