No lie can live forever

When this speech (see below) was being made, I was in my last year of high school - a high school of 3,000 plus students with 5 black kids in the whole place. Two were physician's kids, the third that I knew was a trombone player in the band and the drum major. Our band director actually received threats when the Daniels kid was given the position and several parents wouldn't let their kids be in the marching band if it were led by a black.  Just sayin'.

I don't think we quite got what King was saying.  Most of us thought that the South was some sort of weird alter-nation made up of guys with short haircuts and overalls. It was a place that had colleges where, if you couldn't get into a northern school, you went as sort of a purgatory for the dumb, a perpetual "Waterboy" movie set where people actually did eat snakes for dinner.

The nation needed a King who had a vision of things better for a lot of folks who were without a snowball's chance in hell of any betterment. Poll taxes, literacy tests, voter registration offices open for 5 minutes a month, stuff like that...just basic fundamentals denied.  I sometimes didn't think he was such a hot leader and I sure wasn't aware that Hoover the FBI were after him and a lot of what we were told about him was "inspired" by this so our view was full of misinformation leaked on purpose.  I was wrong.

In 1959 my brother was sent to a military academy in Georgia (my parents had thrown up their hands) and we drove down to visit him.  I was 12.  We stopped at a Howard Johnson restaurant in Atlanta for lunch and it was hot and I made a bee-line to the water fountain.

"Whatcha' doin there boy"?
"Getting a drink mister"?
"I say, whatcha' doin there boy"?
"Getting a drink sir".
"I say can't you read boy? That fountain's for niggers only. White's fountain is over there".
"I don't understand sir"? (I was always taught to be polite)
"Whites don't drink from the nigger fountain. We drink from o'r 'chere".