Well you know the thing about when people present slavery is they also forget that very often, I forget which poet said it but we wear the mask. So there was some grinning and bowing and scraping and all of that and “yes sir, master” and all of that. But that, much of that was a mask. Behind that people were doing what they could to keep their children safe.
You know for example some say that sometimes an enslaved woman might chastise her child so that the overseer wouldn’t whip them. Similarly, when we go to the era of Jim Crow, I think an untold story is how often Black parents shielded their children from humiliation. They would say, maybe be in town and the child say, not knowing, you know I want to have an ice cream and say, knowing that they would have to go to the back or be denied altogether.
And the parent would say, oh when we get back home Mr. Jones down the street, his ice cream is much better. Matter of fact, I didn’t realize until I was doing my book on King that when I was going south to visit my parents’ relatives that that was during the time of Jim Crow. And my sister as I said who’s four years older, I said Nelda, I don’t remember the water fountains. She said don’t you remember we never went to town? We stayed in Granddaddy’s community so my parents spared me the back of the bus. The spared me the colored water fountain.