There was a time when I believed, almost as an article of faith, that with the passage of time, America would age out of racism. What in the world was I thinking?
But that is what I told myself in the fall of 1954 — five months after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision — when I learned that students attending then-all white Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Technical high schools in Washington, and several white junior high schools, had staged walkouts to protest the assignment of black kids to their schools. I was enrolled at Washington’s then-all-black Dunbar High School at the time.