Gas Stations. Human Conscience. Birthday. Why Are There Three Bathrooms?

We were on a family trip from Iowa and drove through Texas.

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1964

It was 1957.

We stopped at a service station that had three bathrooms. One was marked Men, one was marked Women and one was marked Colored.

Even at 10, the truth of that third door slowly dawned on me.

I hadn’t fully processed the separation of races. But, to humiliate a group of people by making men and women share a bathroom, this I did understand.

By the time we moved to Texas two years later, there were no such stark humiliations.

But, there were also no African Americans in my school.

After the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954,  in an effort to head off the violence experienced in other cities, my Texas school district decided to begin integration at first grade, adding a year every year.

What About the Spics?

My husband once told me the story of a question he was asked when he went to school at Michigan State University, where we later met.

He was a Freshman and still had his deep Georgia accent.

An MSU student asked him, “You have three bathrooms in the South, right?”

“We used to,” he answered. “But, we don’t anymore.”

“Well, tell me,” his questioner continued. “Where did the Spics go?”

Ah, yes. Racism was alive and well in the North.

Why Is Martin Luther King, Junior Day the Third Monday of January?

I always admired Coretta Scott King for deciding to honor her husband’s birthday, January 15, instead of the day of his assassination.

I was in Washington, DC the day King was killed, April 4, 1968.

The city closed all the bridges to the city within hours, to prevent gangs from coming in to increase the violence already let loose in the city.

The city was put under martial law.

My husband’s Army unit in Oklahoma was put on alert in case they were called on to help control the city, but they were not brought in.

Why Were Photographers Important?

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, written April 16, 1963, King said,

“Injustice must be exposed…to the light of human conscience.”

I read a story once by a white photographer King had engaged to record the actions of police when demonstrators were demonstrating peacefully.

The police started to use batons on the demonstrators. The photographer put down his camera to try to stop the police.

King told him to pick up his camera. King later explained why to the photographer.

The police were doing what the police had always done. It was the photographer’s job to help people of conscience see what was happening.

Thank you, Reverend King for the love that shocked people of conscience.

Where were you when the country was desegregating?

Do you remember King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the March on Washington? 

Do your grandchildren know that schools were segregated in your lifetime?

To you and the love you teach your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, “Granny-Guru”

Click here to order my book, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

P.S. Click here to order this blog on your Kindle.

Related posts

• Autobiography of Gandhi

Share and Enjoy!


Read the original:
Why Are There Three Bathrooms?