Virginia

There was a small, rickety old church by the side of a local road near where I grew up. It had almost no parking spaces and was supported by a truss in the back where the hillside had eroded away -- i.e. not premium property. Occasionally we would drive by on Sunday mornings and see an amazingly large crowd of Black churchgoers -- mostly elderly -- and cars jammed in wherever they could find the space. Then, suddenly, one day it was gone. We later learned someone had burned it down. At the time (I was still in grade school) I was just thinking "vandalism" but later realized it was probably a hate crime.

Things were pretty segregated where I grew up -- not by law, but by custom and especially "redlining", most likely. We didn't know of a single Black family in our subdivision and I only ever saw two Black students in five years at the same school, so I just didn't know what sort of things Blacks put up with until I grew up and went to college, but in informed retrospect there were a lot of bad signs there.

Actually, my Dad's family lived in B'ham, but all that happened "over there" at "that church" to "those people", so even though it was national news we didn't hear much about it as kids. Had to read the history books to find out what happened just a short distance from relatives we visited fairly frequently.