Friend of Liberty (cont.)

Perhaps I should explain . . . where we were, when this was, why this girl’s appearance in my world startled me so deeply.

The place was the housing provided for the workers at the Lexington Cement Mill on the outskirts of Osborne, a small town in northern Illinois. If it hadn’t been for the dusty, noisy mill, our surroundings would have been parklike, a few houses scattered on a wide expanse of lawn bordered on one side by the mill, on another by a farmer’s cornfield—the land rented from the mill—and on two others by deep woods rising out of the Burgundy River Valley.

The time was 1950. That’s important, that the time was 1950, the exact center of the 20th century. Just the year before, a British historian had said of our country, “America stands astride the world like a colossus.” We in our small Midwestern town actually didn’t stand astride much of anything, but if we had heard those words, we would certainly have agreed with them. We were Americans. We were the best!

To us, part of being “the best” in 1950 meant being white. And we all were. Me. My family. Our neighbors. Everyone we knew. In 1950, not a single African-American lived in the tri-city community of Lafayette-Pearson-Osborne.