with the family on vacation, and I saw poverty just from the roadway that I never imagined existed in America. I came from a blue-collar middle class neighborhood and was in the city of Baltimore on a regular basis, I went alone on the bus to pretty much every area of it (everywhere the bus went), and also was out in the boonies quite often as grandparents lived there... but I never saw anything like what the South was like then.
At first on the road trip, somewhere in Virginia, someone said something like, "wow, did you see that shack falling down over there with people actually living in it?!"... and then I gradually realized that this was not an unusual sight at all but the norm, as we saw the same thing time after time, after time, after time, for hundreds of miles -- pretty much the rest of the way to Miami ouside of the city areas, which weren't great either.
This was widespread poverty, on a scale and severity I had no idea was going on. The Southeast was nothing like the Northeast. I didn't understand everything about it, but it was clear to me after that, there were (at least) two different Americas... and not just to the level I had seen in the city and rural areas at home.
That was also the first time I saw facilities marked "white" and "colored". It may have existed somewhere at home, but I had never seen it before. I thought it was outrageously stupid.
The South scared me in 1962. I was shocked by it, in general.
I was too young to go that far alone to the March on Washington, but I was an avid news junkie even then, and it was covered live for hours on the local tv which I was glued to, beginning to end. Quite a bit of that video is now on Youtube, which I have watched numerous times, I still find it fascinating. (For one thing I'm always struck by how awfully young Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were, singing there.) More lawmakers were there than I remembered at the time, and so was Burt Lancaster among others whom I had forgotten too.
The first big racial "incident" I remember in the general area where I lived, was the desegration of Glenn Echo amusement park and the Buddy Deane show (depicted in Hairspray), but as I remember it that was a while after 1962-63. After the March there was so much action in the 60s the incidents began to run together in a blur. When I was in high school I'll never forget dozens of cities all over America burning down at the same time, and martial law in all those places. The 60s were no walk in the park.
I'm duly impressed by what Sen. Sanders and Danny Lyon (the photographer) and others like them, 5 to 10 years older than me, were doing in the early 60s. And no, as said in posts above, it was not the norm for white people then at all (putting it mildly, that came later), it was sticking one's neck out pretty darn far.
I'm pretty disgusted by those in the same movement then and since then who can't even acknowledge their contribution, and by those who benefit now from their actions then and since then, who can't even feel a tiny "thank you" in their hearts. It just goes to show the vast difference in people on the INSIDE -- that some are so big and some are so small -- and that's what matters to me.
https://dektol.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/john-lewis-bernie-sanders-what-is-the-truth/
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