Archives yielded truths that grandparents wouldn’t

The only time I tried to directly interrogate my grandparents on race was in the early 1990s. Having learned about Greensboro’s importance in the civil rights movement from a class in college, I asked them what they remembered about the years of school desegregation and the Woolworth sit-ins. There followed a long pause, punctuated by the tick-tock of a half-dozen wind-up clocks….

“My people were fighting to preserve white supremacy [in the Patriots of North Carolina], but I never would have known about their efforts without digging through archives….”

— From “Hiding in plain sight” by David Neal at Scalawag (July 8, 2015) 

 

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