I am 39 at this writing, so I was about two and a half in 1961. I was barely old enough to be trusted near the TV, which was the prized luxury item in the house. I was so proud that I could reach the big knobs on the console TV and click them to my favorite cartoons.

I turned one day to a program I found quite strange. I saw a bunch of people walking down the street, holding signs. It looked like a parade, so I stopped a second. There was also crowds of people that were angry and yelling at the sign carrying people. The people in the "parade" were trying to ignore them, but they looked scared, and the police were all around, keeping the angry crowd back.

Something struck me at that age as particularly noticeable.... The sign carrying people in the parade, most of them looked like my aunts and uncles, members of my family. It was probably the first time I saw other black people on TV. Maybe they were not supposed to be on TV, thats the problem, I thought.

I yelled for my Mom to come, and I asked her what kind of show this was. She just said, "Change the channel sweetie, let's find some cartoons," as she clicked the knobs, "you gonna have plenty of time to find out what that is about."

I later saw more of it, and eventually learned about the civil rights marches that blacks and whites conducted in the deep south, the fire hoses and attack dogs, and I spent years of my childhood of fighting off that little kid's feeling that there must be something really wrong with the sign carrying people....the white crowd can't be angry for nothing.

The angry crowd looked like the good guys. I just could not reconcile why people who looked like me would want to put themselves in harm's way like that. Why would you go where you are not wanted? I would be very nervous when we when out shopping, because it took us out of our neighborhoods, and we were surrounded by large crowds of whites.

The suspicion that they may turn on us at any moment, like on TV. Its in perspective to look back on it now, but that was the impressionable years when kids believe in Santa and magic, and the good guys were Roy Rogers and John Wayne. It was engraved in my psyche that there might be some inherently wrong with me. In all friendly debates on race with friends that happen to be white, when we reach an impasse of sorts, when I am told that I am not personally affected by race matters because I "made it" out of the innercity, and are living a middle class life, I just have to temper my feelings that were expressed a few years back in a popular T-Shirt: "It's a Black Thing, you just don't understand."