So much of what you describe back then, Azizi, was just taken for granted. People didn't discuss it, because seemingly it had just "always been that way".

The small towns I grew up in and lived in in Ontario and New York during my youth were white. All-white. You virtually never saw a black person. The only place one tended to see black people or encounter them was in the larger urban centers...(like Syracuse, when I was living in central New York State, for example). The attitude was not good. Small-town white people would have been afraid to go into a black neighborhood and they just didn't. Period. Black people didn't tend to go into the white neighborhoods. The places one encountered those of different race were downtown areas, and people of different race didn't talk to each other...much. At least, put it this way, they didn't casually socialize. Not at all.

There was a lot of fear there, under the surface, but mostly it was just like 2 completely different worlds, and people simply took that for granted.

That's the situation I remember from when I was a kid and an adolescent. The one black person I knew at that time was Reynolds Winslow. He was a designer, and he worked for my father for a few years in his design office in the late 60's. Reynolds was a smart guy, very articulate, very well dressed, and good at his job. He had that neat sort of well-groomed look you see Sidney Poitier usually depicting in the movies he did in the 60's.

It wasn't until I moved to Toronto in '69 that I found myself in a situation where all different races of people were meeting and socializing together pretty freely. It certainly was different that way from small-town New York State.