A change is gonna come BY AL DIAMON

I was raised in the south.

It was the 1950s. The civil-rights movement was just getting started. Nobody in my fourth-grade class considered it unusual when our teacher told us racial segregation was the "natural" state of humanity. "Colored people are happier among their own kind," she said. I believed her. I had no reason not to. After all, there weren’t any "colored people" in my class. Or my school. Or the middle-class suburb where I grew up.

I was raised in the south.

Black people lived in run-down neighborhoods in the nearby city. Of course, back then, we didn’t call them black. In polite conversation, we said "Negro" or "colored." In less-genteel settings, such as when my friends and I were talking among ourselves, we used a different word. It was our most common insult. And even among adults who wouldn’t have considered uttering that particular epithet in public, polite conversation could take a nasty turn. A neighbor once told my mother she and her husband had moved their family to our town because "there’s no chance of coloreds moving in next door." And there wasn’t.

I was raised in the south.

It wasn’t as if we never saw any black people. They came on the bus from the city every day to clean our houses, mow our lawns, empty our garbage cans. Then, in the evening, they went back to where they were happier, among their own kind. My mother was what passed for a liberal on racial matters, so she insisted our cleaning lady eat lunch with us. The cleaning lady never spoke unless spoken to. Even when addressed directly, she rarely uttered more than a word or two. Once, I asked her if the reason her palms were pink was because she’d worn the color off scrubbing our floors. That time, she didn’t answer at all.

I was raised in the south.

There were poor whites in my town. Some of them lived in run-down houses without electricity, plumbing or glass in the windows. Their kids came to school dressed in rags. They had lice. They hadn’t had breakfast. They were white, so we were embarrassed by them for failing to meet the minimum standards of our race. We weren’t embarrassed by poor blacks, because they were the way they were supposed to be.

All that was long ago. Things have changed. There was a march for civil rights in the city during my junior year in high school. I didn’t march. Nobody I knew did. Nobody I knew even went to watch. There was another small protest my junior year in college. A high school in the city was holding its senior prom at a whites-only club. A black student objected. Her mostly white classmates voted overwhelmingly against changing the location. The NAACP organized a picket line outside the prom, a move the local newspaper termed "excessive."

These demonstrations must have had some impact, because things began to change a little. Today, African-Americans and all kinds of immigrants can live in the town where I grew up, right next door to white people. Although, that doesn’t happen very often. Maybe it’s because they’re still happier among their own kind. Or maybe it has something to do with a survey last year by a local legal-rights group that showed landlords in the area didn’t return calls from potential renters who sounded black or foreign. There was a story about it in the same newspaper that once found picket lines excessive.

Still, some blacks have managed to move to the suburbs. Just last year, in a town not far from the one where I grew up, a black student, while riding home on the school bus, was allegedly subjected to racial slurs and references to the Ku Klux Klan. In another nearby city, a school-bus driver came up with a novel method of avoiding a similar situation. He refused to allow a black immigrant on his vehicle, telling him he’d have to take a different bus with others of his kind. Probably thought the kid would be happier.

In 2003, an African-American woman who writes a column for a local weekly paper noted how just a few miles outside the largest city in the state, adults still used the word "colored," and teenagers associated blacks with pimps, hustlers and drug dealers. And right in the city, the columnist was accosted by a white stranger, who called her by that same ugly word we used as kids. Around that time, a white-supremacist group leafleted suburban neighborhoods, blaming Jews and non-whites for the destruction of the World Trade Center.

I was raised in the south.

To be specific, I was raised in South Portland.

In Maine. Where most people act as if the events we commemorate on Martin Luther King Day don’t have much relevance. "There’s no racial discrimination around here," they say. "All that stuff happened somewhere else." The folks who say that are always white. The "somewhere else" is always a long way to the south.

But I wasn’t raised in that south.

It just seems that way.

Comments from all points of the compass may be e-mailed to me at ishmaelia@gwi.net