Local View: Not everyone shakes off being raised racist We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Written By:
David McGrath | ×
Racism was as integral a part of our lives in the 1960s as baseball, Mickey Mouse, TV westerns, and vacations at the lake.
I grew up in a white, suburban, middle-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, just like the town where Dick and Jane lived in our elementary-school readers: No African-Americans. The only ones I knew about were Major League Baseball players who my uncles mocked at family parties and backyard barbecues. So I grew up thinking that Larry Doby was a terrible player. When one of my brothers dropped a ball, we called him Larry Doby. The same Doby who is in baseball’s Hall of Fame.