Barack Obama’s mention of his grandmother in his recent speech brought back some of my own family memories. A decade ago, my uncle pulled me aside and explained that the black horse in the Book of Revelations meant that black people were evil. Raised as a Mormon, Uncle H. wasn’t enough of a churchgoer to realize LDS doctrine regarding blacks changed in 1967.
My mother tells me my grandmother was also quite bigoted toward blacks. Grandma was a devout Lutheran and a gutsy lady who lived in an apartment in the Capital Hill area of Denver, and walked alone around downtown Denver until she was quite old. She wasn’t taken advantage of on the street, but in her church. By her white pastor, Charles Blair.
Grandma experienced a conversion in racial attitudes after she attended a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Seeing and hearing the Christian faith she loved preached from the mouth of a black man totally changed Grandma’s perception of black people.
Cal Thomas might cross the street to avoid black men, but Grandma was fearless when she took her nine-year-old granddaughter to the 16th Street Walgreens for an ice cream soda.
Capital Hill didn’t have the black population like Five Points. But this was before the reconstruction of Lower Downtown, so there were some bad neighborhoods nearby, though neither my parents nor my grandmother attributed the crime in these areas to skin color.
Things were different for me than they were for Grandma. In junior high the daughter of Boulder’s black Mayor Penfield Tate helped me overcome my fear of jumping hurtles when most of my PE teachers gave up on me. I dated a black man in college who was brilliant with computers and a born-again Christian.
Most people are cautious around gangs of any skin color. But while traveling in recent years to New York and Atlanta, I noticed white tourists approaching individual black men to ask for advice about which subway or Marta train to catch. I did likewise. I never saw people approach Wall Street bankers to ask directions.
My mother tells me my grandmother was also quite bigoted toward blacks. Grandma was a devout Lutheran and a gutsy lady who lived in an apartment in the Capital Hill area of Denver, and walked alone around downtown Denver until she was quite old. She wasn’t taken advantage of on the street, but in her church. By her white pastor, Charles Blair.
Grandma experienced a conversion in racial attitudes after she attended a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Seeing and hearing the Christian faith she loved preached from the mouth of a black man totally changed Grandma’s perception of black people.
Cal Thomas might cross the street to avoid black men, but Grandma was fearless when she took her nine-year-old granddaughter to the 16th Street Walgreens for an ice cream soda.
Capital Hill didn’t have the black population like Five Points. But this was before the reconstruction of Lower Downtown, so there were some bad neighborhoods nearby, though neither my parents nor my grandmother attributed the crime in these areas to skin color.
Things were different for me than they were for Grandma. In junior high the daughter of Boulder’s black Mayor Penfield Tate helped me overcome my fear of jumping hurtles when most of my PE teachers gave up on me. I dated a black man in college who was brilliant with computers and a born-again Christian.
Most people are cautious around gangs of any skin color. But while traveling in recent years to New York and Atlanta, I noticed white tourists approaching individual black men to ask for advice about which subway or Marta train to catch. I did likewise. I never saw people approach Wall Street bankers to ask directions.
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