I didn’t agree with the radio announcers who described Little Rock as a nice, clean Southern town, a place where my people and whites got along peacefully. City officials boasted there hadn’t been a Klan hanging of one of our people in at least ten years. They called our citizens forward-thinking because they were completing construction of the Strategic Air Command military base nearby that brought in lots of different races of people. But I didn’t think we were so progressive because I still couldn’t eat at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime, go to a movie unless I sat in the balcony,
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