Born in 1929, Gramps had grown up in Meridian, Mississippi, in the deep South—a place where first slavery and then segregation had had roots sunk deep. “He saw the way those black people were treated,” my mother told me, “and by the mercy of God, he knew it was wrong.” She quoted to me and my siblings the same verses that her father had quoted to her and her siblings: One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you, because God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. In the eyes of the law, all must be
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