She added, “You have a very deep fear…you stay in your place. You knew your place as a Black person—I’m using the word ‘Black,’ but we were called Negroes. You just knew there were things you could and could not do and you didn’t have freedom. I didn’t have a feeling of freedom that we could accomplish or achieve. It made you—I don’t want to say less than a person, or less than a human…” She paused. “I used to have a really, really bad inferiority complex.” This fear extended out into every facet of my grandmother’s life. She told me how, because they lived in the rural South, they did not
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