My grandfather raised me, and his father had been a slave until age eighteen. That’s long enough to shape one’s way of thinking and pass it along for generations. Even after freedom, we were not free. We were lynched and beaten and mobbed and raped and burned out and stolen from and cheated and denied and degraded and humiliated and insulted and belittled and disrespected so much that we believed white folks were God’s chosen people. They had everything we wanted, it seemed. Even poor whites. At least they could go to town and be served. We had to watch our backs everywhere we went. We were
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