I spent a very interesting evening recently with a young lawyer who had grown up in a small town in Georgia. Our conversation quickly got around to the integration problem and he told me that growing up where he had, he could not help but be exposed to anti-Negro sentiment. Yet this man had the situation in perfect perspective. I asked him how his attitudes on the matter had been developed. He said "Civil rights and race relations didn't concern me until one Saturday night when I was about 16 years old." He was working in his fathers store and he looked out at the throngs of milling tenant farmers, white and Negro who congregated in the town square, a rural southern Saturday ritual. The man said "I looked at the Negroes and asked myself how many I'd like to have in my home. The answer was none - – they were too dirty, too different, too poor, too smelly. But then,” he continued, "I looked at the white sharecroppers and decided that for the same reason, I wouldn't want to associate with them either. That was the moment I realize that the problem of human relations had no basis in race or color but rather, in the condition of the people. That's when I saw that there wouldn't be any real progress in human relations until the human conditions have been improved.” Pretty tall thoughts for a 16-year-old boy. Tall and true. Until such time as we can solve the terrible problems of human suffering the world over, we can never come to true interracial harmony.
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