Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Letter to the editor

I remember as a first-grader in Camden playing with the son of our one-day-a-week black maid. He was only another fun playmate of a different color. By the time I attended junior high school in Pine Bluff, though, black folks had somehow become sub-human, second-class citizens. And like most budding pubescent males in my kit and clan, I joined in the undeclared race war.

Then we moved to California.

I was confused: there were so many different shapes and colors of human beings, beginning with reddish-brown, to dark brown, to coffee with cream, to slate gray, to charcoal-I didn't know where to start discriminating.

But I continued to see really dark skinned blacks as unspoken "suspects," not to be trusted. Funny thing, however, having never known any Latin Americans, Phillipinos, Arabs or Jews, I was completely open to their company and friendship.

Being a late "Baby-Boomer" I had witnessed the struggles of blacks in the south led by Martin Luther King and had come to accept that it was morally wrong to dislike someone simply because of their skin pigmentation. But my lingering prejudice against blacks continued, despite my best efforts to "intellectualize" it away.

Then, on a sailing trip through the Caribbean, I ended up in a small port in Jamaica. My hotel owner, neighbors, meal-mates, church friends and casual acquaintances were all black.

Guess what? After three weeks, I no longer saw black people. I saw people-and they happened to be black.

John R. Bomar

Arkadelphia, AR