I remember drinking from a water fountain in 1964 in a bus station in Columbia, South Carolina with a sign above it that read “Colored Water”. We had just arrived and were waiting to be met by my father who had gone ahead of us to prepare a place to live, as he had been sent to Ft. Jackson to train troops.

When I first read it, I thought, “I wonder what color it is?”

I knew nothing about racism in America, as we had been living overseas in the Canal Zone for the past three years, where it wasn’t an issue, and I had been attending the school on post at Ft. Davis with other little children of all races.

Needless to say, everyone in the area watched me with some consternation, even dismay, as I walked up and took a Good, LONG Drink. My Mom, too, was clueless at first, and upon realizing the disruption I seemed to be causing, she hurriedly and somewhat urgently told me to return to my seat beside her.

And that was my first encounter with racism in the land of my birth, from which time, I saw it and learned of it wherever we went in the States. I have never shaken the feeling of how so many of my classmates could so easily, so readily hate another little boy or girl simply because they weren’t white; and I’ve never shaken the disgusted, sick feeling it gave me, the first time I heard one white boy call a black boy “nigger” – a word I hate to this day, regardless of whether it’s Jay Z or M&M using it.

America has grown. She’s gone through some changes.

It’s just been a sad journey in so many respects to see a country that holds so much potential held back and dragged down by concerns that don’t amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things and by people, black and white, who seem unwilling to admit and acknowledge that we all bleed red and there’s no good excuse for not uniting as one people to make this country greater than She’s ever been.

Things were getting exponentially better between the black and white races by the 1970s, even with the implementation of affirmative action [a bit of backdoor reverse discrimination], but with Obama’s administration, the old fires of racial hatred were stoked to a blazing blue hot fever pitch and Biden’s regime has poured gasoline on it, to the point of making it open season on white people by any black with a real or imagined grievance.

During one of the most famous and admired orations of all time, Dr Martin Luther King spoke of ‘the fierce urgency of now’ that compelled him to call for social justice

Until people start living by the Golden Rule and actually paying more than lip-service to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on “judged by the content of one’s character and not the color of one’s skin“, the words E Pluribus Unum will continue to mean nothing and we will continue to experience terrible, horrifying acts of violence and civil strife and upheaval in America.

There is a problem within the hearts of far too many Americans, and it is serving our enemies from within and their agenda for the total destruction of traditional America.

Teach Your children well. In that one thing, perhaps there remains a few grains of hope.

February 14, 2024

Justin O. Smith ~ Author

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.