Word: selma
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Lessons in Selma...
...first lesson in Southern life came two weeks into the summer, in Selma. I had come to Selma to see Ted Dibble, a friend of mine from California who was spending the summer working for a welfare rights project in the Black Belt. On my way through Selma, I stopped at the Silver Moon Cafe to get some coffee...
...soon learned about another side of the Silver Moon. When I was in the cafe, I was a clean-cut white boy. When my friend was there, he was a "white nigger." The students working for the project had incurred Selma's hatred as "them boys livin' with the niggers over on First Street," and now they were instantly recognizable on the streets...
...friends and his workers already had all the strikes against them in Selma. They were surly looking, Northern-sounding students. They were living with militant blacks. They made weekly visits to the county welfare office and threatened to bring down the might of the Federal Government unless welfare officials stopped discriminating against Negroes. Selma, of course, had responded, doing everything it could to make the White Niggers--and the black ones too--uncomfortable when they came to town. "Your parents and your grandparents are gonna be so ashamed," they would hiss at the workers. "Someday they's gonna find...
After one visit to Selma, I was branded by association with my white nigger friends. After walking with six of them down the street, I found that I had joined the list of 'The hippies livin' with the niggers." I didn't find out about that, however, until I stupidly went in for a haircut to the Selma Barber Shop. I sat down, feeling like an innocuous white boy; I didn't realize what had happened until the barber had strapped me in and begun his lecture on the evils of liberalism, the North, and--most of all--long hair...