Do you remember Segregation?

  I know: weird question, right?  But it came up today on a friend's Facebook page, when he rhapsodised about an amusement part he went to as a boy-- an amusement park that was closed down when the 1964 Civil Rights bill would have required it be integrated henceforth.  

This freaked me out.  I grew up, you see, at the same time, but I spent my childhood in a suburb famous for its early integration...which, of course, I took for granted when I was a kid, because what you experience as a kid is "normal."

The first time I saw genuine segregation in real life (as opposed to television) was in 1969, visiting a girlfriend in Dearborn, Michigan.  My twin sister had come and all three of us went to a community pool.  My sister and I kept feeling there was something odd about the place.  Clean, fun and...well, odd.  But we couldn't figure out what was odd.  

And finally my sister hit on it:  "There are no black people here.  None at all."

Were we naive?  Of course we were!  But what you grow up with really <i>is</i> what you percieve to be "normal."  It never occured to us that our suburb was the abnormal place.

How about all of you?  Do you remember segregation in real life?  Or were blatant examples already passing from the stage by the time you took note of such things?  Share your story!

---AlextheKay, Naive Fellow