Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993 TAG: 9403090026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It does in Vidor, Texas.
This month, the last two black families moved from Vidor, a little town that refuses to become integrated.
Vidor is located in one of 36 east Texas counties under court order to desegregate public housing projects. Four black families moved to Vidor earlier this year, the first since the 1920s.
All four of those families have now left, unable to stand the racial harassment of their neighbors - the taunts, the epithets, the threats.
When the last family gave up and moved out, a local official conceded there were problems, but insisted the blacks had "not been exposed to conduct that is much different from what occurs in cities throughout the United States."
He's right, sad to say. But there are variations in intensity.
In Florida, two men have been convicted of kidnapping a black tourist from New York, soaking him with gasoline, then setting him on fire. Because he was black.
In Alabama, a woman recently disclosed that her dying husband had confessed to participating in a Ku Klux Klan murder of a black man 36 years ago.
Her revelation answered the questions of another woman who had wondered for decades why and how her husband died. But the Klan member's widow has been threatened for coming forward.
"I told her it was best to leave it alone," her minister told her. "It just opens up a can of worms."
That can of worms infests the heart of this nation still, whether we would face it or not.
America hasn't yet come to grips with the legacy of slavery, oppression, discrimination, hatred and prejudice. It has yet to face, for instance, the continuing impact of white flight on our cities and schools.
An impact that includes us, right here in Virginia, in our own neighborhoods where we live and bring up our children.
Does racism exist in America?
It has never gone away.
by CNB