I was telling a white friend about my great-grandfather, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and college professor who began his career in the 1890s, when her face wrinkled in puzzlement.
“Was he married to a white woman?” she asked.
Stunned, I stammered, “No,” and explained that in South Carolina—where laws prohibiting intermarriage dated back to the 1700s—it might have cost him his life just to have gazed too long in a white woman’s direction.
Our conversation was decades ago, but I still sometimes marvel at how little my friend knew of Black history, and how her ignorance (there’s no other word for it) fueled the incredible assumption that a Black man could have made something of himself only by marrying a white woman. Though I tried to explain, I’m not sure she understood that African Americans like my great-grandfather
