via xkcd
I grew up in Williamsport, Md., a little town on the Potomac River, in the 1940s and 1950s, and was taught by my parents, teachers and Sunday school teachers to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
It was not so far south that expressing this opinion would have caused anybody to be run out of town, but I do remember many arguments in which the supposed clincher was, “Be honest, Phil. Would you want one of them to marry your sister?”
My answer was, “Well, if I had a sister, which I don’t, I wouldn’t want her to suffer all the grief she would have to go through if she married a Negro. But, if she really loved him, I guess I would still love her and respect her decision, as unwise as it probably would be.”
In truth, I thought the question was a red herring. I didn’t think interracial marriage would ever be common. I thought it was just a talking point to justify the denial of equal rights.
In the 1960s, in Hagerstown, Md., in the same county, I attended the marriage of my friend Jim Yeatts, who was white, to Georgianna Bell, who was black. A detective from the city police department sat in a police cruiser outside the church when the ceremony was performed.
That night the chief of police phoned the newspaper publisher, who was my employer, and informed him that I was among the guests. The phone call didn’t have any consequences. I mention it as an example of something that happened then that would be unthinkable now.
What was unthinkable then was same-sex marriage. If somebody had asked me a question about this back in the 1960s, I wouldn’t have known that they were talking about.