Justice Clarence Thomas says blacks didn’t think about race in the 1950s South.

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Pre-Racial
Justice Clarence Thomas says blacks didn’t think about race in the 1950s South.
By Dahlia Lithwick

"we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school.”


Segregated drinking fountains in North Carolina in 1950.



"To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Ga., to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up. … Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them—left them out."



Students hold a sign reading "Woodlawn Boycott ... We hate niggers" in downtown Birmingham, Ala., after cutting classes at Woodlawn High School on Sept. 10, 1957. About 100 white students refused to go to school as integration tension plagued the city.



“The worst I have been treated,” Thomas went on to add, “was by Northern liberal elites.”

Sarah Jean Collins, 12, was hospitalized by a dynamite explosion set off in the basement of her Birmingham, Ala., church on Sept. 15, 1963, that killed her sister and three other girls as their Sunday school class was ending.



MORE:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/02/clarence_thomas_childhood_in_georgia_images_and_video_of_the_south_show.html