is hard to Google him up) who
moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his
early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan
violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"),
including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of
terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in
which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion,
unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where
I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement,
including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination,
with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and
blondeNorwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her
summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how
she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas
cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at
night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights
activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained
acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member
of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who
was then studying at