I lived my first nine or ten years in Milwaukee, in the 1950s. The Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953 so I was caught up in baseball fever just like most boys my age. I was a big Eddie Mathews fan and I have vague memories of Hank Aaron's rookie season in 1954. One of my strongest memories, I think, was when I found out that Aaron had some difficulty buying a house in the suburb of Mequon because he was black. It was probably the first instance in my life where reality was at odds with what I was being taught in school about America and its ideals. I was utterly devastated, even at that age.
Sometime later in my grade school years, each of us in our class had to do some sort of report on a state in the US. I did mine on Delaware. I don't remember all the details, but in my research I discovered that interracial marriage was illegal in Delaware until the 1950s or 60s. Another shock. This wasn't even a state in the old Confederacy!
Several years later I was in the Army and we moved to the Washington, DC, area. This was the early 1970s. One of the jobs my wife had was as a computer programmer for a local retail business in downtown Washington. One episode she related to me was when the credit manager used a mailing address (as a proxy for race) to decline a credit application, without looking at the actual application.
I bring up these memories because when folks on the right talk about "taking the country back", I am not impressed. Take it to where? They seem to be yearning for a return to an America that never was. What happened to Hank Aaron occurred in the innocent and idyllic 1950s. When people are wishing for the better values of the past, are these the values they're talking about?
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