Like you say, I really hope all Americans can learn to embrace all their citizens including their newly elected president.

I had two routes by which to get to the University where I was finishing my B.Sc.: one was along the main road into campus (lots of car exhaust and not that pretty), and the second option wound it’s way through the beautiful and quiet campus golf course. So which one did I take every day for 2 years? The main road! The reason being that I had to go through two blocks of poor African American houses and every time I went through there with Josh we had people (adults and children alike) yelling some pretty frightening racially motivated threats and slurs at us! Not something a white girl from Canada had ever experienced before.

When I first moved down there I passed out resumes and took the first job I could get: waitressing at a nice little seafood restaurant. I was shocked when my boss cornered me in the back and asked: “What are the niggers on table # X ordering?”. When the roof started leaking, his response was that he was “going to get his niggers out to fix it”. He never called African American’s that to their faces (as far as I know), but every time they weren’t within earshot he trotted it out. And he never hired anyone but white folks and said very proudly that he never would.

We noticed a lot of segregation down there: sororities/fraternities on campus, grocery stores, churches, etc. Josh and I went to Atlanta to renew my Green Card and so I picked out the biggest mall I could find on the map that was not to far off of the route we were taking back home thinking that if you go to a big city, you ought to at least go shopping. Little did I know it was an African American only mall. We wandered around looking at stuff and then realized that we were the only white people in the whole mall. Not only were we were followed by a group of young men the entire time we were in there, but not a single salesperson would help us. Needless to say the ‘groupies’ didn’t leave us feeling very comfortable and we soon left.

One stunning moment involved the Army base that Josh was stationed out of: technically we were posted to Fort Rucker, Alabama, but in reality we lived and he worked at Troy, AL which is about 50 miles North of the base. Fort Rucker is an army air support base: they train all the army pilots and air traffic controllers there. To help give the student pilots they flood the area with somewhere to fly, they staff several satellite airports in the area Troy being one of them. We found out that the army will not post an African American to one of the other satellite posts because that town doesn’t want them there. Not only that, we learned that the Army had been forced to remove African American soldiers posted there in the past for their own safety (threats, fires, assaults, etc.).

I also found it rather interesting that the two universities that I attended down there did have great race ratios among their employee numbers. What the numbers didn’t tell you was that the African American worked in two capacities: the women cleaned the buildings and the men cut the lawns. There were four exceptions that I found: one white janitor and three African professors-they were from actual Africa). The U. of Alabama at Tuscaloosa gave out it’s first Ph.D. to an African American student. Pretty telling when you consider that University has been in existence since before the Civil War.

These are not isolated incidents in our 3 and 5 years down there: I could go on and on with stories like this.

I hope that all Americans can learn to embrace all their citizens especially the president that they have now elected.