I have trouble remembering my life in the segregated 1950s and 60s.  People who are half my age and less must think of those times as just so many cowboy and Indian stories.

I saw movies at the Indian Chief Movie Theater next to the courthouse in Saluda.  Colored people or niggers as they were routinely called could only sit in the small balcony in hard seats.  I sometimes ate in Frank Hite’s cafe with its twin doors; the right hand side was for colored people.  None of my classmates from the class of 1967 were African-American.  I lived in a racially divided world.

Racial division exploded with the big city riots of the mid-1960s.  Segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond championed the benefits of separate but equal.  The modern racist Republican party was born to thwart the work of LBJ and MLK.

The leading segregationist of the era was Alabama’s Governor George Wallace.  He is back in the form of President Trump.

I broke out of my childhood bubble at about twelve and adopted the cause of MLK as mine.  My world view was formed in the fervent belief that all humans are equal and much more alike than different.

For me reliving the re-popularization of racial division is painful.  The new segregationists are feeding the beast that led to the Civil War and pulled our country apart in my youth.  Trump is their momentary triumph.

His revival of racism will continue to  wake me up at night and darken my life but it will fade.  Racism and segregation is a walk backwards and young people will not see the attractiveness of the modern Republican’s revival.  They will walk forward.

Trump’s legacy will be the giant tear in the fabric of our country that will take the death of his–my–generation to repair.   Racism could re-emerge but the possibly of its thriving in the twenty-first century as a popular political expression in the United States is likely impossible.

My hope is that as we come to repairing the big rip created by President Trump’s election  a more unified country will emerge.