In the 1950s, Jim McFarland's grandmother took him on annual train trips from New York to see relatives in the South.
And it's time again for StoryCorps, Americans interview each other. We hear their everyday stories and every week we find out how amazing many of those stories are. Today, a story from Jim McFarland.
My grandmother used to take my brother and myself to the south every summer.
Jim McFarland grew up in New York, he had relatives in South Carolina and he was taken to see them regularly in the late 1940s and early 50s.
When we rode the train coming down from New York, when we got to D.C., we would get out of an integrated car. I thought this was the greatest thing that could ever have happened, because now I am in a car with all my people and they got a brown paper bag with the greasy chicken and sandwiches and we have a good time. When we got off the train, my grandmother would always have my brother and I use the bathroom. The bathrooms were marked colored and white. When I was young, I could read a C, but I didn't know the word colored, so she would say, Use one with the C on it, you can't use the one with a W.
When we went to the movies, we had to sit in a balcony. In New York as a child growing up, I always wanted to sit in a balcony, because the balcony was reserved for adults and people that smoke. When I used to get back to New York, the majority of the little brothers on my block had never been in South. And anyone would ask me, they'd say, boy, you see, what was South about? I used to tell them, man, I say, them bothers got it going on in the South. And they said what do you mean by that? I said, we got our own bathroom. We have our own water fountain. At that particular time, my grandmother would never tell us, the children, why she left the South for anything. Whenever I asked her about this thing called racism segregation, she would always tell me, Shh, we don't talk about that, that something we don't say.
It wasn't until I was 11 and that I realized what segregation was about that I told my grandma, I don't wanna go South anymore.
Jim McFarland, did return to the South 20 Years Later. He now lives in Atlanta where his story was recorded. His interview like all the others' will be archived at the Library of Congress. You can hear more of them and subscribe to the StoryCorps Podcast at npr.org.
Support for StoryCorps comes from AT&T with additional funding from the cooperation for public broadcasting.
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