America's grappling with racial and ethnic differences has not been its finest hour. Nineteenth century New Yorkers hated Irish immigrants and made certain that Jews were confined to the squalor of lower eastside neighborhoods. Southern states produced what became, post-Civil War, a Jim Crow regime. Leafy suburbs in the North and Midwest often enough were governed by real estate restrictions: no colored, no Jews.

 

As for Native Americans, the Trail of Tears tells it all, despite the novel idea that Andrew Jackson wanted to protect the Cherokees from actual Americans who were busy fulfilling what they took to be their divine vocation to seize dominion over the earth.

 

American history as taught in the grammar schools and even the high schools I attended in the 1940s and early 1950s did not tell the real story about either African Americans or Native Americans. Little was said about the Holocaust as anti-Semitism remained an active bacterium in the national bloodstream.

 

Brief mention was made of various Indian wars and how poor Gen. Custer sacrificed his life to make the West safe for white folks. Abraham Lincoln was praised for emancipating slaves, but nothing was mentioned about the cruelty that the thoroughly defeated white South unleashed upon black folks for a full 100 years after the end of the War Between the States.

 

My limited exposure to Native Americans came from repeated reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," cowboy and Indian movies and two or three Potawatomi men who hitched rides hobo-like on the freight trains that ran through our little village.

 

The first Jewish person I came to know -- and that was before I had ever heard the words "Jew" and "Jewish" -- was a kid in my first-grade class at what was once Royal Oak, Michigan's Longfellow School. He lived in Huntington Woods, an adjacent suburb that was then part of the Royal Oak school system.

 

I cannot for the life of me remember his name, but I was once invited to his home for lunch. Our sandwiches were served by an African-American woman in a maid's uniform typical of the times: little white head-piece, white apron and a black dress. My friend's father came into the room and intoned something that seemed like the grace before meals that was said in my own home. I had no idea that it was a Hebrew text -- not yet even knowing the word "Hebrew." However, the language became of first importance to me by the time I reached graduate school as have any number of close Jewish friends.

 

The first black-skinned person I knew by name was the day-shift doorman at the long-gone Hotel Tuller in Detroit in which an aunt of mine lived for 50 years and in the lobby of which she ran a flower shop. Mr. Bailey was his name. He was -- or seemed to me to have been -- well above six feet tall and presided over the elaborate entrance to the hotel with the demeanor of a royal guard. I wanted to be like him and to wear the nifty livery proper to his office.

 

I did not understand for some years why it was that he was not allowed to take his lunch in the hotel's cafeteria. Also I could not figure out why he had to walk all the way around to a back door of the building to use a 2x4 toilet when the fancy public ones were just inside the lower lobby fewer than 30 feet from where he worked.

 

Then there were the two Pullman sleeping car porters -- both African Americans, of course -- whose small kingdoms-on-wheels brought up the rear of the passenger trains that stopped in our tiny northern Michigan village every day but Sunday. The one was a Mr. Pooler, the other a Mr. Handy -- though I noticed in due course that they both were called "George" by people who knew them and those who didn't. It was later explained to me that most sleeping car porters were then called "George" because that was the first name of the founder of the Pullman company. And what difference did it make in the first place?

 

Their runs originated and terminated in Chicago, and I envied their urbanity, not to mention the crisp white jacket uniform with silver-colored buttons, which they wore along with their black caps. One day Mr. Handy slipped a paper sack to me just as the train was pulling out of the station. In it was a Pullman porter's cap. I wore it on and off throughout most of my boyhood to the astonishment of a whole lot of people.

 

In due course, I was off to a small, liberal arts college that, at the time I matriculated as a freshman, had about 1,200 students. Through my entire four years (1957-1961) I think there were but three African Americans on campus -- all male: Jim Waller, Bill Bright and Harry Montgomery.

 

This was true about each of them: They were possessed of far more social polish than I; each had come from a high school far better rated than my own; each basked in a general popularity that neither I nor many of my white classmates ever enjoyed. Waller, I think, was from Jackson; Bright from Highland Park; Montgomery from Battle Creek -- three Michigan cities that were then still happy places to live and have one's being.

 

Montgomery was president of my graduating class and widely admired. It occurred to me maybe a year or two ago that he conducted himself in speech and manner as would a man born two months after we graduated from college and who is now coming to the end of his second term as President of the United States.

 

I took all those limited experiences with me into graduate school and on into the ordained ministry of the Episcopal Church. I began that work in a downtown Detroit church three weeks prior to the uprising of suppressed African Americans in that city and the violence wreaked on its minority population mostly by white police and military personnel -- a preview of what occurs too often even now.

 

That July 1967 tumult claimed at least 43 lives and probably half again that number whose deaths went unreported. The first social issue to arise following what still -- inaccurately -- is called "the riot" was that of open housing. Real estate covenants were widespread in the city even after the white exodus wore paths out to the suburbs and beyond. Some of the reaction to the cancellation and later banning of such restrictions elicited a subtler Northern version of "Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"