Unearthing the Roots of Racial Inequity in America

As chance and ancestry would have it, my life as a White American began on White Street, at the end of the first week of May 1955, in the small town of Clinton, in DeWitt County, smack dab in the middle of the state of Illinois. Clinton was, on the day of my birth, a town of six thousand souls — all but a handful of them White people — hemmed in on all sides by freshly-turned soybean and corn fields. I was born under the skylights of the third-floor operating room in the old, red brick Dr. John Warner Hospital three doors east of the house that would be my home for the next eighteen years. By late May, the towering ancient apple tree in our backyard would be peppered with white blossoms and the lilacs alongside the garage would fill the air with their unmistakable fragrance. The giant weeping willow, the one behind the garage, the one I climbed so often in my boyhood, would be shaggy beneath its fuzzy coat of catkin flowers, not as flashy to mere human eyes as the lilacs and apple blossoms, but a feast for the bees. May can be a lovely month in central Illinois. <a href="https://medium.com/exploring-white-american-roots-digging-up/born-on-white-street-e3784495e425">Website</a>