The John Crow Court

At the time, we thought it some quaint southern tradition. “You may ask, how did this tradition get started?” Tevye asks in Fiddler on the Roof. There are various unconfirmed explanations for this dead Southern on. A less charitable one I ran across decades later is that Wednesday afternoon was when shopkeepers allowed Blacks to enter through the back door to do their shopping. I took no notice at first. Friday on the overpass, a pedestrian couple walked by: a Black man holding hands with a white woman. Later, in the opposite direction, a white man holding hands with a Black woman. Both couples young. Only after they passed did it occur that the John Roberts Supreme Court (Justice Clarence Thomas and his white wife, Ginni, among them) mean to return the United States to a time when such relationships were criminal. And Blacks voting was prohibited and/or as risky. What happens now comes down to a simple choice, my fellow Americans. “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things.“