Since there are few blacks in Korea, this news didn’t really have any effect on me until I came back home, but by then it was old news. Hard to imagine, after it had been such a big issue for several years before that.

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I was baptized in September 1978 (I had been 8 a few months). Another 8-year-old, an African-American boy, was baptized the same day.

I wish I could remember exactly if he was baptized by his father or by another ward member. My memory wants to tell me that he was baptized by his father, which probably would have been a hugely historic moment for that part of the US.

The 1978 revelation was never directly discussed in our home until we were all in college (in the 1990s). There was also no discussion of racism, etc. My parents wouldn’t have been the types to have dwelt on it much — my mother was probably sheltered from exposure to black people. My father, on the other hand, often recalls the fact that he was one of the few white people in his neighborhood in Michigan when he was in grad school in the 1960s.

I really wish I had been knowledgeable of the events of the time, but I was a bit young.

As a side note, Joseph Freeman is currently a Bishop in our stake (in SLC, UT).

My family lived in Montgomery before the bus boycott (though that was before I was born). My mother was a civil rights sympathizer, though none of her family were. She loved William Faulkner, who had a genius to show people as they really are, incluing many black and female characters such as those in “Intruder in the Dust” or “The Unvanquished”. I guess from reading him, and Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, and other writers my mom thought seriously about how things were then in the South and in our country, and realized something was badly wrong.

Back then everyone rode the bus, white and black, and most families had only one car. She told me how the white bus drivers would make a game of insulting and belittling blacks. She said she had seen more than once an African American woman running to catch the bus only to get right to the door and have it slammed in her face. The woman would likely have been working all day in some white family’s house, often hard manual labor like scrubbing floors, and missing this bus would mean a long weary wait for the next one.

Another thing they did was leave the movable signs separating the white from black section far toward the back, even if the blacks behind the sign were standing on top of each other and there were many empty seats in the white section in the front. All these things used to make my mother angry. She was a young mother then and didn’t realize she should speak up and take responsibility for things like that, so she fumed in silence. When the boycott finally came she was delighted to see it happen.

Much later I watched a PBS series “Eyes on the Prize”, and became fascinated with the history of the Civil Rights movement. So much of it happened right here in my hometown. I drove downtown after one episode and looked at the A.G.Gaston Motel still there where MLK miraculously survived a bomb blast, Kelly Ingram Park where black children protesters were set upon by guard dogs and fire hoses, and the 16th St. Baptist Church where the four little girls were killed by a bomb. Everyone should come to Birmingham and see this stuff! We have the Civil Rights Institute now and a statue to MLK. Like Diane Nash said, it was just regular people, who decided they’d had enough, so with God’s help and amazing courage and fortitude, they just did it. It didn’t take a charismatic leader to get it started. Just plain old ordinary people.

I remember in my youth, how bad things were then. I remember our unfair, unjust, violent, sad two-tiered society. By God’s grace and the grace and courage of all the civil rights protesters, our society was spared an endless Palestine-type or Northern Ireland-type violent struggle. We’ve come so far. And it was done simply by ordinary people standing up for what’s right. I feel so inspired whenever I think about it or study it. We can do the same thing now! Why do we think the work is over? There’s so much left to be done.

John f., that’s an interesting thought that hadn’t occurred to me. But I doubt that’s it, as I had only been out 8 months at that point. I think I meant that the second coming was soon at hand. I remember my bishop telling me I would definitely be alive when the Savior returned, and recall that this was back in the days when a lot of Saints assumed it was going to happen in the year 2000 (Y2K indeed). So I think I saw millennial significance to the revelation.