One warm summer day in the 1950s, when I was about four years old, our family drove the 25 miles from our small East Tennessee town to shop at the Sears Roebuck store in Knoxville. My most vivid memory from that “big city” excursion was seeing the two drinking fountains in Sears: a refrigerated one with a big “whites only” sign and a smaller, non-refrigerated bubbler labeled “coloreds.” I am grateful for my parents’ efforts so many years ago to help their very young child comprehend this injustice.
