The Difference Makers

This is a dispiriting account of the life of a young Black male (circa WW II) growing up in Mississippi during the height of the Jim Crow era and attending segregated grammar and middle schools designed to “miseducate” Blacks. The first time he heard the N----- word was from the mouth of an American naval officer. The first White men he saw respecting his mother were escaped German Prisoners of War.

During the Cold War, the author was drafted into the army and sent to West Germany where the slogan was “to fight, if necessary, for the rights of free men in a free world.” Again he encountered Jim Crow and realized that he was prepared to fight for a freedom for others, that he did not really have. After being released from the army in 1963, the racial divide in America continued with an increase in the killing of Blacks and Whites involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the south. The author describes how all U.S. presidents from Lincoln to Lyndon Johnson grossly neglected their oath of office by allowing the Constitutional rights of Blacks to be violated and Blacks to be victimized by elected and government officials and federal, state and local government employees. Despite the criminal atrocities, the author's love for American never waned. He emerged from a small Mississippi delta town and later had the opportunity to meet two American presidents and several U.S. Attorneys General.