And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an … - Isabel Wilkerson

He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, ‘What kind of god they got up inside that church?

Johnson devoted an entire section to racial etiquette on the highway. “When driving their own cars,” he wrote, “they were expected to maintain their role as Negros and in all cases to give whites the right-of-way.” He later added, “If there is any doubt about whose turn it is to make a move in traffic, the turn is assumed to be the white person’s.

Ignorance is no protection from the consequences for inaction.