This Week's Hottest Topic in the New and Washington

This week's hottest topic in the new and Washington, D.C, was the firing of a black government employee who was thought to have made racial comments regarding helping a white farmer.

Thesis: In the 50s, the average black person growing up in the city would attest to experiencing racism, today the face of racism has changed.

Born in the late 1950s in Washington, D.C., at a time when the civil rights movement was in high gear and Jews were leaving the city by the droves, I experienced racism at a very young age. I grew up in the slums of South East, D.C., where it seemed all black people were called colored. My parents migrated from South Carolina and struggled to raise nine children. My dad drove a taxi cab and my mom was a stay at home mom. As it was, my parents gave us lots of love and plenty of discipline.

As a child, my parents would take me and my siblings on outings around town, and I remember being fascinated by all the sights and people; mostly white people. I did not know racism, nor did I know exactly when I first became exposed to racism. However, I can recall an incident when I and my parents were on an outing and I wanted a drink of water from the water fountain. I headed for the fountain and my mother grabbed me; and I recall her telling me that I could not drink from that fountain. I did not know why, until later years, that there was a sign that read Whites Only and another sign that read Colored Only. I guess that was my first exposure to racism, but I was too young to know that.

In the late 1960s, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, I watched and experienced Washington, D.C., undergo a metamorphous. The city burned and the little drug store that I and my siblings visited every morning to buy such things as pencils and paper had burned to the ground. The laundry mat where we would go to do laundry was gone. My third grade teacher, who was White, was no longer teaching