1. 1948
Although I was born and reared in Washington, DC, I was about ten years old before I knew about segregation. Georgetown Day School, which I attended, was the only non-segregated school, public or private, in the city, and we children grew up color blind. As another former pupil put it decades later, "I could see that some kids looked different from others, but I thought this just happened in families. Like my family happened to have all boys, while other families had both boys and girls or all girls. The luck of the draw, I thought." He was asking me to verify our obliviousness to race because his wife didn’t believe him. I was not surprised, because nobody believes me, either.

We children found out about segregation one Saturday afternoon when a few of us tried to go to a movie. We didn’t understand why the manager said that some of us could go in but others not — we showed him that we all had the money to buy tickets. He did not hesitate to tell us why.

2. 1954
Georgetown Day did not have a high school at that time, so I attended the public one, Wilson, as a member of the class of 1955, which was the last segregated class. When the Supreme Court decision was announced, a few of us invited students from Dunbar, a black high school, to discuss it. Our principal got wind of this plan and forbade us to hold the meeting, adding that under no circumstances were we to call the newspapers.

Until he said that, it had never occurred to us to call the newspapers. We were soon on the telephone, telling reporters that we were not allowed to hold the gathering at Wilson, but that they could meet us at Dunbar, which had reciprocated our invitation. (One of the first things I did when I went to work at The Washington Post, four years later, was to go into the library files and copy the photograph of that meeting.) Afterwards, we knew that our principal would be angry, but we three young ringleaders were rattled when he told us, "None of you will ever get into college if I have anything to say about it." But apparently he didn’t, because one of the others went to Harvard, one to Swarthmore and I went to Wellesley.

3. 1963
The day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech was an all-leaves-canceled day for The Washington Post, where, as another reporter once described our approach to mass events, "We don’t just cover a story; we surround it." I was too excited to wait for my shift, and in the morning, a neighbor kindly took us in his boat to observe the march from along the Potomac. We wanted to show our support for the cause, but thought it might be in questionable taste to accept one of those banners demanding fair jobs and hang it over the side of a yacht. Then I reported for work, and my husband, to his eternal regret, also went off to work, at his laboratory. As a conscientious reporter, I threaded my way through the crowd, marveling at how polite everyone was. When I got to the Lincoln Memorial, I noticed that there was an empty seat on the platform. After it became clear that no one was going to claim it, I quietly moved up. The surrounding dignitaries smiled, and one of them removed the chair’s placard, which said "Roy Wilkins," so I could sit down. Warmth and toleration were so much the order of the day that they even enveloped the press, and its least important representative at that.

We used to talk about journalism providing "a front-row seat at history." That day, for me, it literally did.

My memory of desegregation goes back to the Eisenhower years when the president sent federal troops to Little Rock to protect the black children going to a formerly all-white school. And then we had the Kennedy years when more federal troops had to abet the desegregation of schools and James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi. I also have vivid memories of segregation. I grew up in Phoenix, AZ, which had segregated schools and movie theaters. Negroes, as they were called, had to sit in the balcony. I used to go to the movies with our housekeeper and sit with her up in "the crow’s nest." I’m ashamed to say that I loved being with her up in the balcony and saw nothing wrong with it as a seven-, eight- and nine-year old. At 13, I became a radical anti-segregationist and fought with my father every time the subject came up. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most thrilling figure of my lifetime and I consider it a great privilege to have lived through the civil rights movement in this country.

I was raised by wonderful black men and women in Ft. Worth, TX, when the drinking fountains were marked “Colored” and “White.” From the very beginning of my life I couldn’t help noticing the way the people I loved best, who seemed to love me the best, were pushed around, derided and kept “in their place.”

I wrote about all of this in my memoir Natural Blonde and how I was out of step in my own middle-class life because I kept privately battling to change things, to change my father’s prejudices, to change my mother’s racist gentility. At the University of Texas I marched to get blacks admitted, not even to the university but to its graduate school. (We were arguing that they could not get a “separate but equal education” elsewhere in Texas!)

So I was cheering for Martin Luther King from the beginning. But I haven’t met too many people who care what I think. And desegregation, for all the fairness it has effected, failed to end racism. The battle goes on.

Click here to read my latest column in the Post.