I was born in Atlanta, Georgia the olden days, when pot was a cooking utensil, webs were for spiders and civil rights were for white folks. Where I was born I had to ride in the back of the bus, sit in the colored section of the movie theaters, and was barred from public parks. It was the Jim Crow South  Nonetheless, life was full of joy. My father was a pharmacist, my mother a school teacher. We lived in the house, my grandfather, a former slave had built soon after the civil war.  Unusual for that era, ours’ was an integrated neighborhood. My grandfather had built his home first and wealthy Jews had built their houses all around him, for the Jewish synagogue was just a block from our house. During the Great Depression when I was a teenager, their big homes were divided and poorer whites moved in. We had the biggest yard in the neighborhood and all the children whatever their color played in it. 

I attended segregated schools all my life, the first a private elementary school on the black Atlanta University campus. I then went on to Spelman College, the black women’s college, across the street from Morehouse, the black men’s college that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would attend a decade later. I married my husband Bill Rutland during World War II. He was a civilian working at Tuskegee Army Airbase where Uncle Sam trained Negro pilots for the first time. It was Bill’s career with the United State’s Air Force that took me out of the south and into the imperfectly integrated world where I would raise my children. My first book, a memoir, was about that experience.   

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