Craigslist confessional: “The only difference between now and the 1960s is that the photos are in color,” grandson of Civil Rights leader

David, late 50s

I grew up on an island off the coast of South Carolina at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. My grandfather was Esau Jenkins, a prominent figure in the Civil Rights movement. He was a lovely and incredibly intelligent man, even though he only had a fourth grade education. He kept all of his children and grandchildren close; we lived in an all-black community. All of us kids learned from an early age to use family as a support network because we didn’t have that in society. Due to my grandfather’s work, we sometimes weren’t received well by our own, and definitely not by the white community, either. The white families lived separately from us and our engagements were extremely limited. Jim Crow, de facto, was alive and well. Is alive and well, to some extent.

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