Hi, I did not have my facts straight. I started to think I dreamed my post above. I did not. Rev. Jesse Jackson did lead a 64-mile, 7-day march form Bridgeport CT ( my old home town) to Hartford, CT. He led 5000 supporters, and he did march down the old Route One, past the end of the street my father lived on, in Connecticut (in what was called a blue-collared suburb.) It was in Sept. of 1991. And my father did meet and talk to him. He did want to thank him.

I thought of this thread tonight, as I am watching all the news shows talking about Pres. Obama's masterful leadership of the recent capture of Osama Bin Ladin. I just love this man. I am so glad to have lived long enough to see an African-American elected president. I really doubted it would happen in my lifetime, and now I am proud that my country has achieved this.

Again, I am white, and really pale, at that. But my parents didn't graduate from High school, due to poverty in their families. I lived in a scary housing project in a bad part of my home town. Poor people of all colors came from other states to take advantage of high labor demand in Connecticut. We all lived in the same building. I was 5 years old. When my brother got hurt playing and had blood all over his face, I ran into the nearest apartment I could find where I knew a nice family lived. They were African-American. The Mom there took care of my brother, while I ran up to the 2nd floor to get my Mom. That kind of stuff happened where we lived. We all played together. When I got hurt bad in the winter, when my sled slammed into a paked car and the bumper ripped my forehead open, it was a black classmate of mine, who ran to the road and stopped a car to get an adult to help. We were off away from where we lived, sledding down this hill. Those are my memories of growing up.

When my father got to making a little better money, we did get to move out of the housing Project. It was much harder for blacks to get jobs that would pay them enough to get out of that awful place. We knew that we weren't better - just luckier.

I have personally witnessed racism, and was really shocked. That was because I did not see much of that as a child. Only as an adult. I worked in a very competitive environment where I learned 2 things. People of my skin color were the quickest to back stab me to beat me out of a job. I got a lot of support from Afican-Americans in every job I worked. I don't know why they are so good to me. Maybe they can tell what my values are. But, I have worked in very racially mixed environments, and I have been helped so much by Blacks who, I think, saw that I was naive, and they took me aside and clued me in to how things work in a really Big City where I moved to.

I'm sure glad that life taught me that I can't trust, or distrust, anyone based on their skin color.

I checked out "Stormfront." Yes, there are those kind of people. There always will be bigots, some very extreme, as you saw on that Web page. I was brought up to see those kind of people as enemies to people of my own ethnic heritage.

You might want to google info on the 1924 KKK rally that took place in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Klan was really vicious, but they had failed "to do the math." The rally didn't end quite as they had planned.