Louis Weathers came into this world 70 years after the Civil War ended, 70 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. And yet in 1935, when his mother went into labor, the local hospital in Evanston, Illinois, wouldn’t admit her because of her skin color. Louis’s father had to drive her two hours to a hospital that would let a black woman give birth to her baby.
In the early 1950s, Weathers was the first black kid to go to the local public high school. The teacher picked on him; so did the white kids.
“If I raised my hand, she wouldn’t call on me, because she didn’t want the white kids to see I knew the answer,” Weathers told me. “She called on me when I kept my hand down to make me look stupid.”
When he tried to buy a house, years later, white real estate agents steered him away from the better neighborhoods with better schools, where you almost never saw cops and it was safe to take an evening stroll. Even if he’d been able to visit those neighborhoods, it wouldn’t have mattered; the discriminatory practice of redlining made it nearly impossible for a black applicant to get a mortgage for a house outside black neighborhoods.