That makes me think of my own grandfather (in a good way) I will never claim that he was the most forward-thinking, tolerant, or politically correct person out there, there were a few stereotypes and bits out outdated terminology he never quite shook (for example, the term “colored” never quite left his vocabulary, and he had a tiny bit of lingering distrust of the Japanese having served in the Pacific during WWII)

But for a man who grew up in the time he did, he wasn’t half-bad.

He was never someone who was above holding a a grudge, and he’d gladly tell anyone who would listen who he didn’t like and why. His reasons weren’t always good, he got mad at people over a lot of petty bullshit, but I never heard him disparage someone because of their race. He ended up in a nursing home where a lot of the staff was black, and we never heard a peep from him about their race, he found plenty of other things to complain about, but there was no racial bias to it, he complained about the white employees as much or more than the black ones.

Little bit of fun family history with him, for most of his life he worked as a bus driver. Buses in our part of the country were racially integrated from pretty early on so that was never something he dealt with directly, but he did drive his bus at the same time that bus boycotts and such would have been happening in other parts of the country. He never told us this story himself, we heard it from some other older locals who remembered him driving the bus. There was one particular bus stop that was near a business that employed a lot of black women, and many of them took the bus. The bus would come at around the same time the business closed for the night, so they didn’t have much time to get to the stop before the bus came. A lot of other drivers wouldn’t wait for them, but my grandfather always did, and decades later many of them still remembered him for that.