Transcript

Interviewer

What were you really prevented from doing as a child that a white child might have done?

Martin Luther King Jr

Well, in my days in Atlanta as a child, there was a pretty strict system of segregation. For instance, I could not use the swimming pool. So that for a long, long time, I could not go and swim in, until the YMCA was built, Negro YMCA, and they had a swimming pool there. But certainly, a Negro child in Atlanta could not go to any public park.

I could not go to the so-called white schools, that was separate schools. And I attended a high school in Atlanta, which was the only high school for Negroes in the city. And this was a real problem because in Atlanta there are more than 200,000 Negroes. In many of the stores downtown, to take another example, I could not go to a lunch counter to buy a hamburger, or a cup of coffee, or something like that.

I could not attend any of the theatres, only, there were one or two Negro theatres. They were very small. But they did not get the main pictures, if they got them, they were two years later, three years late. So that by and large that was a very strict system of segregation. And there was nothing called racial integration at that time in Atlanta.