Abstract
I was born in 1944 in St. Albans, New York, and schooled in the boldly democratic belief in civil rights and racial equality. At times, however, it was hard to shrug off the shadow of inferiority that showed up where and when it was least expected. Eventually, my family left St. Albans for San Juan, Puerto Rico, a small island in the Caribbean. Despite the journalism prizes I had earned as a journalist for the San Juan Star and the acceptance achieved among prominent leaders of Puerto Rican society, in the late 1980s I was still vulnerable to prejudice by virtue of my skin color and being female. To this day, not many visibly black individuals, male or female, hold public positions of power. Many black people in Puerto Rico remain in the background or are invisible.
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Notes
- 1.
Jim Crow laws closed public facilities—hotels, theaters, restaurants, and movie houses—to black Americans and segregated trains and buses. After decades of protests by the NAACP and other civic organizations, the Civil Rights Act signed into law in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson, banned racial discrimination in public places.
- 2.
Thousands attended Till’s public funeral in Chicago and photographs of his mutilated body were published in the black press. The killers, husband and half brother of the woman, were acquitted, but in 2004 the Justice Department reopened the case.
- 3.
Ricardo Alegria (1924–2011) established the Museum of the Americas in 1999.
- 4.
Numerous personalities including Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Rigoberta Menchu became involved in protests against the US Navy’s use of the small island of Vieques for bombing practice.
- 5.
The agency was called Azabache; the model, Malin Falu, a New York City radio personality, became a semifinalist in the Miss Puerto Rico competition.
- 6.
Velazquez’s vita is at http://africahuna.ning.com/profile/EdwinVelazquezCollazo.
- 7.
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Routté-Gómez, E. (2013). A Tale of Two Cultures. In: Hall, R. (eds) The Melanin Millennium. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4608-4_7
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