Guest column was much appreciated

An open letter to Michael Shelton: Michael, thank you for your great Op-Ed, Tuesday, July 7. Not just because I agree with you, but because it truly depicts the United States in very turbulent times, then and now.

Unfortunately, we have allowed much of the teaching of history to conform to the current politically correct thinking. The shouts of the mob are replacing the truth.

Slavery was, and is today, a horrible practice, more than I will ever know not having personally experienced it.

But rather than sweeping the practice of slavery into the dust bin of history, it should be used as an example of how far we, as a nation, have come.

Like the Holocaust of the 1930s and ’40s in Europe, we must never forget the long period of slavery in our country, nor the hundreds of thousands who died to end it.

Personally, I am old enough to remember the separate washrooms and drinking fountains in the railway stations in the late 1940s as we went by train from New York to Florida.

My granduncle, a Catholic priest, had a cross burned “in his honor” as he sat on my grandfather’s front porch in New York. Like the Nazis, the Klan did not discriminate when it came to hatred.

Later, “KKK” was painted in large letters on the street outside our home and in front of our nearby Catholic church on Eastern Long Island in the 1950s. My parents had to explain their meaning.

I personally experienced racial inequality in the early 1960s as I was at Fort Benning, Georgia, and later at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Numerous times. Often subtle, at times overt.

Our family saw it in Arkansas in the 1970s as an attempt was made for our sons to be recruited for the Junior KKK, while the governor insisted the Klan didn’t even exist in Arkansas. And more.

I’m sure your story would make mine a mere footnote.

I believe we should not forget, nor “celebrate” that time in our history.

But we should, I believe, use it as a teaching tool to show how far a good people can come. We owe it to our children.

Thanks for your article, Mike. BILL GRESSER Yuma