Dear Editor,

After receiving my discharge papers from the U.S. Navy in 1964, after a 5-year hitch, I attended university on the G.I. Bill for an additional 5 years. Although still in my early twenties, I was probably even more idealistic and possessed of a greater sense of the injustice prevalent in the world than my mostly younger classmates, who had not yet been “baptized” in the ways of life beyond their white picket fences.

SDS (Students For A Democratic Society); SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and, of course, the NAACP, were all active in protests and voter registration in the American South during this time. We were not met with open arms in Mississippi when I was there; our presence (Northerners) was, to put it mildly, discouraged, and more than a few people who were offended by signage proclaiming, on drinking fountains, for example, “Whites Only, No Colored;” buses where you could only ride in the back; cafes you could not enter at all if you were Black — more than a few idealistic young people, paid with their lives during that dark but hopeful time.

A Polish American from Chicago, I wasn’t what anyone thought of as “Colored!” As a matter of fact, during this era, the term “Colored” fell out of usage, to be replaced by “Black,” as in, “He’s a black dude.”

I know that I’m uncomfortable referring to someone as “Colored,” and that the term in the U.S. has disappeared entirely. I never use it, and have never been called on it except here in Belize, being told it was insulting to refer to someone as being black!

I’ve subsequently learned that it’s a distinction Creoles like to make. Go figure.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Russell Czarnecki, Stann Creek