I Witnessed the ‘Whites Only’ Signs Come Down. Then I Saw What Replaced Them.

Richard Rose, 77, was a freshman at Clark College, now known as Clark Atlanta University, when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, the prominent metro Atlanta community activist remembers growing up in the Jim Crow South when Black folks were forced to enter movie theaters and restaurants through side doors and back entrances and could visit the city zoo only on weekdays. The injustices compelled him to join the NAACP at 13.

He’s spent decades doing voter mobilization work for the NAACP and other organizations and helped register a multitude of Black Atlantans during the late 2010s as president of the Atlanta NAACP. A surge in Black voter turnout in Georgia during his tenure led to the election of U.S. Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and turned Georgia blue during the 2020 election. He recently reflected on Dr. Martin Luther King’s death and how life has and hasn’t changed much for Black folks.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I was participating in various picket lines and in sit-ins in Memphis as a child. As a matter of fact, Rev. James Lawson was our mentor with the Memphis NAACP. He had also mentored John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, Diane Nash, and James Bevel in Nashville, where he was at the Baptist seminary.

The only time I met Dr. King was when I went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headquarters, trying to catch up with my mother’s first cousin, James Bevel. As I walked in the building, Dr. King was coming out of the office. And he spoke and said, “Who are you looking for?” And I told him I was looking for James Bevel, and he told me, “Well, we got Bevel out in the street now. But leave your name and number, how to get in touch with you.” So that’s what I did.

I already had read a lot about Dr. King. Of course, I followed the Montgomery bus boycott, and so I held him in high esteem. So it was just a giddy experience for me to actually meet Dr. King at the age of 18. He was busy, but cordial. He didn’t have a coat on. He had on short sleeves, and he was going through the hall, doing whatever they did all day. I walked down, and he ran into me, asked how could he help me and — just a genuine, ordinary person who was a giant.

The day he was killed, there was a jazz concert in the auditorium in Clark where we were. And then we got the news that Dr. King had been assassinated. Of course, that was the end of the jazz concert. We all from Clark College assembled. We just wanted to be with each other.

In my mind, it was just dark. It was a dark time in my life that Dr. King had been taken away from us. School was closed. That day and that week was a time of great mourning.

We understood that where we were in Atlanta, we rarely saw anybody white. Nobody was white walking the street. We had white professors and so forth. But Atlanta was very much segregated, and at that time Atlanta was still majority white.

When I left my teenage years at the age of 20, pretty much the South had changed tremendously. The signs of segregation were not there as much, but there were different signs. The “whites only” signs were gone. But Confederate monuments were there. They were building them all over, including Stone Mountain. The Stone Mountain carvings were under construction at the time when I came to school here, and they were not finished until 1972. The message was that white supremacy and racial oppression were still here.

Most white people deny that they are racist, and really, racism is not necessarily the problem. The problem is racial oppression. If you don’t want me living next door to you because I’m Black and you’re white, you don’t speak to me, that’s racism. I’m okay. I can live with that.

But when you don’t want me living next door to you and you burn my house down, that’s racial oppression. That’s what we’ve had to deal with throughout my whole life.

It sounds like we’re going back to the ’50s, but trust me, we are not there. Every day, the first thing you did was try to protect yourself from possible harm from not only policemen, but just ordinary white citizens out on a rampage.

It’s not as bad as it was in the ’50s and ’60s, but it’s not good. We have to redouble our efforts to tear down structural racism. Colorism, the perverted history, limited education, economic discrimination, denial of voting rights, policing abuse, white supremacy, symbology, and misogyny are what I call the pillars of oppression. We have to fight against all of those. We should not limit and just focus on one. Every conversation ought to be about the whole structure of racial oppression.