Daryl Davis

The in-between grades I would do back home here, right?

My classmates abroad—now, we're talking about the 1960s.

My classmates abroad were from all over the world because anybody who had—

an embassy station where we had our American embassy, all of their kids went to the same school.

So this little girl sitting at this little desk here might have been from Czechoslovakia, that kid from Nigeria, that kid from Italy, that kid from Japan.

If you open the door to my classroom and look in, you would say, oh, this is a United Nations of Little Children.

That's exactly what it was.

That became my baseline for what school was supposed to be.

But every time I'd come home,

I would either be in all black schools or black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated.

And just because desegregation was passed four years before I was born in 1954 by the Supreme Court, schools did not integrate overnight.

It took years and years.

And even in some places today, in 2025, this country is still struggling with integration, right?

So...

That became my norm, this multicultural thing.

I didn't know tribes.

Everybody was part of my tribe.

And that's why I didn't understand racism.

Because if I had grown up here my whole life, and my first experience with somebody who did not look like me was having bottles and rocks thrown at me at the age of 10 in a parade,

Maybe I wouldn't be doing this work today.