July 5 is a day for me to think about Walter Bligh. He grew up about a block from me in Compton, the only child of my aunt and uncle.
Walter was fifteen years older than I was. He's a shadowy memory now, shot down by the Japanese somewhere over Borneo.
I remember him.
At the onset of the war, black people could not vote in half the nation. No women held office. We interned Japanese Americans. Anti-Semitism was open and powerful. Yet women, people of color and Jews joined the military. They risked their lives for what small stake they had in a vigorous system that had already invented Hollywood, the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone. They must have felt the flaws, but they unashamedly fought for what they had and hoped to have.
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