Awakening to the injustice of segregation
Murphy briefly describes the process of awakening to the injustice of racism.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William Patrick Murphy, January 17, 1978. Interview B-0043. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
You said it took you until you were thirty years old in the Navy to
really think through desegregation and get to the point where you
questioned things. What about people back in Memphis that you had grown
up with?
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
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I think it's fair to say that most of my friends had gone
through the same personal learning experience, and I can think of three
of my best friends in Memphis now all of whom had the same experience I
did. You eventually just come to the point where you realize, if
you've got any kind of humanity about you at all, that this
is wrong, to treat people differently because of the color of their
skin. It's so obvious in retrospect you wonder how the
proposition could have been defended. All of my friends had gone through
pretty much the same experience that I had.
