I showed this to Wifey, and she went into hysterics.
So help me Hannah, this story is true as it happened to my wife and sister.
Back in the ‘60s we had to relocate to help out my mom, who lived on Columbia, S.C. My sister had also just arrived.
One day they both go to the laundromat and are back in a few hours. Now my sister and I were brought up in the North (NYC) and just outside of Philadelphia for my new wife.
I asked them how everything went (navigating in a new city, etc.). Wifey said the people down here are freaking weird and stared at her and my sister the whole time. I asked them how they acted or what they said. Sometimes, down there, you got a negative reaction when they heard a Northern accent.
WTH??? Later on during supper, it came out that when they saw the “white” and “colored” signs over the washers, they thought it kind of odd, but separated the clothes accordingly and loaded the washers.
To this day, we still kid them about their naivete, but it just shows you the ridiculous extremes that were gone to in those days.
Follow up:
I showed this post to Wifey and she added that the whites just glared at them, but when they were unloading the colored clothes, a black lady came over and chewed them out for using those washers. Wifey takes out the colored clothes and shows them to the woman and says, “But we did just what it said.” The humor was lost on both sides.