I’m not that much younger than him but I never once saw a segregated water fountain. But then I was raised in the racist south and he was raised in the enlightened north.
He was raised in Detroit and separate restrooms and drinking fountains were common until 1964. You must be quite a bit younger.
I was a tiny little guy then.
/johnny
I worked in South Carolina in the late '60s and not only saw segregated water fountains, but bathrooms that said "White Men", "White Women" and "Colored" (long before the unisex thingy). That one REALLY pist me off as I wouldn't want my wife using the same bathroom as men.
[Sidebar] Harry Golden ran a newspaper called "The Carolina Israelite" back then and wrote an article on how he helped desegregate a Sears store in North Carolina. He was friends with the manager, who held views similar to his own, and asked him to conduct an experiment.
"Out of Order" signs were placed on all the "White" drinking fountains. The first few days, whites would head for the fountain, read the sign, and walk away. By Day Three, they'd look around to see if anyone was watching, and if the coast was clear, drink from the "Colored" fountains. After a week, they didn't bother to look around. After another week, the "White" and "Colored" signs came down and nobody complained.
Allow me to belabor the point with a family anecdote about our experiences down there. My wife, as well as our family were all brought up in the North. My sister and my wife go to the laundromat and come back saying that "these Southerners are weird". I asked them what happened. They said they finished putting the clothes in the washers, turned around, and found both blacks and whites glaring at them. WTH??
It finally came out that part of those Southerners' weirdness was that they had washers for colored clothes and washers white ones, so, according to the signs, they put all the colored clothes in one machine and whites in the other. Their first lesson in Segregation 101.
North/South matters. I was raised in the south and I remember it quite well. Carson is 6 years older than me so he could remember it also, had he been in the south. But he was born and raised in Michigan.
Back then gas stations had 3 restrooms; men, women and colored. I attended segregated schools. Black neighborhoods had their own restaurants, whites had theirs and they did not co-mingle. The south during the 60s was far different from Michigan and I can't imagine how he experienced any of this unless he visited his parents' home state of Tennessee, which he could have.
I'm a year younger than him and only saw such signs on the news back when Wallace was making his legacy.
I was raised in Rochester NY - no "Whites Only" signs but that didn't stop some of the race riots from reaching into some of our budding "Black Lives Matter" activists....
There were segregated bathrooms in the south into the 60s. I lived in Selma Alabama in 1965-66. It was not a happy place. My Dad was military, and we could not get service in a store or restaurant because the military was associated with the federal government. We bought things from the BX & Commissary, and ordered them thru Sears, or bought them in Florida on vacations.