When he walked through the door, the front door mind you, of the Kellogg Center that day in 1963 and was told he would have lunch, the thought was as alien to Gene Washington as the next hour’s experience.
He could sit at a table at a public eatery? A white waitress would ask him for his order? There would be no obstruction, no caustic words, no sneers, no expulsion?
A teenager from Texas had no concept of such a moment or day. But here was a new reality, at Michigan State University, where a young man who lived 15 minutes outside of Houston came to realize not all of America was as racially poisoned as the South.