On This Day.

In 1950 segregation was banned in railroad dinning cars.

With One Wish, Banishing Memories Of Jim Crow
NPR MORNING EDITION
By Wade Goodwyn
MAY 30, 2012

As the sun beams down, Dorothy Flood, 75, stands on the steps of the Royal Gorge Route Railroad train, smiling like a 1940s movie star.

"Right there! Then turn around, right there!" photographers call out, jockeying to snap her picture. "Here we go, count of three — one, two and three!"

And with a tip of his cap, a porter offers Flood his hand, and her "Wish Of A Lifetime" begins.

Many are familiar with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization that grants wishes to terminally ill children. Less familiar is the nonprofit group Jeremy Bloom's Wish Of A Lifetime. The organization grants wishes to adults age 65 and older — and recipients need not be ill or dying to qualify.

Dorothy Flood's wish — to ride in a train dining car — is an easy one to make come true.

Why was the ride so important to her? Because when she was little Blacks could not ride there in the dinning car… the Supreme Court struck down the ban on Blacks being forced out of the dinning cars.

Crossing The Mason-Dixon Line

Flood grew up in ethnically diverse Jersey City, N.J. But traveling by train to North Carolina each summer with her grandmother was like traveling to another country.

"When we'd get to Baltimore, that was the Mason-Dixon Line," Flood says. "The African-Americans would go in the back ... and white people would go into separate cars."

Flood and her grandmother — and many of the other black passengers — carried their food in shoe boxes.

"I guess that was the easiest thing to carry them in. And every shoe box would have fried chicken, pound cake ... a hard-boiled egg and fruit," Flood says. "And to this day it's the best fried chicken I ever had."

But while the food was good, the child, whose parents had been killed in a car accident, couldn't grasp why she and her grandmother couldn't eat in the dining car.

Now down in Florida school children cannot read about this because it will make some children uncomfortable to hear. Woke is banned… teaching Black history is banned, talking about LGBTQ+ topics is banned.

Are we going forward or backwards?