Mary Rowland is thirty-three and single and lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. She is self-employed, operating a business out of her home.

Until a couple of years ago, I lived in southern California, so my socialization was all in that area of the country. I was raised a liberal and was a liberal activist in my twenties. I was primarily involved with conservation issues, but sometimes that would prod me into getting involved with other causes, like Indian rights. If they had a dump a mile from an Indian reservation, I might write a letter to the editor or something pointing out that this was environmental racism.

Carolyn Davies* is fifty-three and a widow and lives in Massachusetts after spending most of her life in Texas. She works for the government in the area of social services.

My first awareness that there were different races came when I was a little girl, about five or six. This was in the mid-1950s. We were living in California. We hadn’t moved to the South yet. We visited my mother’s relatives in Texas. I went downtown with my mother and my two aunts. We went to a department store and they were talking and shopping and I was just sort of looking around like children do, and I noticed that they had two water fountains on the wall. One of them had a sign that said “colored.” I had never seen anything like that before, so I ran up to my mother and said, “Oh mommy, they have colored water over there! Can I have some?”