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My grandfather, Hack Hall Sr., was a kind and gentle man. He drank a glass of chocolate milk every night, and always gave one to his grandchildren, too. I never remember hearing him raise his voice. His sternest reprimand was "Dry up," and what it lacked in specificity it made up for in compliance.

A deeply committed Christian, a Wesleyan Holiness man, he taught his children to confess and pray every night. He loved the Bible. He was part of that generation, and that stripe of piety, of whom it would not sound right to say he read the Bible. He read his Bible. He was, in a compliment no longer common, a committed churchman.

He was the editor of a newspaper in the tiny town of St. Francisville, Illinois, and his sons loved him enough that they all followed him into the same line of work. (Their names were Hack, Jack, and Mack. Don't ask why. I never even knew it was funny until I reached high school and no one would believe those were my uncles' names.)

As mild-mannered as he was, there was courage beneath the surface. Once back in the thirties he wrote a series of editorials about a gang bullying southern Illinois. One day a long shiny black car pulled up across the street, and sat across from the newspaper office all day long. Just to send him a message. Didn't deter him a bit.

One other piece of his job. He was more or less mayor of St. Francisville for some stretches of time. As such, it was his job to let any people of color who happened to wander into town know that they were not welcome to spend the night there. It was a town for white people. Everybody knew that was part of his job. The pastor at the church where he practiced Wesleyan holiness knew that was part of his job. I wonder about that …

When I was a boy, eleven years old, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I don't remember anyone saying anything about it at the church I attended. Maybe they did. But I don't remember. I don't remember any families of color ever attending our church. I don't remember anyone mentioning their absence. The Mason-Dixon line in Rockford, Illinois, where I grew up, was the Rock River. The east side was the white side. The high schools got integrated when I attended in the 1970s. Not the churches, though.

My friend Chuck lives in the outskirts of Atlanta. One of his neighbors is in his seventies, a retired Marine Corps officer. He told Chuck that when he was growing up, a young African American in deep Louisiana, he and his friends had to walk five miles to what was then known as the colored school. They would often be passed by a school bus of white children, who were being taken to a school a mile away. The white children would call to them from the bus; 'stupid' being the only word I can repeat in this column. After a while, he told Chuck, you begin to believe them. You begin to think, White kids probably are smarter. That's probably why we have to live like this. We probably are dumber."

Psychologists have found an intriguing way to study what it is that we really like and dislike. It's called "affective priming." They print a word over a bouncing dot on a computer screen. If people's response if positive, they push any key with their left hand; if negative—any key with their right.

Too discover our deeper responses, researchers will use subliminal stimulation. They'll print a negative word (like "fear" or "storm") subliminally, below your level of awareness. Your intuitive system is so fast it reads those words and responds to them before you are aware. So if they show a negative word subliminally, then a positive word slowly, it takes you longer to move toward a positive response.

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