The Chicago Catholic Church desegregated its schools before the Chicago Public schools. It involved a voluntary bussing program that shipped black Catholic schoolchildren from the South Side of Chicago, the African American side of the most violently segregated city in America, as Martin Luther King Jr. described it, to schools on the North Side. Some of those black kids wound up at to St. Ignatius, the Catholic grade school a half a block from my home, the school where my mother, my grandmother, and me and my three siblings all attended. St. Ignatius was a neighborhood school, and back then nearly all moms were stay-at-home moms, so Ignatius didn't have a cafeteria. We walked to school in the morning, walked home for lunch (and Bozo), and walked back for afternoon classes. The black kids being bussed into the neighborhood couldn't go home for lunch, of course, so the school had to find families in the neighborhood to host black kids for lunch. My mother volunteered to host a family and that's how the Wilson kids—Michael and Wanda—wound up at our house every day for lunch.

My grandfather was a sportswriter for the Chicago American, and later for the Tribune, and unlike a lot of the white men of his generation he believed in racial equality. Covering college basketball for a living might have done the trick. My grandfather, Ed Schneider, bought the first television set on the 6400 block of Glenwood to watch Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers in the 1947 World Series. When Jackie Robinson played at Wrigley Field, my grandfather took my mother to see him. Mom was a Dodgers fan for the rest of her life.

Anyway, a neighbor across the alley didn't appreciate my mother hosting the Wilson kids. There may have been other families that didn't appreciate it, but only this neighbor was stupid enough to—well, here's what went down: My mom and dad invited the Wilsons to a block party in our alley, Michael and Wanda and their mom. A man that lived across the alley from my family's two-flat apartment walked up to my dad—my dad the Chicago cop—and told him that "if he brought those niggers back again" he'd have his shotgun ready. My dad arrested him. There were no more threats.

I went to the Wilsons once for a sleep-over with my sister and got a taste of what Michael and Wanda must have experienced when they arrived in our neighborhood every day. We were the only white faces on the block, the only white children in their apartment building, the only whites at their church that Sunday. ("They scream and shout and clap during mass!" I told my mother when I got home.)

Anyway, reading Bob Herbert's column in the NYT this morning, a column about all the folks he wishes were still around to see this moment (including LBJ), made me think of the Wilsons. Michael and Wanda were a part of our lives for years—my mother had a genius for staying in touch—but I haven't seen them since they were young adults and I was in high school. But growing up in the most segregated city in America, at a time when a bigot would blithely assume he could get away with threatening to shoot African American school children in front of a cop, a time when interracial couples were still considered scandalous and interracial children a tragedy, I never thought I'd live to see this day. I'm elated. I can only imagine what Michael and Wanda must be feeling today.