For a Negro, theres no difference in the North and SouthTheres a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact. James Baldwin.

On October 17, I walked into a Milford, Connecticut, movie theater to watch Marshall. Set in Bridgeport, the film stars Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall who represented Joseph Spell, a black man who was accused of raping Eleanor Strubing, a white woman. The judge presiding over the trial barred Marshall from speaking in court, rendering him even more voiceless than his client. After their first pre-trial hearing, Marshall commented that in the Jim Crow South he met judges who forced him to enter the courtroom through the back, but even they let him speak in court.

As a black man from Connecticut, I predicted the rest of the judges biased rulings along with the local bigotry so well I might as well have written the script. Like many rape accusations against black men back then, those levied against Spell were false, and he went home free. But the damage was done. I walked out of the theater convinced Spell would have had to skip town for committing the offense of interracial sex.

After all, that was the real reason he was on trial, and any black person from Connecticut knows that.

Marshall was an accurate depiction of James Baldwins American fact that racism in the United States was never restricted to the South, and for the first time I saw a movie that gave the full picture of race relations in Connecticut.

I grew up in Stratford, Connecticut, and attended high school in Naugatuck and Seymour. However, I am descended from Southerners. Most of my immediate family lived in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and desegregation.

For example, my mother, Felicia Coble, at 7 years old, had to walk to the bathroom at school with a partner for her own protection during the school busings in McComb, Mississippi.

White people were so bad, Coble said with tears in her eyes. We couldnt even pee.

Her father, Barney Pace, grew up so poor in Decatur, Mississippi, that he had to hunt for his own food. However, he had a talent for baseball and basketball and aspired to play for Mississippi Industrial College.