Mr. Chauke and other blacks sat at desks pushed out of the room, in the school's hallway.

Griffith Stadium was not officially segregated, although an unofficial policy early after the 1920s expansion was that blacks sat in the right field pavilion.

At most tables, blacks sit with blacks, whites with whites.

Two blacks sit on the nine-member Board of Education.

The movie theater closed years ago, refusing to let blacks and whites sit together.

But blacks, stunned and saddened by what they had just heard about a cultural icon, sat silent for half an hour.

I suggested the whites go upstairs and the blacks sit downstairs, in the so-called best seats.

"If blacks sat in the back of the bus, and whites in the front of the bus, where did the Asians sit?"

On a December day in 1955, four blacks went aboard a city bus and sat where they'd never sat before, in the forward section reserved always for whites.

At the theater, blacks could not sit downstairs.