Surprisingly, for just a brief moment, the class sits in stunned silence. A few students actually ask if I’m serious. I ask them to imagine if what I said was true? I tell them that I remember when blacks couldn’t attend the drive-in theater in my hometown.

I find it difficult to believe that in my lifetime, a person couldn’t go to the movie theater because of skin color. The students in my class say that such a suggestion is stupid and would never happen. Then I remind them: It did happen!

Stepping into someone else’s shoes and looking out on their world through their eyes is a good way to learn to appreciate differences.We must continue to speak out against discrimination and racial injustice. If we don’t, then “it” could happen again.

Drive-in theaters began to disappear from the American landscape in the latter part of the 20th century. There are many people that never had the experience of sitting in their car (or sprawled on a blanket on the ground) on a warm Summer night and watching a movie on a mountainous screen while listening to the soundtrack through a metal speaker hanging on the car window.

The Skyway Drive-In was the only drive-in theater in my hometown, Oak Ridge, TN. The Skyway is my earliest memory of discrimination. I remember going to the drive in with my parents one evening when I was a youngster and seeing dozens of black people lined along the entrance to the theater. I was too young to understand prejudice and racial injustice, but I remember why they were protesting. They were upset because they weren’t allowed into the drive-in.

Each semester in my First Year Experience class, I give a lecture on “Developing Relationships”. I stress the importance of appreciating differences. During the lecture, with as much sincerity as possible, I inform the class about a new Miami-Dade County ordinance that will soon take effect, which bars Hispanics (I use Hispanics since the majority of the class is Hispanic) from eating at local fast-food restaurants and attending movies at theaters. I tell them that they must rent movies that they want to watch.