“Bill Saunders can still hear the officer’s words in his head: ‘You don’t belong here.’ That was decades ago. But last week, news that a gunman spewing racist hatred attacked a church in his community took him right back to that day, when he had returned from fighting in Korea and was told he had no right to be inside a bus-station waiting area in his own country.”
“His whole life — ever since that day at the bus station — Saunders [has] been fighting to be seen as a man. It’s a goal that he says feels out of reach now, more than ever, in this state where the Confederate flag still flies proudly and a deranged racist can still slaughter innocent people in a brazen church attack. ‘One of the things I wanted all my life is to be a man, not a black man, but a man. There’s no way I can ever be a man in Charleston, South Carolina,’ Saunders says. ‘I will always be a boy to the system.'”
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Not exactly. Saunders earned his manhood long ago. It’s the system that needs to grow up.
Photo: William “Bill” Saunders of Charleston, South Carolina — husband, father, veteran, community organizer and civil rights activist, political candidate, factory worker, man.