Equality Quote by Ed Smith

The line lands with the offhand chill of someone describing the weather, and thats the point. Ed Smith stacks decades the way memory does when segregation feels like a permanent climate: "the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s" tumbles out slightly out of order, as if time itself blurs under a system that never let up. That casual chronology signals a life where the details of years matter less than the unbroken fact of constraint.

"Of course" is doing quiet, brutal work. It marks racial separation not as a shocking policy but as an everyday assumption, something so normalized you almost apologize for mentioning it. The phrasing "required to live among themselves" is a euphemism with teeth. It sidesteps the violence of enforcement and the machinery behind it - redlining, restrictive covenants, intimidation, and the local laws and customs that made "choice" a fiction. Smiths language reflects how segregation often got narrated in real time: as community, as habit, as the way things simply were.

The geographic narrowing - "at least in the Washington, D.C., area" - hints at the tricky politics of the capital. D.C. sold itself as the nations front porch while operating as a laboratory for racial hierarchy. The subtext is comparison without saying it: maybe elsewhere looked different, but here the rules were clear. The intent feels testimonial rather than rhetorical, a record offered without flourish. That restraint makes it more damning, because it shows how thoroughly segregation trained people to speak about injustice in the neutral register of fact.