text: I am in fact old enough to remember when only white males were first class citizens. I was born in 1949. Throughout the 50s and 60s women and minorities were openly discriminated against in employment. Very few women held public office. Blacks were kept from voting throughout the south and were unable to buy housing in places like Eugene, Oregon. As late as the late 50s people as prominent as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald could not get a hotel room in Eugene. (I recommend a trip to the Mims house near Skinner Butte if you think open racism was something that happened long ago and far away.) As for homosexuality, that was more likely to get you jail than matrimony.