“Come to think of it, I’ve been in the minority all my life,” I said, realizing it was true.

I grew up in the deep south. A block or two from my childhood home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there was a bank of signs welcoming visitors to Birmingham’s main highway.

The Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions Clubs were all there. So was the Ku Klux Klan.

This was Alabama in the 1950s. Blacks couldn’t vote. The Klan operated openly. Schools were segregated, separate and unequal.

One fall evening, the vicar at my church was kidnapped, beaten and run out of town. He had invited some black kids to our church youth group.

No arrests have been made. The man disappeared into the north and a curtain of silence fell. Our pastor never mentioned the incident in private or from the pulpit.

However, everyone knew who in the congregation organized the fight.

This was common back then. Majorities in Alabama have elected racist mayors, city councils, county commissions and governors, including George Wallace (segregation today, tomorrow and forever).

To join the majority in Alabama in the 1950s was to join a conspiracy of iniquity.

But what if you kept quiet?

That’s what most Southerners did. The price of questioning the dominant racist worldview was high indeed, and most refused to pay it.

This is true even though they hated injustice and violence. That’s what my father did. He never joined the Klan or the White Citizens Council, which was a version of the Klan for Rotarians, members of the tie-dyed Klan.

Our family remained silent as Robert Shelton, the Clan’s Imperial Wizard, went about his work in my hometown. He later went to jail for contempt of Congress. As a young reporter, I covered Shelton’s return from prison in 1969, a banquet at the Ramada Inn.

My boss edited my story down to a few tame paragraphs. He found my original story, which simply cited Shelton’s insane racism, to be too inflammatory.

I just read Wright Thompson’s book “The Barn” about the 1955 Mississippi murder of Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old black boy who allegedly committed the sin of refreshing himself with a white woman

Thompson is a passionate Mississippi Delta native, and his book is chilling. In it, I heard the child’s death cries echoing from a barn with a lamp at midnight.

Everyone in the Mississippi community where the crime took place – every sentient being – knew who committed the crime, how and when and where. They knew of his incredible brutality.

Two suspects eventually faced arrest and a trial by an all-white, all-male jury of their peers in the Mississippi Delta. Reporter David Halberstam called the trial, which lasted five hot days in September, the first major media event of the civil rights movement.

No one ever went to jail for Emmitt Till’s death.

At his funeral, Emmitt Till’s mother insisted on an open casket so mourners could see the brutality that led to her child’s death.

Sometimes being in the minority means being on the right side of history.