While listening to NPR this morning, a segment came on concerning what is possibly the most popular song in history: "Chattanooga Choo-choo". Personally, I love this song for its style, its sound and its unrestrained enthusiasm. However, it doesn't come without history. And baggage.

You see, this very day, seventy-five years ago, saw the song's premier. 1941. It was the year of our entry into the second World War. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment had been going for nearly a decade (and would continue for thirty more years).

And segregation was the way of things.

What does all this have to do with the famous song? The line "Boy you can give me a shine" gave me pause. Granted, shoeshine boys were mostly juveniles. It was the norm to address not only boys as "boy", but also to address a full-grown African-American man as "boy". The point of addressing a man this way was to impress upon him the point that he was still less than a man.

The period brings me shame. No human should ever be diminished by another. While we have come a long way since then, we still have a long way to go.