In 1965, my grandparents bought a small house in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was a red and white house on a corner lot with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was not the kind of home that appears in real estate brochures. But it was theirs. And that’s what mattered.
The house was previously owned by a white widow who told my grandfather that her late husband “would have turned over in his grave if he knew she was selling it to a Negro.” Yet, she also said she believed in equal rights and asked only one thing of them — that they care for the home well. They did that and more.
That one home reshaped the course of three generations of my family’s life. By leveraging their home as an asset, it allowed my mother to attend college — the first ...
