How Moscow’s 1957 World Youth Festival Inspired Me to Go On Pretending
I was five years old, living in Odessa, then-USSR, when I saw my first Black man. “Look, Mama,” I exclaimed, delighted, “a CHOCOLATE person!”
“No,” she corrected me. “That’s a Negro.”
Two years later, we moved to the United States. And while San Francisco had fewer African-American residents than New York City, where I live now, I grew accustomed to seeing people of different backgrounds around me, Asians, Hispanics, and yes, Black people (I quickly learned that the Soviet term was not an acceptable one to use).
Growing up in the Soviet Union, the only African Americans I was familiar with were Paul Robeson and Angela Davis. But I had also heard about the “children of the rainbow,” those born to one Russian and one African (as well as many other ethnicities) parent after the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party.