In "Driving While Black", Gretchen Sorin provides a number of examples of 20th-century road signs that warned African-Americans when they were about to enter towns where their presence was not welcome. One came as a surprise to me because it referred to a town I spent part of my childhood and early adulthood in: "In Palo Alto in 1946, California's Klan painted KKK in red letters three feet high on the road at the intersection of Homer Ave and Ramona Street, to make sure motorists saw it." Though the article Sorin cites is not online, its author, Matt Bowling, has a website on Palo Alto history where he includes the story. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 July)
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