People have their news preferences. Some devour crime and smash-up stories, while others camp out in the sports section. I know a few who never get beyond the comics.

I'm a sucker for race stories, and I don't mean NASCAR. I'll read anything about how blacks and whites, whites and browns and all the other racial/ethnic combinations are getting along.

Are we sharing the same schools? Who's getting their fair share of the American dream and who's not? Are we coming together or moving apart?

My interest almost certainly goes back to 1960, when I moved from New Jersey to a small, segregated Alabama town roiled by the emerging civil rights movement.

Blacks went to a black school, whites to white. Drinking fountains carried "white only" and "Negro only" designations. The municipal swimming pool was only for the pale-complected.

I thought this was the strangest thing. It was as if the South had won the Civil War.

The adults around me, including my mother and my esteemed blood relations, not only accepted this Southern way of life, they quietly defended it. There was no end to their rationalizations.

I sympathized. The social changes being asked of whites were wrenching. But still, the status quo didn't pass historical muster. It was time for the South to join the rest of America.

I left Alabama with a new racial consciousness and an eye for inequality, which turned out to be everywhere, North and South.

I moved to Napa in 1973. One of the first things I noticed was that Napa didn't have black people.

Didn't then and hardly does now. The latest federal estimate puts the county's black population at 1.3 percent. In Napa, it's almost certainly less.

What does one make of 1.3 percent? Such a freakishly low percentage, especially for a community at the edge of the intensely multi-racial Bay Area?

There are many possible explanations, ranging from common patterns of association to outright bigotry. Perhaps the best accounting is lost to history.

All I know is that the longer I've lived here, the less I've questioned Napa's lack of a significant black population. This community's surging Latino community seems a more relevant demographic issue.

Last weekend I went to the Napa Valley Opera House to hear Brian Copeland, a comic and Bay Area TV guy, do his one-man show, "Not a Genuine Black Man."

Copeland tells the story of his family -- black -- moving to San Leandro -- white -- in 1972. This was years after the Summer of Love. The Bay Area already had a national reputation for liberal fair-mindedness.

Such generalizations didn't apply to San Leandro, a 99.99 percent white town terrified of being overrun by the poor blacks of adjacent Oakland. Copeland's family had a fight on its hands.

Copeland recounted incidents of raw bigotry with hurt, anger and injections of humor that made it all bearable for his white audience. Our consciences were touched, and so were our funny bones.

I left the Opera House wondering about San Leandro, 1972. Were there any similarities with nearly-as-white Napa of the same period?

Napa didn't feel embattled when I moved here. Our identity as a white town was not being challenged. There were no overt signs that we had thrown up racial barricades.

I think most Napa residents of 1973 would have rejected the racist label. Perhaps our city just happens not to have black people, we would have said. There may have been historical reasons, but they had nothing to do with us.

I have subsequently learned of Ku Klux Klan rallies in the Napa Valley prior to World War II. An ugly bit of history, for sure, but those hooded bigots weren't us. We came decades later.

I do recall a neighbor who confided in me that he would never sell his house to a black person. His actual term of reference was much stronger, the kind of word you might have associated with Jim Crow Alabama.

He explained his racial bias in friendly terms. He would not sell to a black family out of consideration for me and his other white neighbor.

Well, here it was: the naked face of bigotry. No beating around the bush. No obfuscation. Just one neighbor sharing with another neighbor his desire that Napa remain always white.

My response was classic. I did not condemn my neighbor's racism. I did not say, "Don't worry about me, Charlie. I can handle living next to a black person."

I was silent.

Kevin can be reached at 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register, P.O. Box 150, Napa 94559 or kcourtney@napanews.com