MLK Vignettes: Retired judge Patricia Gorence covered civil rights as student journalist in Alabama

Growing up in Sheboygan and attending college in Milwaukee and Madison, Patricia Gorence knew almost no African-Americans.

In 1967, Gorence had completed journalism school at Marquette University and was a graduate student in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When she heard about a reporting job at the Southern Courier, a weekly newspaper in Montgomery, Ala., that focused on news in the black community, she applied. Gorence, who had just turned 24, covered Alabama politics, protests and marches and interviewed sharecropper families to tell their stories. 

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She kept copies of some of her stories, including an article about the state Legislature passing a law that allowed public school parents to choose the race of their children's teachers and a measure requesting state colleges fly the Confederate flag and play "Dixie" at football games.

"It opened me to different possibilities, to a culture I didn't know. I know it impacted the way I look at the world today," said Gorence, 74, now a retired federal judge who handles mediations and the federal prisoner re-entry court in Milwaukee.

Staying in a room provided by the newspaper, she earned $25 per week and worked and socialized with African-Americans. Gorence met civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy, but didn't have the chance to meet Martin Luther King Jr. that summer.

Gorence didn't see violence or arrests during the marches she covered and, as she recalled, signs for waiting rooms and drinking fountains that segregated blacks and whites had been taken down.

But she vividly recalls an experience that illustrated the racial divide.

Sick with the flu, she went to the office of a doctor, who happened to be white. She was directed to a room where she waited for her name to be called and noticed other patients, who were black, also waiting for treatment.

"I didn't think anything of it until the nurse took me out the door and put me in another waiting room, which turned out to be the white waiting room," recalled Gorence. "I didn't realize it until I walked out. It was really disturbing to me because this was way after the time this should no longer have been happening."