16. Sickened by the appalling racism in 1960s America, she once advocated racial separatism
When she heard about the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, Nina’s immediate reaction was understandably vitriolic: ‘I had it in mind to go out and kill someone. I tried to make a zip gun’, she remembered. In the event, Nina wrote Mississippi Goddam, but for some time she advocated separatism: ‘Much as I liked the idea of the world being as one and wanted it to be true, the more I looked around, the more I learned… the less I thought it would ever happen… but I didn’t believe that there was any basic difference between the races’.
