On Saturday, February 4, 2023, I boarded a bus for a mundane 3-block ride to the store. I paid my fare and turned to take a seat when I noticed a familiar face staring back at me from her front seat. A biography above the face, introduces the activist to those who might not recognize the face of Rosa Parks. She first took a front seat on a bus in a Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, and entered American history.
Below the poster, sitting across the seat, was a single stemmed red rose. Kenosha Transit Equity Day it read further down. I don't recall such a day in previous years.
In a town that greeted Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15 with open arms, is this the beginning of systemic change? An awakening of sorts?
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My grandmother warned: Don't use that word in this house! My grandmother was referring to the word, black. As in the black community. black people.
Negroes. Black is an insult !
I referred to black people only when I was around my age peers. In the meantime, whenever I would hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s name mentioned on the kitchen radio, I stopped to listen, careful, however, to not draw my grandmother's attention. If she had seen me listening, she would have asked why I was bothering about what was going on "out there." What happens out there doesn't have anything to do with what happens in here, among family.
I lived with my grandparents until I was eleven, and wanting to continue being a good girl, no trouble to adults, no boat rocker, I stopped to listen, pretending I wasn't listening at all. But I suspected something was happening out there that had everything to do with my grandmother's willingness to deny acknowledging the lived experience of Black Americans not just out there but also inside our home as well.
We were one of the first in the neighborhood to have a black and white television. A monstrous piece of furniture in which I was planted in front whenever Dorothy from Kansas suffered a nightmare or when little Shirley Temple danced alongside of Bojangles.
At school, for at least two years in a row, Crispus Attucks lived to fight in the American Revolution before becoming the first to give his life for freedom. Someone's freedom. Maybe not his. The nuns never followed up with why white Americans took up arms to free themselves from the British, but they insisted on keeping blacks enslaved until 1865.
The nuns introduced us to Oklahoma. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plains...
Did I mentioned that I lived on the South Side of Chicago and the school and church were a block away?
In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till has been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by white supremacist in Money, Mississippi. Dr. King's name is on Hoover's list of enemies. Meanwhile, white America is enraged.
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