Could you describe your experiences during the 1950's and 1960's with regard to the Civil Right movement of the time?.
I think the beginning of the Civil Right Movement began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. She was arrested and that's when Dr. Martin Luther King got involved. .
In the 1960's I remember feeling angry, sad, hurt, afraid and finally powerful because we were standing up for our rights as citizen and we did not want to be treated like we did not matter anymore. .
How could we be hated so much by the white people? What have we done to deserve this burden? It was a heavy load to carry, discrimination, racial harassment and segregation every day of your life and it hurt because you have to humble yourself to a people who detested you because you look different from them, just because you were BLACK. .
I was anger because we could not speak out what we were feeling to the world, only among ourselves. We had to be still and accept what was being done to us and not complaint. We, Blacks are people just like the whites, we had families that we loved and wanted to best for them. We have feeling too. I was anger because they treated us like we did not matter. We were not in the South but you still have to be careful of what you said or did ever here in the North. We lived in our own little world, the ghetto. We didn't know any other world at less I didn't. I remember one time going to work with my mom I think in Evanston, Ill. She was a domestic worker who cleaned the homes of the wealth whites in the Northern and Western suburban. Their street with lined with green trees and green grass, and they were clean. I did see no signs of broken glass or bottles, no papers lying around. This was a whole new world for me. I had never been passed State and Madison or Western and 65th street. Our sidewalks were lined with dirt, broken glass and bottles and paper, food what people toss out of their hands.