Philosophy Now Forum

commonsense wrote: ↑Wed Oct 31, 2018 10:12 pm I was 10 years old, living in Virginia, when I first became aware of these atrocious events, chiefly form the photographs and captions in Life magazine and from television news.

There were so many questions I had then. Why were blacks treated so horrendously? Why did whites and blacks use separate bathrooms? Why did they drink from separate fountains? Why didn’t everyone know that blacks were people like all other people except that they had darker skin? Why was their skin even called “black” when it wasn’t? Why were German Shepard dogs used to attack black people? Why were fire hoses used to hurt people, like bombs dropped from the sky would injure people? Why did the fire hoses have to knock them over like bowling pins from a strike? Why would a man be hanging from his wrists, which were tied together like the legs of a chicken or a turkey when you buy it from a store, and be dangling from a tree limb, wearing only his pants, which were pulled down around his knees, bleeding from the pink linings of his skin, which were laid open in strips up and down his back and legs, with his head upright as if he were still alive and suffering in pain and humiliation? Why did I want to cry when I saw the photograph?

I knew of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson (Sr.), John Lewis, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, James Baldwin, James Farmer, Dick Gregory, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Freedom Riders, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. There were others, I’m sure, but these are the ones who have challenged my thinking and gave me hope that little black children and little white children would play together. I’ve been inspired and dismayed when I think how exciting the Movement’s potential was and how little has been realized as yet.

And now, I still ask the same questions.