EYE WITNESS TO AMERICAN SLAVERY - 1956 AND TODAY

                                        

MY SKIN IS WHITE. MY HEART IS HUMAN. MY WORD IS TRUE.

 

We were enroute to Florida from Montreal for a short winter holiday - our hope to evade one or two of Quebec's bitter snow and sleet storms.

 

As we drove through the Carolinas and Georgia, I witnessed things that stunned me.

 

It was the winter of 1956 -1957.

 

I saw a tumbled-down wooden shack at the small gasoline station where we stopped to fill up.

 

It was a toilet. It had a sign on the front. The hand painted sign read, "WHITES ONLY".  It was 1956!  I was shocked - and disgusted.

 

The owner was a dirty looking, skinny white man. I was hardly twenty. Did I say anything to him? I don't remember. I would not be surprised if I was too afraid to confront him. He was mean looking and he sounded mean.

 

As we traveled through Raleigh, Savannah and on south - we saw a chain gang close by. I could hardly believe my eyes. Human beings wearing stripes, chained together, working on a railroad line with guards holding rifles over them to prevent any hope of escape. It was 1956!

 

Today, the Twenty-first Century in America.

 

Slavery never ended in the South. It lives in the minds of racist fanatics in practice in various forms, and in their dreams of returning to their vine draped mansions - their mammies serving them mint juleps and nursing their mixed-race babies at their sweet brown breasts. 

To think that the Republicans - the powerful NRA, Ku Klux Klan - and America's Nazis - who, by any other name, still reek of the blood of the raped girls and the rotting lynched bodies of the men - will change, to trust that they regret the past - is to justify and erase the truth about slavery and to encourage the evil that is tearing apart America in 2018.