It Is Time Again To Chose Up Sides

I might have told some of this story before, cause there are lots of parts to it, and not all of them will be here. I have in my collection of things to finish, a project that contains a metal stencil for a sign from a Santa Fe Rail Road Station in Northern Oklahoma.  It was a small station with one waiting room. The stencil reads "Whites Only". It was used to make the sign on the waiting room door.  If you were not White, you had to sit outside on a bench at the loading dock of the station.  Not White meant Indians, Mexicans, but most especially Negros.

I have taken that stencil  and have pasted a picture on it in such a way that when I cut out the letters most of the picture can still be seen.  There's where the projected stopped.  Still haven't figured out what comes next.

The picture was taken in Indiana in 1930.  It is almost like a town festival.  everybody seems to be there, well all the White people are there.

I am from that culture. No not Indiana, the culture that kept Negro's in their place and segregated; the culture that, if it wanted to, could punish them for being uppity and Black at the same time.  I remember it.  The segregated cafe's, rest rooms, and drinking fountains or on a work site, one water bucket for Whites and one for Them. It did not seem strange.  It was the normal way things were done.

Even though we were segregated, I wasn't separated from the Negroes.  I worked in the fields with them when I got older.  I played with their kids when I was a kid and they were living in our nigger-shank during boll pulling time.  I was Naive with a capital N.  I knew what as going on but had not the foggiest notion of what it meant. When I was 15 I just happened to ride into town with a black man who had been helping me and my crop duster boss clean out his hanger.  He was just going to drop me off at my house.  Before we got there, a car passed us and some jerk stuck his head out of the window, and yelled at me by name, "f..... nigger lover".   The Black guy got real scared.  That was an epiphany for me, but I have to admit it took a couple of years to totally sink in.

Now we have a whole bunch of good solid people, citizens, that want to go back to those days for Blacks, and Mexicans, and Indians, and even for Women.  They want their America back.  No, they will tell you, that's not the America they want back.  Not that segregated one, they say, but that one where me and mine were respected.  Mind you they are good people, good Americans, our friends and neighbors and they don't have a clue as to what they are actually striving for  (some do, the bad ones).

We all have to chose which America we are willing to fight for.  If you sit on the fence on this one your wump won't survive, nor maybe even your neck.