dorxter¼
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- Jun 1, 2020
I remember in high school learning about civil rights, the whole long list of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the bus thing, sit-ins, all that jazz. Then the 70s roll around and the history book started talking about the use of buses to force integration that happened then, and it gets maybe a paragraph at most with the summary being essentially "and then in the 1970s they used buses to desegregate schools and some people didn't like it" and then it immediately moved on. I never thought much about it until years later when I read about this: "Black teenagers in Roxbury threw rocks at auto mechanic Richard Poleet's car and caused him to crash. The youths dragged him out and crushed his skull with nearby paving stones. When police arrived, the man was surrounded by a crowd of 100 chanting "Let him die" while lying in a coma from which he never recovered."
Really makes you think.
And if any Italians are reading this, what did your history books say about the anni di piombo? Did they take a truly neutral tone or did they speak more favorably of one side than the other?
Goodness. I'm wondering who was more ticked at the "integration", the whites or blacks?
It's funny. Last month I was visiting my grandma (82) and grandpa (92) at their house while my mom (65) was there. She's the typical boomer, been married like 8 times and buys a new house every 5 years and she brought her boy friend with her this time.
We got to talking about serving in the military and stuff like that and my grandpa mentioned when he joined in the late 40's, it was still segregated. My mom's boy friend pipes up and starts talking about his service in 'Nam and how all the black people that were joining were doing so because they were given a choice of go to prison or join the army, etc. He said you really had to watch your back as all the black people basically formed gangs and if they caught a white boy by himself, they'd surround him and demand jewelry, money etc, or they might just beat the crap out of you for fun. If you didn't comply, they'd group together as witnesses and report you for "racist" stuff that they made up. So he had a few stories of stuff like that. And another one of his first day after training where in the "mess hall", the black cooks there would randomly choose not to give food to white people (his countering by demanding of the black cook to "serve him" apparently caused a huge brawl and food fight)
But his best story was.... after he left the service, sometime in the 70's, he had some mutt dog with him in his truck and while stopped at a gas station, someone took the dog from the back of the truck. Two weeks later, he's driving past a trailer park of mostly black folk, when he sees his dog tied to a tree. So he parks in the street and runs over and cuts the rope and tells the dog to get into the truck. At the same time, the front door of the trailer swings open with a black man yelling "what are you doing!?". He yells back "This is my dog and you're a thief!". The black man stands there motionless for a few seconds and yells back "You owe me $20 for feeding it for the last two weeks!" Oh, and the dog was apparently used as a "bait" dog in a fighting ring based on its now shredded ears.
Oh and he had another story, I guess in the late 50's or early 60's. The city desegregated the schools and forced the blacks into the white school. The blacks were ticked because the white school was a much farther walk away, and the old black school was actually air conditioned.