AthenaAwakened
Contributor
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2003
- Messages
- 5,338
- Location
- Right behind you so ... BOO!
- Basic Beliefs
- non-theist, anarcho-socialist
I was four, a week or so shy of my fifth birthday. We were visiting my father's family in Putnam county GA. My father left our family home, which was now my aunt Lucille's house, early that morning. He and my Uncle Dave were going into town to spend the day with my uncle Will. My uncle was a business man. He owned a store, a juke joint, and he ran the family farm.
He and Poppa and uncle Duck (Uncle Dave's nickname) were hanging out in the juke joint laughing and talking the way brothers do when the sheriff came in. Uncle Will and the sheriff exchanged words, the kind of words two married men exchange over a woman neither one of them is married to.
Thing got heated and the sheriff threatened my uncle. My uncle reached under the bar, came up with a shotgun, laid it on the counter, and asked the sheriff to leave. The sheriff left. The day went on.
In the wee hours of the next morning, my uncles and my father were walking to my uncle Will's house. The sheriff pulled up behind them, stuck a shotgun out the window of his car, and shot my uncle Will in the back of the head then left him in a ditch to gulp and die.
My father returned to us just before dawn, his brother's blood on his shirt, his trousers, his skin.
The white man who caused this woe, even with a parade of witnesses, was exonerated at trial and never served a day for murder of Ed Willie Simmons.
There isn't a black family in America that does not have similar stories to tell, and sadly those stories are still happening today.
So yeah, I talk about race and racism. And I will keep on getting the word out until I die.
He and Poppa and uncle Duck (Uncle Dave's nickname) were hanging out in the juke joint laughing and talking the way brothers do when the sheriff came in. Uncle Will and the sheriff exchanged words, the kind of words two married men exchange over a woman neither one of them is married to.
Thing got heated and the sheriff threatened my uncle. My uncle reached under the bar, came up with a shotgun, laid it on the counter, and asked the sheriff to leave. The sheriff left. The day went on.
In the wee hours of the next morning, my uncles and my father were walking to my uncle Will's house. The sheriff pulled up behind them, stuck a shotgun out the window of his car, and shot my uncle Will in the back of the head then left him in a ditch to gulp and die.
My father returned to us just before dawn, his brother's blood on his shirt, his trousers, his skin.
The white man who caused this woe, even with a parade of witnesses, was exonerated at trial and never served a day for murder of Ed Willie Simmons.
There isn't a black family in America that does not have similar stories to tell, and sadly those stories are still happening today.
So yeah, I talk about race and racism. And I will keep on getting the word out until I die.