The year is 1963. My mother, Carol, and I are on our own. My father, Eric Hawkins, and my little brother Sam were lynched while protesting peacefully, and they were killed by a violent mob filled with White supremacists who didn’t want to accept that blacks are part of this country. Ever since their death, my mother doesn’t allow me to go out on the street to protest. She barely even allows me out of the house for a couple hours. There’s still a deep gash on my forehead from when I was attacked a couple weeks ago while walking back home. Every now and then, the stitches come apart and the wound starts bleeding again, but I don’t do anything about it. I keep it as a reminder that I will only ever be a black man in Birmingham, and that people …show more content…
It’s hard to defy the stereotype of being a poor black family when you’re living it. Every week, my mom would go and collect her welfare check, and she’d turn to me, with an ashamed look on her face, distraught that life put her in a terrible situation, and mostly because of the fact she was black. We lived on a small road, in an all-colored neighborhood, close to the 16th Street Baptist Church. I had a migraine and had woken up late. My mother was shaking me with her emaciated arms, screaming at me to wake up.
“Wake up, Jamal!” She yelled. “The Ku Klux Klan, some white terrorist, I don’t know what’s going on, there’s some booming sound!” She trembled thinking about the chances of being shot in the head in her own home, knowing that there was nothing stopping people from barging through our
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A couple minutes later, all the noise stopped, and we ascended from our hiding place. My mother quickly phoned her friend, who told her that someone had bombed the Church to target black worshippers. I was enraged by the injustice .She told me the Ku Klux Klan had bombed the Church, and they killed four girls, and injured 22 innocent people.
“These damn white people! They don’t see we’re just as good as they are! We’re only ‘Negroes’ or ‘Niggers’ to them. We’re much more than that.” I exclaimed. My mother slapped me across the face.
“Shut up, now! Don’t stoop down to their level. We can’t get respect if we don’t give it first. Don’t ever say those words again!” Her eyes were fixated on mine, judging me. I huffed and started tearing up, thinking that the racism and the segregation would never culminate. I didn’t know why God did this to me. Why He made me black. Why He made whites better than blacks. Why he created inequality. I didn’t know that some people were inherently ignorant and didn’t care about the wellbeing of an entire race. That some would even go as far as to bomb a church to prove their superiority. I suddenly realized the difference between a black person and a white person: