I can only speak for myself when it comes to being colour blind in our so-called post-racial world. Growing up, in a chocolate city (CC) of bricks, Newark, New Jersey had a diverse background of people until after the riot that changed the people and the city structure “involving issues of collective memory, trauma, race relations, and urban development (Herman, 2013). The riot happened in 1967 when I was nine going on ten and at a time when black people, became fed up with race relation in America when it came to equal rights and other treatment (Mumford, 2007). Even police brutality of beating or killing blacks in the Ghettos was a part of social injustice done all in the wrong ways. It was the era of the Black Panthers, Black Power movements and a City turned into an eyesore. That is when most of the white people started moving out of Newark and the southern black people started moving north. By the early 70s, Newark had a different swag called CC.
The music industry was located in Newark, but slowly moved to New York City after the riot. Before then entertainers performed outside on any block that the people allowed them to plug their mics & amplifiers into their electrical sockets. I remember, such groups as the Temptation, Black Ivory, Blue Magic, Isley Brothers, George Clinton, the Funkadelics, Aretha Franklin, and even James Brown performing free. The events were “Neighborhood Block Parties,” and everyone came out including Kojak and Peschi.
My memories of Newark are diverse schools, big buildings & big houses of different cultural environments, movies on
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A. (2013). Summer of rage: An oral history of the 1967 newark and detroit riots. New York: Peter Lang.
Mumford, K. (2007). Newark: A history of race, rights, and riots in america (1st ed.). New York: NYU Press.
Supremacy. (2016). Retrieved April 25, 2016, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supremacy
Pellegrino, R. (2015). I See Color. Westville, CT: Create Space