I wrote this two days ago to go with something else..But I am reposting it just to show that I was writing about a real person, My Uncle Johnnie J. Crittenden who rests here in a church yard in Leary Georgia, he had the job of teaching “little Black men” how to survive in American Apartheid…a horrible place that we had for much too long been taught to think it was “normal”…I don’t fault my Uncle for excepting things like they were….I have no idea of how many horrors he may have seen in his lifetime..but somebody had to show us how not to get killed..because as history shows us , children got killed too back then..other people were the soldiers of the movement, people like Uncle Johnnie were “Guardians” …may he rest in peace and he has my eternal thanks…”I had to learn at a very young age that certain people got treated better than me and could do things I was not allowed to do just because of the color of their skin. and that it was the law. it was right around this time that my uncle Johnny took me and my cousin for a walk in Albany Georgia..actually it may have been Dawson Ga. . He pointed out signs with big letters. I was just starting to learn how to read, my cousin “Junior” was older than me but didn’t know his letters yet. We had to learn the letter “C” and the letter “W”. And were taught that the C was for us and the W was for white people. At the time I didn’t even know any white people, I was in the “kindergarten” But uncle Johnny told us that it was his job to tell all the little boys this because if you go in the wrong door or touch the wrong thing you may never see your Mama again. It was a couple of days later that I went to the store with my Mom and her aunt Belle, who was Uncle Johnny’s wife. And I felt like I could impress my Mom if she saw how much I knew. I went over to the water fountain and told her “See Mama, this one is for me, touching the one that said “colored” and then I went to the other one and put my hand on it and said “and this one is for white folks. This was the very first time my mother ever hit me in the face, and also the first time I saw her with an expression I figured out it was fear. The reason I know it was 1955 is because the story about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus boycott was on the radio in the car as we drove home…yeah…we lived in a different world.. And we have many people to thank for helping to change it…..but we are not done yet.”
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