Civil Rights Historical Journal Entry Tonight I Essay

Civil Rights Historical Journal Entry

Tonight I awoke to the unmistakable sounds of long restrained rage being freed from its cage. My neighbors are in the street below the grocery store I've owned for nearly two decades, decent folks who are simply trying to earn a living and raise their families the right way. While most of them are Black, and have been since the bigoted practice of "blockbusting" drove most of the Whites to migrate en masse from the neighborhood of Watts (Simpson, 2012), these people are my neighbors, and in most cases, my dear friends. Tonight though, they have become an angry mob growing larger by the minute, a constellation of fierce eyes flashing amidst the darkness, orbiting slowly around a police car, the White cop driving it, and the young Black man he is trying to arrest. As the screams and shouts become more pitched, and the frenzy of fighting intensifies in the street beneath me, I draw the window shades shut and return to bed, but sleep is slow to come. I cannot shake the suspicion that tonight's skirmish will be merely the first in a longer battle that has been a long time coming.

August 13th 1965 -- After a day of cowering in my apartment above the store, with crowds looting and rioting throughout the neighborhood, burning abandoned vehicles and beating White passersby, the National Guard has finally arrived. I never in my life would have believed that my own neighbors, men and women who have known me to be fair and unprejudiced in my dealings, could be incited to such violence. To know that their anger may soon be directed in my direction is a terrible prospect to consider, but nonetheless, the sight of National Guardsmen in waging war in the streets, against American citizens, gives me even greater reason to fear. Sitting here now, with the clamor and commotion simmering in the streets below, I find myself thinking back to a seemingly simple bit of news overheard last year. When the newspaper ran a small story in November 1964 about the passage of "Proposition 14 on the California ballot ... The initiative (that) overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which established equality of opportunity for black home buyers" (Reitman & Landsberg, 2005), I gave the notice no further attention. While many of my White neighbors had indeed relegated Watts to the status of a "ghetto" fit only for minority occupation, and fled to the suburbs surrounding Los Angeles, I remained in the place I considered to be home. Today, however, as the rioting crowds draw ever closer, I have been forced to realize how fortunate I am to have been afforded that choice in the first place. The people in the crowds out there, the people releasing their frustrations with violent acts against authority, they never had any choice…