Wednesday, September 29, 2021

2 memories of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., ...

...by the one resthome resident who's a retired school nurse, who was working at a very urban school at that time:

1) They didn't call off school, and she felt that she had to go in since she was pretty new at her job, and to get to school it took over an hour-and-a-half and she had to plan a pretty circuitous public transportation route so that she didn't have to go directly through the area where there had been rioting and looting, though she did have to walk through a line of the National Guard, as it turned out. Then, she gets to school, and like 9 teachers and like 12 students show up, out of a school of 2300.

2) Afterwards, everything changed, where before (black) residents who you'd see out were pleasant to a (white) woman in a dress - "Any white people there had to be government service workers, and they made you wear dresses, then," she was like - but then, everyone was on edge, and one day when she walked up to a different office 3 blocks up from the school, a guy was sitting out on a porch and they saw each other and she was about to say hello like she always did, but before she could do that, he just looked at her and was like, "F*ck you, white b*tch."

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