About fifty years, America was a nation of segregation, racial discrimination, oppression, and violence. Often times we learn of these tragic events through history books written by the “white man” and only told from their point of view. That’s why I set out to find the truth, interviewing and collecting actual and factual personal accounts of the post-segregation and post-Civil Rights era from two different perspectives. One black and one white. What were their personal experiences? How did the ending of segregation affect them? We’re they changed by these events in any way? Well that’s what I wanted to find out.
I first start out by gathering a first-hand account of what life was like for an African American growing up in the Civil Rights era. I begin by interviewing a Ms. Kim Wheat-Wells, who is from small city outside of New Orleans, LA where the black and white community was separated by a set a railroad tracks. She tells me how uncomfortable and unfamiliar it was to walk down the streets of a white community, “It was different and strange, I saw big houses and lawns, I got to see how they were living and all the things we didn’t have. I thought it was unfair because I thought they lived better than us.” My first question for Ms. Wheat-Wells was could she recall any incidents where she recognized a difference in color and/or any sort of discrimination. She told me that she was the only black cheerleader on her high school and began to notice that her teammates would always put her in the back; she goes onto say, “I never knew why but when I realized what they were doing I quit the team. I felt like an outcast.” This discrimination affected her greatly, she even felt like an alien within her own community, “My black friends said I was being stuck up and acting cute.”
My next person I interviewed was a Caucasian woman named June Miranda, 60 years old from Plymouth, Massachusetts. I asked her similar questions like had she experienced any form of...