Part Two of Two

However, when I was twelve years old and had just entered high school, my father drove the family from Chicago to visit our grandparents in California. We stopped at a campsite overnight near the rim of the Grand Canyon in Utah. In the morning, my father went to a “dime” store, (Woolworth’s - the cheapest store in the U.S. at that time), to buy something for breakfast. He entered the front door of the store as usual. He was greeted by the statement, “We don’t serve niggers here - they may have something in the back!” When my dad returned to the campsite, he was visibly shaken. He was a calm man. I had never seen him angry or upset, and he ever used profanity. He didn’t this time, but I could see all of this in his face - he had been psychologically wounded.

He was a proud man and had worked very hard to achieve the position he held as the Executive Secretary of the recently opened Maxwell Street Y.M.C.A. He had earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Southern California, and was working on his doctorate in sociology. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the struggle that Black males in particular experience in America - he hadn’t expected to be encountered at that primitive level. He told my mother of the incident and she told us, my sister and me. I realized then that we were still victims of the institution of slavery. From that time on, I became very sensitive and concerned about my position as a Black or African-American in our American society and its international consequences.

What does all this have to do with this song? “The sun shines bright on my ole Kentucky home, it’s summer, the darkies are gay”?? Summer is over and the “darkies”, which in reality could include all people who are oppressed and never were gay or happy as alluded to in that song. It focuses on a time when one group of people were enjoying life at the expense of other people’s misery and benefiting from injustice. Perhaps we can sing a song about the sun of peace, justice, and love, shining over our global home and then the multicolored people of the world could truly be happy.

                                                           By Sara L. Prince