WOW

So, I am taking a class called multicultural education. It is a required class in the education program at UVU. It is basically an awareness class. We read a lot of articles about different cultures, races, and other related issues. Most of them have been extremely eye-opening. Yesterday in class we watched a documentary on the civil rights movement. I was appalled. I have never really seen or heard such haunting detail about the movement. My high school textbooks mentioned some of the main events such as the bus boycott and the sit-ins, but they did not fully describe the violence that occurred. The documentary was full of footage of beatings, shootings, burnings, and bombs. It told stories of many innocent people who were killed simply because their skin was not white. One fourteen-year-old black boy from the North who was new to the South and was not familiar with their society, whistled at a white woman in a store. Later that night, a group of white men took the boy from his home, beat him to death, tied weights to his ankles, and sent him to the bottom of the river. The murderers were arrested, and witnesses(black) testified in court, but it only took the all-white jurry one hour to find the suspects not guilty. We watched footage of state troopers beating men, women, and children in the streets. We saw white people spraying the blacks with powerful fire hoses from extremely short distances, causing immense pain for those being hit by the forceful water. One black man and two white men who supported the movement were told by the sheriff to leave town (somewhere in Mississippi). As they left, police followed them until they were outside of town and then shot them. The federal government charged the police with breaking civil rights laws, but the state of Mississippi refused to press charges for murder. In Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were changing into their choir clothes at Sunday school when they were killed by a bomb planted by the KKK. Nine high school students were the first black students in an integrated school and they faced persecution as they attempted to go to school. State soldiers guarded the school and refused to let the black children enter while civilians were threatening the students and begging the guards to lynch them. It wasn't until the federal government sent soldiers, including personal body guards for each students, that they were finally able to attend school. I cannot believe how brave those young kids were. Their parent must have been brave as well. It would take an immense amount of courage to send your children into danger for a higher cause.
The entire time I was watching the film and witnessing footage of barbaric beatings and nauseating maltreatment of innocent people, I could not help relating it to the Holocaust. There are too many similarities. We did not send blacks to camps, but we did beat them and shoot them for no reason. We planted bombs in their churches and killed their children. We refused to allow them equal rights and treated them like animals. It's disgusting. The whole time we were hating Hitler and the Nazis and wondering how anybody could be so cruel as to treat other human beings the way they treated the Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other groups, we were treating the blacks like garbage. The documentary we watched started in 1938. That is one year before the official start of WWII. The civil rights movement went on much longer than the war. I love this country very much, but parts of our history are painfully difficult to study.