Week Fourteen

Today, I am not going into my internship, but will be working diligently on the database. I just read an interesting excerpt from an oral history with Dr. David Lowance, born in 1940 and raised in the Buckhead community. I thought I would share it.

There were two times in the 1940s that I was kicked off the number 23 bus for having sat down next to African Americans because we were a very segregated society at that time and I was raised by a marvelous [African American] lady, [Louise Jackson], whose picture is in this book of our family history along with some other wonderful African American people who ran the Lemonade Club of Howell Mill Road. I didn’t understand segregation, which young children all didn’t understand, but I’d get on the bus and I would sit down at the first seat that I saw available and it didn’t make any difference to me if they were African American or not. Twice the bus was stopped and I was kicked off by the bus driver and given a pass and told to get on the next bus and not to sit down next to people of color because it was not acceptable in our society for a white boy to sit down next to people of color which is ingrained in my mind for the rest of my life. 

Last night, I was helping one of my friends write her personal statement, which got me thinking about why I've grown so attached to this field. I decided to start at the beginning, and for me the beginning is books. My parents read to me constantly. When I took my first real history class in 10th grade, I realized that the stories that history provides us with are way more remarkable than any of the stories that I had read in books. Only time can write stories that well.