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Show ij ALL DUNN by Roy Dunn he said, for we needed the money desperately. That money had the strain of degradation on it and the food it bought, stuck in my throat, but that golfer had maintained the status quo. I always barked for him and felt lucky in a crazy sort of way, for Negro kids were not allowed on the golf links. White trash was, and this is where that one levated notch came in handy. If anyone has the slightest degree of respect for me. I feel that I have earned it, for nothing comes free. And never a day passes that I don't thank God that I was not born a Negro and that I have been raised from the status of "WHITE TRASH." The people of Utah gave me that chance the chance to prove myself a man. "SEE YA'ALL LATER ians. Only eleven percent of the troops in Vietnam are Ne-gros, Ne-gros, but they have suffered fourteen percent of the combat toll. When I was a boy, my playmates play-mates were Negro as well as white and the parents of them, black or white, knew nothing of this. There are no color lines among children as there are no color lines in the Vietnam mud and jungle, only green. We, as children, really had the key to intergration and I can remember pricking my finger fin-ger to compare with the blood of a Negro boy who had caused his to bleed for the same purpose. pur-pose. We could see no difference. differ-ence. And now the heart of a dead Negro beats steadily in the breast of a white man, giving him the breath of life, planted there by Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Bar-nard. A woman was quoted as saying say-ing "I'd rather be dead than have a nigger's heart." Some of the wild-eyed ones have said, "Pack 'em up and send them back to Africa where they came f rom." If folks should happen to get mad enough at me to "Pack me up and ship me back where I came from," they'd have to chop me up in about six different dif-ferent pieces and ship me to that many countries. I'm so mixed u p that I really don't know what nationality I am, except to say when asked, "I'm an American," which should be sufficient for anyone to say who is a citizen. My paternal g r a ndmother was said to be a half-breed Cherokee Indian which made my father a quarter-breed and his children one-eighth. I guess the other seven-eighths is sor-ta sor-ta mixed up between the Scotch, Irish and English. I reckon the rest is just plain "Okie." This was another thing we had to endure down there, for "Breeds" were held up in contempt, con-tempt, but there were some like Will Rogers who made a name for themselves. But it was no fun to reach for the coin the slack-jawed bigot held out to me for carrying carry-ing his bag of golf clubs for eighteen holes, only to have him drop it and set his foot on it and say, "Down on your knees, boy! Bark for me!" Then he would laugh uproar-ously uproar-ously at my embarrasment when I obeyed his command and performed for his friends who always enjoyed my plight. But I would always do what HOWDY FOLKS I guess it's just my nature to try and insert a little humor in what I have to say, but for this one time, may I be serious? The turmoil we find ourselves in, as a nation, has us all concerned, con-cerned, not a little bit, and I'm no different. There's a lot of things happening which I cannot can-not understand, not the least of which is the racial problem which I have never been able to understand from the time I was a child. I know from whence I speak, for although I was not raised in the deep south, I was raised (jerked up) in southeast Oklahoma Okla-homa which is a sort of "Lapland," "Lap-land," where the south laps over into the midwest. When I was a kid, we "chopped "chop-ped cotton," which is the same thing as thinning beets, for fifty cents a day, sun to sun. We white kids worked shoulder should-er to shoulder with the Negro kids. When the crop had matured, ma-tured, we picked the white fluff with the same kids and a good picker might make a dollar in a fourteen hour day. When we stood on our shadow, shad-ow, we found a shade tree and ate the biscuits that was left from breakfast which was spread with white oleo and peanut butter. Peanuts was one of the common crops of that section and the butter was cheap. Sometimes we could persuade a Negro boy to trade one of his fried catfish for our biscuits made of white flour. No one could fry a catfish like a Negro. But we did not sit with them to eat our lunch. The social structure wouldn't allow such a thing. We were better than they. At least that was what was drilled into us from the time we were born and a boy could get his hide tanned for fraternizing with them socially, if he were found out. But the boys, black and white, could never understand this. If you had been taught that a pig is J God, from the time you could remember, you would belive that a pig is God until you became old enough to reason things out for yourself. There were three definite social so-cial levels there. "White folks," "White trash" and "Niggers". We were of the middle class and considered about one notch above a "nigger", but not as good as white folks." "The man" was a term of respect for anyone of means or in authority au-thority to which the white trash and niggers were subject to. Being white trash we were caught in the middle, for the Negro kids wouldn't have anything any-thing to do with us, generally, and neither would the white folks' kids. We were mean to the negro kids, as the white folks' kids were to us. We had to unite to survive an attack from both flanks. I am speaking speak-ing on a general scale, for we had our close friends who were black. Somewhere along the line I came to realize that I had been cheated for having been raised under this illusion and would henceforth think for myself. But the more I thought of it, the more confused I became. It's just that having been pushed so far, and called "boy" all your life, you want to be called "man" regardless of the color of your skin. Some who consider themselves them-selves superior, call these citizens cit-izens "niggers," "coons" and "jiggs," and have been called in return, "white devils," "hon-kies" "hon-kies" and "whitey." These des-cendents des-cendents of four hundred and fifty years of slaves were brought to these shores against their will. And of those who didn't die en route on the infamous in-famous slave ships, millions were flogged, shot and lynched after they got here. Many of the Negros of today to-day find the status and authority author-ity they seek, in the armed forces. Their re-enlistment rate is three times that of the whites. They are becoming the elite guard, the shock troops and the centurions of a society they could not bridge as civil- |