“It was a quiet summer day… . Mother was sleeping late that morning when a car began honking loudly and persistently in front of our house. Mother, very much annoyed, went to the door. Before she could speak, a man sitting in his car raised a revolver and squeezed the trigger. The quiet of the day, of the summer, of our lives, was irrevocably shattered.
Mother was shot because she had never learned to be quiet. A black woman who taught black children was expected to teach them to be humble, obedient and unquestioning of a society which kept them as poor, ignorant, and as spiritless as terrorism and economic blackmail could manage. Instead, she taught them that they were human, ’as good as the next man.’”
The mother was a threat to the status quo following the 1954 Supreme Court decision. The family was surrounded by silence. The mother would be well, but the law enforcement system was quiet. The black church quietly looked forward to a better world and “the white church was just quiet.”
From the article “Silence” by Ann Stewart.
