In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This story is my reflection as a colored girl.
She was sixteen, and smart, Valedictorian of her class. Her English teacher, Mrs. Daily, encouraged her writing and entered her into contests. She won both the Optimist Club and the Civitan Club essay competitions her senior year. Winning the Civitan award was special because she received a $50 savings bond.
That year’s topic was “What Democracy Means to Me.” The amazing sixties vitalized her, a Negro girl growing up in the Jim Crow south. The Brown versus Board decision had outlawed school segregation. Negroes were successful with the Montgomery bus boycott. Negro college students were engaged in freedom rides and sit-ins at lunch counters. Young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had sparked the fire of freedom in generations of Negroes.
A required course for all senior students, “Democracy vs Communism,” prepared her well to pen an essay about what democracy meant to her. She had learned about the oppressive system of communism, its lack of freedom, justice, and the individual’s aching for a better life that only democracy promised. She wrote eloquently about the free and fair elections promised by democracy, somehow ignoring the fact of Negroes who were killed for even registering to vote. The essayist wrote of social equality, yet knowing deep down that she, her parents, ancestors, or any other Negro that she knew had not exactly experienced it.
She poured out her soul, her vision of her country as the great democracy where each citizen was free to live the dream. She wrote convincingly of things that neither she nor anyone she knew had true access to.
In 1967, after experiencing the Detroit Riot, she came back home to Florida for a visit, full of the rage of almost all Blacks her age. She pulled out the essay, the one that made her mother so proud, and tore it to shreds in front of her parents’ unbelieving eyes.
As a young adult, painfully aware of what it meant to be Black in America, she could not believe she had written such sappy, ignorant thoughts about a concept that had no meaning or relevance for her. She hated herself for allowing whites to believe that what she dreamed or hoped for was theirs alone. She hated most that in her eagerness to impress she had surely fostered their sense of superiority; poor little Negro girl hoping for something she could never have.
"In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This is my reflection as a colored girl." This phrase opens each essay in the series “Reflections of a Colored Girl” from Martha R. Bireda, Ph.D. being aired on WGCU FM. Dr. Bireda is a writer, lecturer, and living history performer with over 30 years' experience as a lecturer, consultant and trainer for issues related to race, class, and gender, working with educators, law enforcement, and business, and civic leaders. She also is director of the Blanchard House Museum of African American History and Culture of Charlotte County, in Punta Gorda, Florida. Bireda was born in Southwest Florida in 1945 but spent the first 10 years of her life in a small town in Western Virginia. Her family then moved back to Punta Gorda, where they have deep roots. This is one essay in her series. Read more essays here.
