…As a young bright-eyed child, I was extremely proud of my family lineage. Just knowing I had something no other kid in my neighborhood had made me feel good inside. I had a grandfather, Jim, who was born in 1900, and I had a father, Elmer, who was born in 1928. They were born in Hayti, a small town in southeastern Missouri. …As a child visiting my grandparents’ home, I was completely amazed by the amount of farmland they owned. As I looked across their fields, I could not see another house for what appeared to be miles. At that time, I was too young to know or understand anything about sharecropping. …

I would learn later that after slavery was abolished, the early 1900s became an era in which Blacks were not entitled to justice of any kind. As best as I could remember, there were no such stories during my childhood. …In fact, my parents and grandparents did everything they could to shield me from the racism and discrimination that existed in America….

As a kindergartener in 1967, I was enrolled at Clark Branch No. 1, a school just two blocks from where I lived. Despite living in a Black neighborhood, I don’t remember if Clark Branch No. 1 was an all-Black school. I definitely don’t remember any white children being in my classroom. …But even if they did attend, I believed that the color of a person’s skin didn’t matter. …

In 1970, after I completed first grade, my parents told me that …I would be bussed across town to attend a white school on the city’s south side. As a young child, that made absolutely no sense to me, especially when there was a school in my neighborhood. Besides, a school was supposed to be a school regardless of where it was located. I didn’t know at the time that some schools (white) were better equipped than other (Black) schools. …While I was enrolled in white schools, I did the same thing that my parents did. I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see any racial or social injustice of any kind. My parents never took the time to tell me about the incident in which the National Guard was called in to prevent a Black student from attending an all-white school. …

When I was young, I did not believe that racial and social injustice existed….Prior to coming to prison, I totally believed in the American ideology that “All men are created equal,” and that under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment no one should be deprived of  “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Those were the things I was taught in those white schools and I believed in them. …

…However, despite the strides America has made and continues to make in social justice reforms, the events surrounding the 2020 presidential election and the January 6th insurrection only reaffirm that racism, prejudice, and social injustice are alive and well in America.