Thread by @MimZWay

This is a picture of the home my Mom & Dad bought in 1967 with money my dad earned working in Alaska.
Banks wouldn’t lend my parents money because they were black.
They couldn’t buy an existing house because of deed restrictions.
So they had this home built in Liverpool, NY.

This photo was taken during the first Easter in our home.
I’m on the far left in the green coat. From left to right is me, my Mom, my Aunt Stephanie, my sister Suzette, my Uncle Roland, my cousin Jimmy, my cousin Johnny and my cousin David.

The house was originally painted white. My Mom and Dad had to paint it brown because someone spray painted “Niggers” on the back of the house. My parents scraped the paint off the sliding glass doors and my dad quietly painted over the slur on the siding.

I remember the morning we woke up to our house being spray painted.
I was eating cereal in the kitchen when my Mom opened the curtains to the sliding glass doors. She saw the red paint and ran outside to look at what it said, and woke my dad up.

The person who took the time to purchase the paint and sneak over to our home in the middle of the night to do that is probably still alive. I wonder if they ever think about what they did, and how we felt knowing that someone had spent time & money to make us feel unwelcome.

My parents spent that day scrapping the paint off, and my dad took the next couple of weeks to paint the house brown, because they sprayed the entire back side of the house, and he didn’t want anything to show up again.

A few weeks later, someone threw a brick through my window.
It landed at the foot of my twin bed.
I was three years old, so it didn’t hit me.
My parents called the police and replaced the window.

Then someone ran over our lawn with their car.
They created ruts in our newly seeded lawn and destroyed the flowers my mother had planted. My dad found large rocks and painted them white. He placed them along the front edge of our yard, so no one would drive over our lawn again.

My dad put up a swing set. It had two swings, a slide and a rocking double seat. My sister and I were thrilled! We played on that thing all day long.

The next morning we discovered that someone had knocked it over.

My dad dug deeper holes to anchor it, and added cement.

Growing up, I didn’t realize that these things didn’t happen to everyone.

My parents sheltered us from racism.

But something deep in me must have known something was terribly wrong - because I remember.

I remember my mom tying her hair back in a scarf to scrape paint.

I remember my Mom’s gasp when she saw the paint on our sliding glass doors.
I remember the tightening of my dad’s jaw as he placed the stones along the edge of our front yard.
I remember my Mom & Dad pulling me from my bedroom in the night with glass shattered on my bed spread.

What I don’t want is another child to ever experience this.
Whether Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, Black, Hispanic, White, Gay, Transgender.
I don’t want any other family to go through what mine went through.

Watching videos of Nazis and White Supremists marching in the streets feeling empowered & justified. Seeing videos of people feeling comfortable telling others to “Go back to - Mexico, Africa, Puerto Rico, etc.” make me feel sick.

We are humans.
We live on the same planet.
We all want the same thing.
We want our children to have a better life. To be happy. To laugh and smile.
Children should not live in fear.
Children should not be in cages.
This shouldn’t even be a debate.

This shouldn’t even be a debate.

My mom just corrected me. The house was always brown. The paint wasn’t red spray paint - it was black tar - and my parents scraped and scrubbed it off - then put up a fence. My memory of painting must have been the fence. We also got a dog.