Memoirs of a Revolution Experience Through Poetry and Poems

By Lulu Westbrook Griffin

70

Memoirs containing poems/poetry of a revolution experience in the lives of many colored people living in this southwestern town of Georgia during the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by the Jim Crow laws.

This were a form of segregation and separatism—mildly racism! Many young students and other coloreds/Negroes/blacks took a stand against hatred, blatant persecution perpetrated by militants, Southern whites, supremacists groups, and racists. This book is written in hopes of sharing the true history of a thirteen-year-old in the articulation of a firsthand experience during the 1960s Civil Rights movement in which the atrocities, the jails, the beatings, and suffering of many children, students, families, and others that lived during this time there grew up out of an innocent experience—a changing of laws and voting rights came out of this revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662403521

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Memoirs of a Revolution Experience Through Poetry and Poems

Lulu Westbrook Griffin

Copyright © 2020 Lulu Westbrook Griffin

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-0351-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-0353-8 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-0352-1 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Be

Father, Dedicated to You

Mama Dearest

Memory of a Loved One

Sister, Sister

Thoughts

Birthday Wish

Black Men: Make the Difference

Days of the Week

Breathless

The Earth

Free Spirit

If I Had My Way

I

Imagine

Shadow

Shakespeare

Smile

Springtime

Words

Angels

Easter

Faith

Hope

I’m Free

My Plea

Poem for a Small Child

Success

The Bible

My Soul

Down in My Soul

The Word

Forever

Friend

Love Is

My Valentine

Struttin’ Right Up

Africa

Discrimination Among Coloreds/Blacks (The Shade of Skin Tone)

Justice Let It Stand

Martin L. King and Elvis, the King of Rock

Once Upon a Time

Stand For What You Believe

Move On

Po’ Man

Barefoot

Children

My Town

Summertime

Leesburg Memories

Americus, Georgia in ’63

Thirteen Is Ten plus Three

Misery

Memories of the Stockade

Traumatized

Black Night

After My Release from the Stockade

Reminiscence (Incarceration: 1965 Civil Rights)

Transition

Introduction

The early years of my life was racially divided because of the Jim Crow laws in my hometown of Americus, Georgia. During the fifties and sixties, tired colored people (at that era), the Southern terminology for black people / African American, were struggling to live in a dominated white society. The inferiority and subordination, one would say.

My reminiscence of my people’s daily life was a very passive one. Economically, educationally (if there be a word), and socially speaking, or lack of these things, render them useless.

I was born pre-Civil Rights days into my psyche of blatant, obvious signs of segregation and words of segregation posted over public restrooms, water fountains, entrances at back doors of buildings with a white hand pointing that showed us where we were to enter.

The vestiges of colonial laws had all spurned from a slave mentality. I lived on a red dirt road in