ColvenComp1ExamplesOfDiaryEntry

** August 26, 1963 ** // Today I found out I was going to an integrated school. I feel my life will be better, but I am also worried of what the kids will think of me. Their parents are very upset and protesting outside the school. I have mixed feelings about it. I know that if I want to fulfill my dream of becoming a black lawyer, I will need a great education and have to work hard. My life will be nothing without education. // ** August 27, 1963 ** // I just got home from school. It was terrifying. I am usually proud of who I am, but my classmates made me feel ashamed. No one would speak to me and I felt like an outcast. I should have stayed at my old school. I'm never going to be able to become a lawyer learning like this. How could I have thought this would work out? This was the worst day of my life. // **  This journal entry was by Martin Luther King Jr. and later used in a speech:  ** ** April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC **"Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."
 * The following two are from a young black girl going to an integrated school for the first time: **