Robert Holly Jr, is my uncle (my mother’s brother) whom I chose to speak as my interviewee.
Robert would now be 62 years old, born on the south side of Chicago. It was stated that he had been married twice and is no longer married. I specifically chose Robert because he is always open to share his remembrance of his past vividly. My uncle has never encountered any violence or racial discrimination directly but he remembers how he felt from seeing things through media and conventions he attended that included violence, discrimination and riots. During Robert’s earlier days; when he was too young to understand. He wondered why these things were happening and why our people were treated so poorly. “I felt inferior”,
Robert explained. “Nobody ever explained to me why we were mistreated”, Robert said.
Although he knew it was not right; he knew he could not do much about it because of his age at that time. So therefore, he so often thought that that was how it was supposed to be and that things would probably never change. Though, he wanted to change to come anyway. As he got older and attended high school (Fenger High school); he learned to cope with the things that were happening around him. Around that time, Dr. King’s movement had been going. Robert felt that it was ineffective and he did not pay much attention to the movement. I asked my uncle why did he feel that way. He replied, “violence, the violence was the only method of reasoning”. I took that as if he thought that growing up in chicago
; the only method of reasoning was through violent confrontation. “The only thing I did was try to forget and put it pass me”, Robert stated.
However, even though he learned how to cope with it; he still did not feel safe. He didn’t have security like we do now. He felt that he could not depend on the law back then. “I did not have reassurance”, he said. He never knew when the day would come when he would finally encounter any kind of disturbance on his way to and from school.
In 1968, My uncle Robert attended conventions and other things that he followed his peers into. At those conventions, he explains that there were riots that occurred and it made it
him
