Photo copied from britanica.com/transatlantic-slave-trade
There is a tremendous amount of confusion in the United States today about what books should be allowed on the shelves of our educational institutions – and ESPECIALLY IN THE STATE OF FLORIDA!
A lot has changed since I first started my education in a one-room schoolhouse in the State of New Jersey in 1942. New words are being used these days, and old words have new meanings. When I was growing up the work “WOKE” was simply the past tense of “awake.” Today, according to Merriam-Webster, it means “Awareness of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”
Back then “CRT” was a can of lubricant stored on a shelf in the shed. Today, CRT stands for “CRITICAL RACE THEORY” – “AN ACADEMIC AND LEGAL FRAMEWORK THAT DENOTES THAT SYSTEMIC RACISM IS PART OF AMERICAN SOCIETY – from Education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory (now) recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is imbedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to the LDF Legal Defense Fund, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school to prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the rates of death of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies.” (https://www.naacpldf.org).
I began my education while living with my grandparents in a small farming village in the Southern part of New Jersey. Our neighbors were all white immigrants, mostly European and Italian. There was one Japanese family and one Colored family living on a side-road a few miles away; and both families had lots of children. My biological father ran away from home and joined the Army when I was 3 years old. Since there was no work to be had for a woman educated in the occupation of a secretary, “Mom” moved to the city so that she could get a job, earn money, and help to support my grandparents and me (or, so I had been told).
Sadly, my grandmother passed away during Christmas Week in 1946. I had 4 wonderful Great Aunts that looked after me while my grandfather worked and until my mother could be located. Mom had met a Sailor from Florida that was on leave in Atlantic City and apparently took off with him. That is really another whole story to be told at a later date, but a part of that story needs to be included in this post. My great aunts were able to locate my mother from an address on an envelope that she mailed to my grandmother. When they contacted her, she made the necessary arrangements for me to move to Miami, Florida, and – as soon as school was out in June of 1947 – I traveled by train to Miami where I met the man that would become known to me as my stepfather. They were living in a poor neighborhood of wooden cottages sitting on concrete block just across the street from a Miami Transit Bus Yard. The neighborhood was known among its inhabitants as “TRASH ALLEY.” The residents of Trash Alley were all white; no Black or Brown.
Not long after meeting my stepfather I heard the “N” word for the 1st time in my life. It did not take me long to learn that he hated almost everyone. He hated Black people, Brown people, Jews – especially Jews – he once let a piglet loose in the lobby of the world famous Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida (it was a haven for wealthy Jewish people vacationing in Miami Beach in those days). He also hated Muslims, and as I would soon come to learn, he hated me, too! I did not realize it in my youth, but, surprisingly, he was a “Half-breed!” His mother was a Seminole Indian woman that had married a big Swedish man and she was very BROWN; actually a dark copper color with straight black hair! (She passed away many years ago and is buried in a cemetery in Volusia County, Florida).
Gertrude Freeze Udgreen circa 1951
When I arrived in Florida I spent the summer of 1947 learning about my new environment; walking with my mother to a City Park along the banks of the Miami River; learning about the local flora and fauna, watching the old men fishing with cane poles on the banks of Biscayne Bay, and making at least one friend among the neighborhood children. In September, I began attending a nearby school – and, boy, was I in for a shock. My fellow students, the boys and girls that attended my new school, where ALL WHITE. NO “COLORED KIDS” (although most of the children were deeply tanned from playing out of doors all summer long while wearing shorts and light cotton shirts). This was my first introduction to SEGREGATION. Once I graduated from the neighborhood 1-room schoolhouse that I attended in New Jersey, I began riding a school bus to a nearby brick school that taught older children and I went to class with several boys and girls of color. When I asked another boy why there were no “colored” kids in class, he replied, “You mean NIGGERS?” “We don’t allow no BLACK KIDS in here!” For the next 6 years, until I returned to New Jersey in 1953, I lived in a “WHITE WORLD.” The schools, the stores, the theatres, the beaches, *Public Transportation, were all inhabited or attended by WHITE PEOPLE. *(Miami Transit buses had signs posted just inside the front door directing Negroes to sit in the rear of the bus just behind the rear door. If they refused they were ordered off the bus, and if they tried to make trouble the bus drivers carried revolvers in their cash boxes and were not afraid to use them)
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/segregation-united-states#housing-segregation
To reiterate: BANNING BOOKS MAY HIDE OUR HISTORY FROM VIEW, BUT IT WILL NEVER ERASE IT
(for there will always be someone {like me} that will remember what happened and pass that information on to their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, ETC!)
ARTHUR FREEZE UDGREEN was the sailor that my mother ran off with – the man that would become my stepfather; a man that hated almost everybody. A man that belonged to the Klu Klux Klan, and a man that participated in the dynamiting of the Carver Village in Miami, Florida, on November 30, 1951. Carver Village was formerly a WHITE housing community that opened up to BLACKS in August of 1951
Finally, on October 6, 1952, over a year after the first bomb was set,
Attorney General James P. McGranery asked a federal grand jury to
review the evidence gathered by the F.B.I. concerning Carver Village
bombings. McGranery stated that he believed “there have been viola-
tions of the Civil Rights statutes…and other federal laws.” 35 The jury
thought that the testimony on Carver Village would take approximately
three weeks. The first witnesses to testify were the F.B.I. agents who
had investigated the possible civil rights violations at Carver Village.
The jury also ordered twelve other witnesses to produce all records of
the John B. Gordon Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan in Hialeah. On
December 9, two months later, the federal grand jury returned indict-
ments against four people; three men and a woman: William G. Orwick
Harvey G. DeRosier, Arthur F. Udgreen, and Mrs. Helen Russell. AL
four surrendered to federal authorities after being indicted for pel
jury. 36
(Text copied from “The Carver Village Controversy – Digital Collection Center (published September 14, 2016
We cannot make something bad go away by pretending that it did not happen, nor by banning books and publications about the events of our countries past, and there is a lot more at stake here than just BLACK, BROWN & WHITE issues. One cannot make the horrors of the Holocaust of WWII go away by pretending that it did not happen. Hitler was directly responsible for the murder of an estimated 6 MILLION JEWISH MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDEN;
A number of Native American Indians estimated to be between 2,500 and 6,000 people died or were massacred along “The Trail of Tears” during attempts to remove and or relocate them:
One cannot ignore the fact that Child Labor existed in the United States during the Industrial Revolution between 1870’s and the 1930’s, when children ages 10 to 12 (and even younger) were forced to work long hours under terrible working conditions:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.1
—Sarah N. Cleghorn
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm
The Breaker Boys (8 to 12) Match Girls (13 to 16) and the Newsies often worked 10 hour days or longer during the Industrial Revoltion:
(Newspapehttps://www.ducksters.com/history/us_1800s/breaker_boys_matchgirls_newsies.phpr boys)
Nor can we forget that somewhere between an estimated 129,000 and 226,000 MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDEN, died during the nuclear bombins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
Attached below is a link to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ STOP WOKE ACT. Read it carefully and decide for yourself what it means to you and to people of all ages that will be attending Florida Educational Institutions in the future!!! While I do not believe that this act directly prevents the teaching of sensitive racial and social issues it appears that it might very well do just that. It is my belief that our children and their children must know about the many horrific injustices that have been committed in the history of our country – our world – in order to prevent these things from happening again!
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/2167/stop-w-o-k-e-act
This act, known as “The Stop Woke Act” was passed in January of 2023
thesumofme2 
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