Of Quiet Birds

OF QUIET BIRDS The year is 1955. Slavery has ended almost a hundred years ago. The plan of the United States government to give each freed slave forty acres of land and a mule is a long ago broken promise. Most of those who had been slaves are dead now, but their narratives of misery and horror lay latent in the minds and souls of those who came after. The memory of it keeps many blacks in check. All over the south, Blacks are oppressed and segregated. They are barred from restaurants, voting booths, public toilets, parks, swimming pools, beaches, hotels, theaters, and many stores. Upon this scene, less than a decade earlier, had come, quietly and without fanfare, the most powerful technological force of the twentieth century: television, allowing an entire nation to see, where before it could only imagine. It captures this scenario of sickness in the south, cuts it open and lays its disease bare for all the world to see, and with that new vision comes a new discontentment, an alien disquietude and a David and Goliath sense of hope and determination to once and for all, put the ancient monster to rest. Loretta A. Hawkins is an American playwright, author, poet, spoken-word artist and retired educator. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.