Rosewood. Rosewood. I'd never seen it before, and we watched it. I don't
know if I need to give a plot line for the movie, but it's about a black
settlement rising up and being successful, and a white settlement sort
of moving in and antagonizing the black settlement. There's a show down,
and a lot of white people are killed. To see, I don't want to say joy,
but to see the satisfaction that was gotten by watching that movie by
the black kids where it was almost like that was the right thing to do,
to have a massacre of white people. I got mad. I said, "How is that
possible? That's not right." And I talked with Jeff Black who's a black
kid on SEC and just won the Morehead scholarship. I was talking with him
about it, and I said, "How can that be okay? How can it be all right for
anyone to kill anybody?" And he said, "Well, Ned, you know black people
were in slavery for about three hundred years before that. Three hundred
years of aggression building up to twenty white people dying. For us
that's a," he said, "small victory," but I don't think he meant killing
white people was a victory, but that fighting back, having a
Page 15voice and standing up was a small victory. For me,
I sort of thought, "Well, okay. I guess you're right." And after that I
reflected on it, and thought, "I guess I don't want to think that black
people have a right to have a distaste for me because I'm white, but
they sort of do because of the history of this country." I don't want
that to be that way, but that's how it is, and I have a greater
understanding of that now.