Not Yet Free
It started out like any other day. I woke up with bags under my eyes from watching the game all last night, ate breakfast, turned on the TV. It had been left on the news channel from last night when my dad was watching it. I was about to turn the channel when something on the screen caught my eye. On the screen I saw a heading that read “Alton Sterling killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.” I was in shock. I started remembering past killings like Eric Garner in 2014, Mike Brown in 2014, and Trayvon Martin in 2012. I thought about how many black people have been shot and killed by police in the past 30 years.
I thought about how bad and terrible black people have been treated for the past 300 years. I learned in school that blacks were used as slaves and got beat and tortured for being black. They were “freed” by the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. Then I look at the past 50 years. All the racism that has happened in those years, shadows what the Emancipation Proclamation means to blacks. To us, it feels like we are not free.
I researched the death of Alton Sterling and it shows that he was doing nothing that went against the law. He was trying to sell CDs to people and try to get them to hear his music in front of a convenience store. Then someone reported that they saw a man in a red shirt(Alton Sterling)that "threatened a customer with a gun". I saw the video of when the police shot him. It was horrible.
As a thirteen-year-old black young man, I got scared. I got scared for me, my dad, and my brother. I started to think about what would happen if I came across a cop. What do I do? Do I call somebody to help? Would anything happen to me if I came across a bad cop? All these thoughts came to mind.