<\/p>\n
Gloria Thatch-Woody, a Mancos resident, shared civil-rights movement history and her personal experience with racial violence with several grades in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday.<\/p>\n
During 1953, she said, four white men terrorized her and her teenage friends, while in a predominantly white Chicago neighborhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey started calling us all kinds of really terrible names,\u201d she said to a wide-eyed classroom of students.<\/p>\n
Then they beat the back of the car with baseball bats and left a bat stuck in the back window as she drove away with her friends.<\/p>\n
She asked if this was fair. She was met with a resounding \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted them to feel I wasn\u2019t just talking, I knew what it felt like to have someone prejudice come after me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Thatch-Woody said she is one of three African-Americans in town and wanted the students to have an educational experience that they hadn\u2019t had at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have an obligation and a responsibility to allow people to have a firsthand experience with someone who is different, but not different really,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
During the course of the day, she spoke to about 198 students and emphasized the importance of nonviolence resistance using the well-known stories of Rosa Parks and lunch counter sit-ins.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t appreciate where you are, until you look where you come from,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
resident tells of personal experience with racial violence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1175,4912,13,961],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-59897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-discrimination","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-mancos-elementary-school"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59897"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=59897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}