Thomas Merritt - On fighting for civil rights (clip)

MCJC Staff: “At the same time, kids in town were fighting for civil rights?”

Thomas Merritt: “Yes. They were fighting for civil rights because they wanted to go places and to be free to go places and do things. Dairy Queen [chuckle]. Down at the bottom of Franklin Street, in the dirt parking lot down there. You had to go around the back because they wouldn’t serve you in the front – ‘colored and white’ water, bus stations, all this stuff. Nobody had put it out there, it had never blown up like it did. You were separating people and it was intentionally done. See when you understand how the system is run, this whole country was set up that way, to keep you at each other’s throats. So, the divide and conquer type thing. We’re fighting each other’s throats, not realizing we look like one another. Yet still we have been torn and just pitted [against] each other. So now we look at, why was that? In order to put us in bondage, we’re all in bondage not realizing it. We’re all enslaved.”

MCJC Staff: “Say more about how the system is set up that way, where do you see that happening?”

Thomas Merritt: “The system is a slave-mentality government. What they’ve done, in order to keep us in poverty – you can only make so much money, they would only allow you to make so much money, teach you so much. But when you understand what’s being taught, it’s not what should be taught to you. You don’t know the history of the Black man, you don’t know the history of the Indians. All of what we know what they told us. When you get out of your box and do your research, you’ll find out it’s an entirely different story…it’s an evil system to keep us at each other’s throats. So now we’re fighting amongst ourselves, we’re angry at each other. And now we see black and white crime, a lot of this stuff was started by the government. Whether you believe it or not, check it out. A lot of this stuff was done to keep us at each other’s throats – divide and conquer.”