Thursday, September 4, 2008
Unknown Separation
Today I was given a mission, and that was to explore the exciting GTA bus system. As soon as class ended I headed out to the Bus stop with Leah, Heather, Sara, and Anna, located at Anna's house. The was a small sign up with the route number on it, and with my experienced skills at bus riding I immediately knew that route 2 would lead us to Four Seasons town center. We ended up having to call the bus number to pick us up and surprisingly the bus came literally within seconds of receiving our call and location. Once the bus arrived I was pushed along quickly after I swiped my card by the Bus drivers impatient motives. Apparently we were causing the bus to by slightly delayed due to an off route call. I could see on the looks of everybodies faces that they were not happy with us. Well I felt bad, but hey, its the way things worked out, so what? After quickly absorbing the torrential downfall of frowns, I sat down comfortably in a hard plastic shelled seat. Definitely not the best seat in the world, and my survival rate dropped due to the lack of passenger protection gear such as the commonly known seat belt. I understand I'm riding this bus at my own risk, and also the fact that unless this bus plowed off a cliff or got jacked by terrorists, I was quite safe. Moving on past the physical feeling of being on the bus, I'll let you know that it smelled like the fumes from a dirty lawnmower. I didn't hear many people talking, so I assumed the passengers were on there way to work, or heading home for the evening. If i were to describe some of the people then I would say most of them were predominately African American. I actually didn't read the excerpt about the sit-ins in greensboro before going onto the bus, due to a time crunch. However after just reading over it, I've realized that things now seem to be very equal, but not at the same time. I couldn't understand why Most kids at A&T are African American still, and there is a white minority. I have a few friends who go there and they are African American. I asked them why they didn't choose to go to NC state or some other school for engineering and they told me because they were familiar with the school. From the reading it seemed that alot of African Americans were applying to get into white school and were denied, and now that the restrictions are lifted things are still very similar...to some extent. Back to the bus though, It was a curious sight to see only African Americans on the bus besides ourselves. I'm not sure why, but my first guess was not joy riding around Greensboro like myself. The bus returned to the depot where we proceeded to get off and explore the area. The first stop was the Greensboro train station. The station itself was impressive, it had high vaulted ceiling, and many rows of large wooden benches. These benches stretched half the room, where only 4 or 5 people actually were sitting on them. My observation would be that public transportation has changed alot since the car came along, and trains are no longer a reliable source of transportation due to it. Again much like the bus, most of the people in there were African american, and again I realize that although many things have changed an unknown segregation still lays before us. This occurs in school, in work, and even in transportation.
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