Nicki Bixler

A few journal entries:

01.08.01 I am really excited about the class, maybe a little nervous, but ready to create and show the community a wonderful project.. This is something I believe in. This is something important. I think that it is okay to be nervous about this. The fact that it will stir up emotions, opinions, ideas is wonderful! History is very important. It seems that Muncie does not look at its history very often, or at least the controversial part of its history. I am ready to hear the stories and I am excited that the community will hear the voices.

01.10.01 For ages, African-Americans have faced discrimination, but now Latinos face a lot of discrimination, although people don't talk about it very much. A lot of people make jokes about Mexicans and no one thinks anything of it. I know people who have made jokes about Mexicans before and I always say, "Hey, I have family members who are Mexican. It's not funny." They apologize and act like they didn't mean it. I know, though, that none of them would make jokes about African-Americans. Why is it okay to make insulting jokes about Hispanics? Or Asians for that matter.

01.28.01 One picture in at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham really got to me. It was a picture of the little girl who went in to integrate one of the schools. She is standing calmly in the picture, wearing a pretty dress and clutching her books. She is standing up straight and looking ahead. To both sides and behind her are white women with their arms in the air. Theirfaces are contorted into horrible positions and their mouths are open in mid-screams.

01.31.01 I called my dad to tell him about Birmingham, and he told me a story I had never heard. In junior high my dad was on the track team in a small town south of Bloomington. He was good friends with an African-American boy who was on another team. They knew each other because their schools always competed with one another. Well, one day my dad found out that the boy's house had burned down. This was in Indiana in the early sixties, probably 1961 or 1962. He had never told me this story before. I couldn't believe it. I wonder why my dad never told me this story before.

3.14.01 We are outsiders from Muncie. because we are college students in the year 2001, we cannot stray from the fact that we are putting a touch of our perceptions into the events at Southside in '67 and '68. We can portray those events by what we have been told in the interviews and by what we have researched, but I don't think that the play is going to be focused on facts. It is about voices, memories, ideas, perceptions.