A Vietnam Veteran who served 29 years in the U.S. Army recently recounted his experience with racism in a supermarket parking lot.
"It was pretty dramatic. It's destroyed me," 73-year-old Eugene L. Brice, a member of the Springfield chapter of the National Association of Black Veterans, told MassLive.
"I pulled into the handicapped spot at the Big Y in East Longmeadow. I do my own shopping and for my wife," Brice said. "A woman pulled beside me and crossed halfway over the lines. I asked her to move so I could use my ramp to get out of the car."
While the woman did move, she didn't give Brice enough room to exit his car, prompting him to ask her again, to which she responded, "Mind your own business." But then what happened next moved Brice to tears.
"The woman said, 'N----, just keep on moving.' She said that several times," said Brice, who uses a mobility scooter to get around. He also said that the woman physically threatened him.
"I was sitting in the scooter, and I was very vulnerable. I was scared and afraid if I said something, it might escalate," Brice said.
Once he was inside the store, Brice's ordeal wasn't over yet.
"I tried to buy some ice cream, but I was shaking and I couldn't talk," he said, adding that a white man who saw the incident told the woman that if Brice had stayed "with his own kind" — it wouldn't have happened.
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