Your soul’s intact
—Nina Simone, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” 1970
My sophomore year as a voluntary integrator was a disaster. Seeing my dream of being a havoc-raising linebacker extinguished was difficult enough. But running into the big brick wall of racism was a rude awakening.
It had always been there, weaving its way in and out of our family’s history. I first got a glimpse of this ugly monster in the late 1950s as a seven- or eight-year-old, mostly on Friday nights after the Friday night fights on TV were over, and our fried fish dinner had long since been digested. I saw Mommy and Poppy’s sad faces. They knew full well that their Black, muscular fighters, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, and countless others, despite the thrashings they gave their white opponents, had been robbed, cheated out of victory by bigoted referees and judges. They never said anything about it to us kids. They never demeaned whites. They just continued working to provide us with a sense of freedom that they and their parents never had.
Poppy would come home from work at Boeing filled with rage from dealing with some petty racism. One day while he was driving home and stuck in traffic, someone drove by and shouted, “Nigger!” Poppy lost his cool, got out of his car, grabbed rocks, sticks, anything he could throw, and propelled it all after the bastard, who was long gone. Had he been able to get to the white man, Poppy would surely have hurt him—which is exactly why Poppy never owned a functioning gun and never wanted one around. I could understand why, when he came home, he reached for a highball. It helped to defuse the anger, to hold at bay the deep rage and the memories of war.
Mommy also had her share of stories of being told lies such as “No, we don’t have any jobs open,” despite a sign stating the contrary. And down from our house, there was the Lake Washington Realty office on the corner of 34th and Union, with the little, skinny, pale, spectacled white lady behind the desk who let it be known that she did not do business with Blacks or Asians. As kids, we knew every other business owner in Madrona on a first-name basis, but we never ventured inside that real estate office.
For the most part, Seattle was different from a lot of places in the United States at the time. Racism was not out in the open, staring you in the face, thrusting you into confrontations or forcing you to question your own integrity. Nevertheless, it was there, hidden, mostly in faraway neighborhoods, in the souls and the hearts of misguided, miseducated, and misinformed white men and women. I remember listening to the older teenagers in the neighborhood as they shared their battle stories of venturing out of the Central District, our safe haven, going to neighborhoods like Ballard, Queen Anne, and Shoreline, and being attacked by bat-waving, “nigger”-yelling white boys—and how, afterward, they would load up in three or four cars and drive back out to seek revenge. Always carry a bat with you, they said, and be ready to run. Then there was the unsettling story of the Black lady raped by a gang of white policemen, with nothing ever said or done about it, which created a sense of helplessness in our young minds.
At the end of one of our summer trips, we were driving back from Chicago. Poppy had driven the length of Montana, a grueling stretch. We reached Deer Lodge, a small cowboy town. Poppy spotted a motel with a “Vacancy” sign, pulled into the lot, and went in. He was dog-tired and limping from a ruptured Achilles tendon, which he had injured before the trip.
When the man at the front desk told him he didn’t have any rooms available, Poppy got that crazy look on his face. It was the kind of look that a man gets when he has had enough of talking and is prepared to take action, like I will tear you and this motel apart if I don’t get a room. I’m not sure what Poppy said, but he put it to this jag-jaw cowboy in no uncertain terms that he was tired, his family was tired, and he’d better get a room or else. Later that night, as Poppy, Elmer, Michael, and I walked to a nearby store, the sheriff followed us around, peeping at us from behind corners as if we were going to blow up the town.
Up on Madrona, we kids were largely insulated from the tentacles of racism. It was only when we ventured out that it reached us. Sometimes when we had softball games in a distant, white, working-class neighborhood, things got tense. Sometimes the older kids got into fights. Or there were the questionable ball calls that always went against us. Over time, we seemingly became conditioned to such things.
The biggest slap in the face came after our tennis team qualified for the Parks Department city championship, which was held at the Seattle Tennis Club, a prestigious club on Lake Washington. Only a few years earlier the same club had denied access to the greatest Mexican American tennis player of all time, Pancho Gonzales. Everybody on our tennis team was Black, with the exception of one Jewish boy, Marty, who always wore a yarmulke. Nobody was sure where Marty went to school and we didn’t know the actual location of his house. We just knew he was a heck of an athlete, and we were always glad to see him up at the park. He was a phenomenal left-handed quarterback, a solid pitcher on the softball team, and one of the better singles tennis players in our age group up at Madrona.
I don’t think the Seattle Tennis Club was prepared to have a young all-minority team competing on their clean, smooth, green courts, and they were even more surprised when we took first place, soundly defeating all comers. Besides receiving trophies, we were supposed to get lunch in the club dining room and a free swim in the Olympic-sized pool. To our astonishment, with the exception of Marty they would not allow us in the restaurant or the pool. Instead, they brought hot dogs out to us and directed us down to the beach, while we watched the white kids we had defeated being led into the club dining room. In the moment, we were so excited about our victory we didn’t have time to think about what they were doing to us, but Elmer and I would not forget.
At Queen Anne, my 2.5 grade point average plummeted to a 1.5. My typing teacher flunked me because my wrist, badly sprained from playing football, made typing impossible. My math teacher, who never answered my questions, gave me an E—the equivalent of an F, or Fail. Many of the kids I had known and played with at Denny Blaine the year before were now distant and unfriendly.
A turning point came in late February of my sophomore year, during the city high school basketball championship game, held at Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington. Garfield, the predominantly Black school my neighborhood friends attended, was playing against Queen Anne, the all-white school where I was enrolled. The game seesawed back and forth, going down to the wire. I sat with my friends on the Garfield side, stomping our feet as we cheered our Black warriors to victory, holding our breath, our hearts in our throats, wondering if victory would be denied as it so often was. When Black folks competed against whites in sports, it represented much more than a sporting event—it was a declaration of equality, a silent demand that one’s right to exist be recognized.
With five seconds to go, Garfield had a three-point lead and had the ball. We were all sitting there, wondering what could go wrong. Garfield had been denied the city championship so many times in the past. Then, right before our eyes, it happened. A phantom foul was called on a Garfield player, giving the ball back to Queen Anne. And the referees even added another five seconds to the clock. Queen Anne ended up winning the game by one point. We were stunned, outraged at how blatantly victory had been stolen out of the hands of the Garfield players. I went home feeling very sick about the injustice of the game.
When I went to school the next day I noticed that a lot of students were absent. I also noticed that the white kids were looking at me strangely, staring at me like I had shit on my back. During the course of the day I heard stories of how the white kids from Queen Anne were attacked and beaten after the game, some dangled from the Montlake Bridge, others chased to unsuspecting homes. The Black Garfield students had gone on a rampage, declaring through their actions that they would no longer tolerate blatant racism without there being some form of retribution. The remainder of my year at Queen Anne was very tense. The handful of Black students stayed closer to each other, everyone vowing not to return the following year. The rivalry between Garfield and Queen Anne had always been intense. After this incident, whenever we played on each other’s turf, violence broke out.
In 1966, my junior year, I gave up on voluntary integration and came back to the community to attend Garfield, where Quincy Jones had honed his musical skills, where Jimi Hendrix was enrolled before dropping out to embark