One day I was out on the tennis courts perfecting my serve and my net game, aspiring to be the next Arthur Ashe, the first Black male professional tennis player. Mommy called out from the porch as she usually did that dinner was ready. I remember walking by the TV as the six o’clock news was broadcasting. Walter Cronkite was reporting that in Sacramento some Black men with guns had invaded the California capitol building. After dinner, as I walked back out to the tennis courts, I thought briefly about the image of the Black men with guns, feeling a tinge of pride and amazement. Then I forgot about it, yet the image stayed in the back of my mind.
7
Stokely Comes to Town
We’re people, we’re just like the birds and the bees We’d rather die on our feet Than be livin’ on our knees Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud
—James Brown, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” 1968
The Civil Rights Movement, initially led by Black Southern ministers, slowly began to hear other voices—voices of young Black men and women who were starting to question the tactic of nonviolent protest. With each march, with each fallen martyr, with each crack on the head by baton-wielding, racist policemen, these voices of dissent grew louder and louder.
Two of these voices soon emerged as new leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known by its acronym, SNCC (“snick”). Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were both fiery speakers, addressing the concerns of the emerging youth movement that was gradually picking up steam. SNCC, founded in 1960, was originally focused on desegregation and voter registration in the South, and exercised nonviolent protest methods such as sit-ins and marches. But under Stokely’s leadership, “Black Power” began to replace “We Shall Overcome.” Meeting violence with violence was put forth as an alternative to nonviolent protest. Stokely, who took over as chairman in 1965, and H. Rap, who succeeded Stokely in 1967, were eloquent as well as confrontational, unafraid to say aloud what many young people were feeling and thinking: “Whitey” was going to have to pay the consequences for two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of segregation. These two young rabble-rousers crisscrossed the country, speaking to college students, high school students, and Black communities, preaching this new empowerment. It wasn’t long before the clenched fist of Black Power became the new symbol of resistance, and soon the Black Power Movement took the lead from the floundering Civil Rights Movement, creating hysteria among whites and a lot of fear among older Blacks.
Stokely Carmichael came to Garfield to speak in the spring of 1967. There I was, sitting in the middle of the front row with Elmer and Mike Dean. We had gone out and bought some black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, just like the ones Stokely was so often seen in. We were excited and feeling defiant. The tall, lean brother came onstage and began to address the crowd, punctuating his speech with shouts of “Black Power!” as he raised a clenched fist. He talked about “Whitey” having had his day, and that it was our day now. He talked about the riots breaking out in Harlem and Chicago and Philadelphia, and that we had a right to burn white, racist businesses in retaliation for the many years of exploitation. He talked about the Black revolutionary leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Samora Machel in Mozambique, who were emerging to change the colonized land of Africa. The crowd went wild with Stokely’s every rebellious word. We left the Garfield auditorium with a much different view of whites than what we had before. A slow current of anger began to brew inside me, and to my mind whites were now the cause of all the problems that Black people faced.
I walked out of the auditorium transformed. I was not the same person who had entered. From that day forward, I looked at the world and everyone around me with anger and rage. I even looked at Mommy and Poppy differently. They no longer fit my frame of reality. Their views and ideas were not compatible with my new, angry, “Get Whitey” outlook. As a matter of fact, there were not many adults with whom I felt I could hold any real conversations. The anger I had held at bay for so long had now surfaced and was coming out whenever my emotions were challenged. Family conversations in the kitchen about politics often became heated, and I questioned Mommy and Poppy’s political beliefs.
My job at Swedish kept me financially independent. I had even been able to save up some money. But after listening to Stokely, my job did not seem that important anymore. There were issues beyond my personal realm that now took center stage. I began to look more closely at my interactions with whites, and since most of those interactions occurred on the job, I began to scrutinize every look, every word that I received from my white coworkers. Mrs. Gannen, the head supervisor of the kitchen at Swedish, had called on the first day of my senior year to tell me they were offering me a special position if I would work full-time rather than complete my senior year of high school. I handed the phone to Mommy. She cursed out Mrs. Gannen, telling her that school was more important than some damn job, and hung up on her. I began to reflect on Mrs. Gannen. She had shown what she thought of me—to her I was only worth a buck seventy-five an hour, as opposed to my going to college and being worth twenty-five to thirty thousand a year.
For the most part, the whites my friend Mike Dean and I worked with in the kitchen were friendly. But the dynamics were changing rapidly. And I was probably changing faster than most of the people around me. I had become super-sensitized to all the events taking place, in my own life and around the nation. All the stories I had heard from Mommy and Poppy and my grandparents, all that I had seen on the evening news, and my own personal sense of righteousness were coming to a head, threatening to erupt—just like those Black folks in Watts and Newark and Philadelphia, erupting without conscience, without concern for the results. Burning, destroying, even killing, lashing out like an angry, cornered dog.
I had started wearing my Black Power shades to work. My position was the most important on the food tray assembly line—I had to read the menus so the other workers could place the proper dietary dishes on each patient’s tray. With my sunglasses on, I messed up on more than one occasion. The white night supervisor was a rather rigid person, and after I’d made a few mistakes, she turned off the conveyer belt and asked me to take my glasses off. I refused; we got into a heated argument, and suddenly I exploded. All the anger I held against whites erupted like Mount Vesuvius, spewing out in words of profanity. When she threatened to send me home, I ripped off my apron, told her to kiss my ass, and called her words I had never said to an adult in my life. I stormed out of that place, never to return.
8
The Tide of the Movement
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember
My favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad
—Rodgers and Hammerstein, “My Favorite Things,” 1959
In June of 1967 I graduated from Garfield High with a 2.50 GPA. I celebrated like everyone else—partying and getting drunk. I remember, a week after graduation night, sitting on the long radiator in the living room, looking out the window at the park, where my childhood years seemed to slowly disappear. My head was foggy from another night of drinking with my friends Chester, Tony, and Mike as I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life.
“Aaron, you’re going to have to get a job or go to college. You can’t be sitting around here all day,” Mommy said while sweeping the living room. Even though I was eighteen and now a high school graduate, I still pretty much respected my parents’ words. I knew I was going to have to do something. But what, I did not know.
Without school and without a job, I had no sense of direction or purpose. Leroy Fair, one of the fastest football players in the neighborhood, and I had signed up to crew on a survey ship that traveled from Seattle to Hawaii and Alaska, but Poppy would not let me go. This made me terribly distraught. It would have been a childhood dream come true, an opportunity to travel the high seas and explore exotic, exciting