My People Are Rising Read online

  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 on his quest to become the most famous guitarist in history, and which Bruce Lee had adopted as his own. Though not an alum, Lee had developed an attachment to Garfield, with its wonderful mix of Black and Asian and white students. He lived in Seattle for several years and often came by to greet some of his martial arts students or simply to hang out.

  Garfield’s student body was mostly Black and the rest a mix of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and whites. The staff was well-blended, with whites, Blacks, and a few Asians. In many ways it was the ideal school for the ’60s—a place where no matter your color or beliefs, you could feel free to express yourself. Here were the best musicians, the best athletes, some of the city’s best teachers, the best example of racial harmony, and a rich tradition of openness. It was here at Garfield that my identity had an opportunity to grow and flourish. I could explore and search, discover who I was and why I was here on this earth. I found a new circle of friends, and over the next couple of years we played sports together, got drunk together, and philosophized about our future and the world.

  At Garfield, there were old-school teachers and new-style, “hip” teachers. The old-school teachers, some of whom carried paddles, went around intimidating students. The new style was embodied by Mr. Peoples, the young, white, sharply dressed math teacher and track coach who was much better at teaching us about social development and dressing well than teaching math. He was very well-liked by the students and was able to set a good example for us young guys because he acted like one of us. On the other end of the spectrum was Mrs. Hundley, a tall, light-skinned Black woman who never smiled. The word was out that she did not take any mess. There was no idle chatter or laughter in her class. She got the most out of you, whether you wanted to give it or not. A throwback to the old days when Black folks relied on their own initiative, understanding that hard work paid off, she was easily the best teacher I ever had. We read the classics and through her I learned the love of literature.

  Mrs. Woodson, the tall, Black, rail-thin student counselor, called me into her office one day during my senior year. I had been skipping a lot and getting into some trouble—for example, being kicked out of art class for starting a clay fight—and being sent to study hall far too often. Mrs. Woodson had never said much to me. But what she said that day angered me and woke me up.

  She said, “Aaron, you are not going to college. You are just not college material.”

  Those words stuck in my mind like lead. Mommy and Poppy had always told us we were going to college. I guess I had just assumed that I would go. But my GPA at that point was a pitiful 2.0, not high enough for me to be accepted into college.

  Not only was my GPA merely average, but I was also short on credits, meaning that if I failed or dropped even one class, I would not graduate. I knew that Mommy and Poppy would not be pleased with that. But it was the words of Mrs. Woodson that burned inside my head. I realized I had to buckle down, and the remainder of the year I did. I still worked at Swedish and had fun with my friends, but I made sure my studies were taken care of. Even so, I still did not put in a lot of time on homework, doing most of it during school so it would not interfere with those long hours up at the Madrona basketball and tennis courts.

  Besides hanging out with my friends, sports were the most important activities in my life. By now, football had taken a back seat to basketball and tennis. Every warm day during the school year, the ballplayers congregated up at Madrona Park. College players from Seattle University, high school players for Garfield and Franklin, varsity rejects like me and my buddies Mike Dean and Chester and Michael Childs, we were all there, waiting for an opportunity to get on the court and show our skills, waiting for winners, sweating, pushing, shoving, jumping, scoring, rebounding—and sometimes fighting. I had become known for my rebounding, my fearlessness beneath the boards, and my tenacious defense against older and bigger opponents. Sometimes we were out playing until sunset. Some of the guys even stayed out way past nightfall. I remember lying in bed, hearing the sound of the leather ball bouncing on the concrete, and wondering who was still out on the court. Sports had become an increasingly important focus for me at this time. They gave me a sense of purpose; I could direct all my energy onto the basketball court, the tennis court, or the football field. I was fearless when playing sports—it was the one area where I had almost complete control and a healthy confidence in my abilities. But there were other, more important things on the horizon for which my skills would prove to be best suited.

  Something was brewing in America, something that had begun hundreds of years earlier when Black slaves were brought to the shores of the New World. It was something unavoidable, something that could no longer be held down. The Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s had ushered in the beginning of the end of segregation and outright racial discrimination. And it was my generation—not only young Blacks, but also young whites and other young people of color—who sat at home watching the shaky black-and-white television images, steadied by rabbit-ear antennas, of Southern Blacks integrating universities, schools, buses, restaurants, movie theaters: establishments and institutions that had failed to recognize Blacks as equal human beings. These images penetrated our young minds, informing our visions of our future.

  The ’60s had begun with one of the most unsettling events in US history, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic president, embodied possibility and hope, a break with the conservative ’50s and President Eisenhower. To many Black people, Kennedy represented an opening, a ray of light on a dark, ugly past. Many felt that at last there was someone in the White House who understood us, who cared about us, who spoke with his own words and not those of the power- and money-hungry moguls that infested the political scene. We had been lied to for so long. Finally, we thought we would get the truth.

  But Camelot was short-lived. On November 22, 1963, thousands of Americans gathered in starched dresses and pressed slacks and ties to watch their beloved president’s car pass by in Dallas. Millions of other Americans were watching the parade on TV in their homes. Suddenly Kennedy slumped over onto his wife’s lap with blood gushing from a bullet wound to his throat. Americans were in shock, stunned as they witnessed their president being shot in front of them, out in the open, in broad daylight. It was a heavy, terrible day. Like most of my peers, I was too young to comprehend the events that happened before our eyes, but our
parents’ sorrow and despair was transferred to us. It was the first and only time I saw Poppy cry, crying in anger, throwing chairs, books, barely able to hold himself up under the strain and sorrow.

  Little did we know that 1963 marked only the beginning of a very violent decade. Earlier that same year, Medgar Evers was assassinated. Evers was as important to the Civil Rights Movement as Martin Luther King Jr. and had become familiar to every Black home in America. His leadership and tenacity would never be with us again. In 1966, the most feared Black man in America was assassinated: Malcolm X, tall, persuasive, sharp, strong, fearless, a brilliant man many of us had not even had the opportunity to know. It was only afterward that we realized we’d had a genuine diamond in our midst, an authentic Black American hero who could have helped shape a positive future for this country.

  A year earlier, in 1965, white policemen in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles stopped and arrested a Black motorist, Marquette Frye, on suspicion of driving under the influence and proceeded to beat him violently as well as his mother, who lived nearby and tried to intervene. It was also rumored that, in the preceding days, the Watts police had roughed up a pregnant Black woman. These events ignited the first of many violent riots to rock the nation. The Watts Uprising woke up America. Blacks rioted for five days, burning down establishments that had exploited Black people far too long, sniping at racist cops, rampaging through the streets, liberating TVs, clothes, food, and guns, throwing Molotov cocktails, leaving behind a wasteland.

  Thousands of miles away, young Americans were being sent to hostile, hot jungles, armed with M-14s, trained to kill Vietnamese men and women because they dared to fight for the unification of their country. Older boys I had grown up with were now absent from the neighborhood, no longer on the basketball court or the football field but in the trenches, muddy, bloody, and slowly becoming bloodthirsty for an enemy they did not know. Many would never return.

  I managed to stay disconnected from all the chaos, yet it was slowly seeping into my subconscious. In other parts of the country, new Black organizations were sprouting up. Black Nationalism, which rejected white culture and made its primary concern the improvement of the conditions of Black people, was just beginning to emerge. Its focus was on Black independence and self-determination.

  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 c
oncern 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.