The most racist day of my life…

Last weekend I saw one of my best friends from high school, Jonathan Lee (pictured next to me below), for the first time since the day we graduated nearly 32 years ago. What a rush! Pair that with the celebration of MLK day a couple days later, and I felt it was finally time to tell this story. It’s somewhat painful to write, but here goes…

My first day of class in the tenth grade, August of 1979, was a terrifying shock to my reality. The previous year, my Dad had lost his 10+ year truck-driving job delivering boxes of frozen hot dogs and bologna all over the state of Georgia for Oscar Mayer. Some management type in Wisconsin decided to layoff all their truck drivers and outsource that task to save on overhead costs like truck maintenance, fuel, employee health insurance and other benefits on which a working class family depends (like, say, a salary). In the months that followed I watched my Dad, his pride crippled and scrambling for ideas to keep us afloat, concoct the plan to move us back to Los Angeles, from which we had escaped to the more primitive South when I was only five. He then put our nearly-new house on the market.  But we lived in Riverdale which at the time was the most southern leading edge of white suburbia in metro Atlanta, a stick’s throw from the sticks, and one of the hottest real estate markets in the state. The house was under contract in less than a week. By this time, our west coast relatives had warned my parents about the high cost of living in California and begged us not to make the mistake of moving back to Smog-opolis. When Dad finally found full-time work with a local company driving a full sized 18-wheeler, Mom had applied and been hired for graveyard shift at local Clayton General Hospital as a nursing assistant. And that summer after my 9th grade year, she found a really cool 50’s era house to rent in nearby College Park. Now it did just happen to lie precisely underneath one of the primary flight paths of adjacent Hartsfield Airport.  And even though my brother and I learned to call out the manufacturer and series of the  aircraft flying barely overhead with a boisterous “Lockheed L-1011!” and a finger pointing cry of “Boeing 747!!!”, it took the entire family a while to get accustomed to the ridiculously loud roar of the jet engines. But this, my reader, was not the shocker that smacked this puny kid in the face on my first day of class at Lakeshore High School.

As I was dropped off by my mother at the main entrance, I noticed rather quickly that there was not another Caucasian to be found. I gave a slight “Hmmm…” as I walked through the main entrance and began finding my way down the corridor to locate my new homeroom.  I did see one or possibly two random white students along that initial journey. I remember hearing one young girl giggle to her friend as they passed, “Look, a new cracker!” After finding homeroom, it hit me there were possibly just a handful of white kids in this entire high school.

Granted our parents never taught us to be bigots nor do I ever recall them exuding any partiality toward a person based on their skin color. And most kids in my generation were too young to remember the desegregation calamities of the 50’s and 60’s or even Jim Crow. Our parents knew of them, but we didn’t. Though the population percentages of white/black students in my school career to that point had varied somewhere between 70/30 and 95/5, I had always tried to pick my friends by their character and never by their hue. Invariably, the bands of hooligans I considered friends always had representatives from diverse economic, social, racial and religious groups – and I didn’t care in the least. However the first day at a new school is inevitably a scary trial, an attack on your self-esteem because you know absolutely no one and you are confronted with a monster-sized dose of isolation. But to couple that fear with the thought that you are Frankenstein, some bizarre aberration in contrast to the norm, creates a terror so deep you pray you are merely submerged in a nightmare aching for someone to wake you up.

Eventually, just as before, I developed great friendships at Lakeshore High School. I would ultimately be there three full years by the time I graduated in 1983, and that gave me plenty of time to find a handful of peers, all who just happened to be African American, in whom I shared common interests and with which to commiserate about hard-nosed, Dickensian teachers and brutal school lunches. There was a girl in whom I had a brief crush, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. These were normal, everyday teenage happenings regardless of your race. But I do need to tell the story in which I finally met cruel Racism and stared in its ugly face with so much naivety and surprise that it took me awhile to finally summon the bravery to carry my carcass away from that hell.

For some reason I can’t recall, I decided to try out for the Lakeshore Lancers varsity baseball team in the spring of 1980. I have never been, nor was I then, even remotely close to being athletic. I had attempted to play first base in the sixth grade, and could hit the ball well in practice.  But whenever facing the pitcher in a real game, I struck out, or by some miracle, walked. I just wasn’t good – period. Dad worked so hard to keep our bills caught up, he didn’t have the time to show me anything.  Not that he knew how to swing a bat, since his father had abandoned him and his four younger siblings and their mother when he was only eight years old. So even though I had a desire, I had no talent, nor anyone who had the time to show me how to become a worthy fielder or hitter. Apparently I forgot these facts when I signed up for it again in the 10th grade.

Before you could join the team, the varsity baseball coach, who happened to be white and whose name doesn’t deserve to be remembered, required candidates to pass a physical test – the ability to run a quarter mile in 60 seconds or less. I had no idea if I could accomplish this feat, but I was determined to be on the team. The day the quarter mile tests were given I lined up in view of other potential players, some who were quite athletic and physically mature. When given the whistle, I took off around the track as fast as I could carry my scrawny physique. I had run quarter miles before but not as if my entire life depended on it. That day though, in my mind, it did. The length of it seemed an eternity and by the time I swung around the last turn my side was splitting and I could barely breathe. As I crossed the finish line, the coach clicked his stop watch and claimed, “Made it…barely!” My gratitude and relief were soon to be terminated though, as one of the black athletic types looking over the coach’s shoulder grimaced, “No he didn’t!!! You gotta be kidding me!” He flung his body around in shock and glared at me in disbelief while the coach moved on to the next candidate.

So I had “made the team” apparently. I was foolish to believe the coach was right and the other student just had it in for me. But about a week later, the coach called me and one other Caucasian soul into his office after practice and sat us down across from his desk. “Do you know why you’re on the team?” he asked us. We looked at each other, shrugging our shoulders at his rhetoric, hoping he had seen some athletic talent that until then was undiscovered. His answer set us straight and forever altered my perspective of the world. “It’s because you’re white!” he smiled hideously. I heard nothing else of his little speech after that.  My ears were ringing “because you’re white…(white)…(white)!”

Before that time, I had never confronted such a lie from someone in authority, so I found it excruciating, almost impossible, to believe. In my immaturity I told no one.  After all, I was on the team – wrong set of qualifications or not. But it would be me who would pay for this boorish sin – at least in the beginning. I spent most practices in the sleepy outfield waiting for, but secretly hoping against, a fly ball hit toward my position. One day I allowed a simple pop-up to plop behind my head while my glove was held high in the air. I arrived at school the next day met by my snickering classmates holding up a picture of me on the front page of the local newspaper’s sports section, glove pointed to the sky, ball heading to the ground behind my head, and a look on my face of “Oh please God, what am I doing here?” You can’t blame them for laughing. It was a comedy!

My tenure on the team only lasted a few games – ended by my own choice. I was either on the bench or put in at the last inning if we were way ahead in total runs.  I don’t recall any single day where I did something successful on that team. And so I finally became honest with myself of the fact that I was never supposed to be on the team. I resigned and went back to focus on strengths I actually possessed – drawing, math and music. If you want a Breakfast Club analogy, I wanted desperately to be the Emilio Estevez character, but I was destined to play the Anthony Michael Hall role.

And the coach? He ended up calling our house a few times too many outside of baseball season asking to speak to me about the Lakeshore Lancers. So my Mom in her wisdom of years took it upon herself to report this to the school principal, who then relayed to Mom that they had several other complaints of a similar nature about this individual and that action was already in place to terminate his position and if he tried to call again we should immediately call the police. I guess poisonous character will eventually overtake a person’s entire life until they are utterly deviant. In this case, a sad racist baseball coach ultimately turned out to be a sad pedophile. What still baffles me to this day is how he was able to bluff his way through some screening process to become a supposed leader of young men.

But let’s not end this story like a dirge. I have so many good memories of those high school days, like being in technical drafting class for an entire year with one of the star football players, Mike Makins, whose nickname was Cap’n Crunch. We cut up a lot together while learning how to wield a t-square and an erasing shield. There was Vada Farmer who worked with me at McDonald’s into the late hours closing down the store on Old National Highway. We weren’t super close friends, but we had some good times serving Big Macs and McRibs – especially when Skate Town had $1 night and closed one hour before us so that we were bombarded with students in a horrendous frenzy of fast-food ordering. There was Sam Hairston who always had a huge smile on his face.  Jevora Hall was a killer tennis player, but could make me laugh so hard in class it was embarrassing. I remember Reggie Harris singing “Still” by the Commodores at an all-school function in the gym, sounding exactly like Lionel Richie and making all the girls scream. There was smooth Gerald Wade and outgoing, even-keeled Rodney Yarbrough,  And there was my math team and drafting class buddy Jonathan Lee, one of the brightest, smartest peers I’ve ever known.  As seniors, we were both accepted to Georgia Tech, and at one time talked of helping each other navigate college, although I eventually attended somewhere else (a forthcoming post). Terry Allen, Todd Richardson, Rudy Mack, Desmond Towns, Dwayne Mack, and so many others. Those three years took me from not knowing one soul in the halls of Lakeshore, to knowing and befriending so many of my classmates. And thanks to social media, I’ve been able to reconnect with many of them.

I suppose the life lesson I learned through that experience was this: if you are silent about something you see and you know it to be wrong, then you are complicit in the crime. I vowed to never allow that to happen to me again.