I have always been drawn to the Black struggle for equality, dating back to my childhood. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened many young Americans of all races, but my journey into the heart of what drives it began in 1952.
I was 7, sitting in a movie theater in a farm town in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, watching Jackie Robinson play himself in a biopic that told the courageous story of the first Black man to wear a major league uniform. What struck me, even at that young age, was the overt hatred that he had to endure. It was a glimpse into a world that — to a privileged white boy — seemed far removed from my experience.
Where did the ugly hate come from? In my child’s mind, it came directly from the bad guys, the kinds of villains I saw in westerns and cartoons. Like other movie protagonists who stood up to the mean villains, Jackie became my hero, with three main differences. He was a real man who played himself, he was Black, and he was the victim of stark, endemic injustice.
Not long after that I came across my mom reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and asked if I could read it. There, once again, were the bad guys hating and unfairly accusing a Black man of a crime he didn’t commit. The hero, Atticus Finch, a white man, was there to courageously defend him, even though he himself was immersed in the deep South’s Jim Crow culture.
There were other dark-skinned heroes in my teenage years. Rafer Johnson, from the small town of Kingsburg a short drive from my hometown, served as UCLA’s student body president in his senior year, then won the gold medal in the decathlon in 1960. Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis player, enrolled at UCLA the same year I did, in September, 1963.
Days earlier, on August 28, Martin Luther King led hundreds of thousands of freedom marchers to the Lincoln Memorial. His stirring words were especially dramatic in the context of an era of peaceful protestors being met with violent police beatings and Klan-driven atrocities in the sweltering South. I watched it all on TV from the comfort of the air-conditioned home I had lived in all my life.
In two weeks I would leave home and move to the campus of UCLA, where my dad had graduated a few years before Jackie Robinson had to withdraw from the university due to financial difficulities. I was about to say goodbye to an uncomplicated life in a small town of 5,000 people where it seemed I knew just about everyone and begin a new life at a university of 30,000 in a great city of millions. I had no idea what to expect, but what transpired in the next five years would have been unimaginable to that 7-year-old boy sitting in the safety of the cool, dark movie theater.
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I arrived at UCLA at a time of record heat, record smog, and record undertow at the beach in Santa Monica. Since I knew no one in all of LA, I hoped to connect with the fraternity where my dad had served as president 25 years earlier. By the end of that first week, my lungs ached from the constant smog, the heat was more oppressive than the dry heat of the San Joaquin, and my body was sore from getting beat up in the surf. I wanted to go home. But I had pledged the fraternity and there was no turning back. I had been attracted to UCLA my entire life.
Even though I was off to a rough start, I liked the idea of a truly multicultural university where blond-haired surfers shared the campus with dashiki-adorned Black women. I felt like a member of the global community for the first time in my life. But by the end of my freshman year, I had become aware of the deep roots of racism and discrimination that governed the rules and practices of my fraternity. Still, I chose to live there until the end of my sophomore year.
During Rush Week of 1964, Kareem Abdul Jabbar — known then as Lew Alcindor — showed up at one of our rush parties with a beautiful blonde on his arm. He was already destined to be a basketball great even though he had not yet played a varsity game. Did he know my fraternity, under orders from its national headquarters, had refused to sign a non-discrimination clause?
Kareem had gained respect not only because of his basketball talent, but also his intellect. He had to have known where he was. He was making a statement. And no one, at least not openly, questioned his right to be there.
During the summer of 1965 I returned to my parent’s home to work in a potato-packing shed, earn money and get in shape and hopefully play baseball for the Bruins during my junior year. By July 10, 1965, after a month of 10-12-hour days loading 100-pound sacks of potatoes into boxcars, I was in the best shape of my life. I was excited and hopeful, looking forward to returning to campus in the fall and playing varsity ball the following spring. The very next day my future plans evaporated in an instant.
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July 11, 1965, a Sunday: On a beautiful day the summer before my junior year at UCLA, I lay on an emergency operating room table, unconscious. I had crashed in a small airplane with my friend, the pilot, who died in the crash. When I regained consciousness a week later, I learned I was paralyzed from the waist down with a spinal cord injury. My life as a privileged white boy had ended, but my journey into the roots of what later came to be known as Black Lives Matter was just beginning.
I was transferred to the rehab floor of a hospital on the outskirts of south-central LA. One August night, lying in the human rotisserie (a Stryker frame), I noticed an orange glow outside the window of my four-person ward. A Black orderly who worked the night shift came to crank the handle and turn me on my stomach. He saw me staring out the window. “It’s Watts. It’s burning, man. It’s like a war zone out there.”
He was one of a number of Black orderlies and nurses who took care of patients on the rehab floor. He worked two jobs — bus driver by day, rehab orderly at night. Every day during the prolonged ongoing riot, he risked his life driving through the rioting area to take care of people like me and make ends meet. When I got hooked on morphine, he spoke up. “You’ve got to get off that stuff, man. I’ve seen what it does to brothers on the street.”
Fate had forced me into the oppressive reality of the brotherhood of the underprivileged, where discrimination and bias was the norm, not the exception.
Now, in my wheelchair, I no longer felt welcome in my own hometown. There were no curb cuts on sidewalks, so most stores and offices were off limits. Not only could I not sit in the front of the bus, I could not even board one. I could still drink out of public fountains and use public restrooms, but only if they had accessible bathroom stalls, and none did.
When I returned to campus in 1966, I had to choose my classes based on which buildings had accessible entrances and elevators. After one term living in the fraternity house, where two pledge brothers had installed a ramp through the garbage area and around to the back entrance, I moved to an apartment in Santa Monica.
The Vietnam War heated up in 1967. In 1968 the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy dashed hopes for peace and further progress in civil rights. That summer, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, another San Joaquin Valley athlete, raised their gloved fists in the Mexico City Olympics in support of Black Power. In late August the police rioted at the Democratic National convention in the streets of Chicago, bloodying peaceful war protestors and widening the growing cultural chasm.
With a mild traumatic brain injury from the plane crash on top of the chaos, I had difficulty reading but managed to graduate with a degree in English. My diploma was mailed to me. There was no way to access the stage for graduation ceremonies.
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In 1969, confined to office duty as a social worker, totally alienated, I quit my first job out of college and joined two hometown friends to collaborate on a bare-bones documentary on the plight of Black Americans. I was the cinematographer/editor, working from a script outline one of them had written in an all-white Fresno State Black History class.
I photographed newsprint, magazine and book images of iconic moments in Black History and edited them into a fast-flash sequence that documented the unrelenting persecution of Black Americans from the Emancipation Proclamation to the civil rights era and the recent urban riots. On the outskirts of Bakersfield, at an unlikely location — or so I thought at the time — we took footage of a dirt-poor ghetto-like shantytown where housing conditions were despicable.
Our footage was depressing, at times shocking, but the message was clear: If economic conditions in Black America remained unchanged, riots would spread from inner city ghettos to every rural town in the nation where Blacks lived in poor, crowded, oppressed neighborhoods.
It was only a 10-minute Super-8 film, but our plan was to expand it, transfer it to 16 mm and add a soundtrack — a fitting format for documentaries in that era. For the soundtrack, we turned to former high school Black classmates we had grown up with. Most of them still lived in our hometown, in the Southgate area, itself a de facto-segregated shantytown. Understandably, they were skeptical of helping at first: “What’s in it for us? What’s to keep you guys from getting all the money and leaving us high and dry?” It took a lot of explaining for them to understand that the film would never make money (and it didn’t). It was a labor of passion, not a commercial venture.
We met as a group in a Southgate “flat,” passed a few joints and recorded as the group rapped freely about the current state of unrest from their rural Black viewpoint: “The young brothers, they ready to fight. Some of them got guns. It’s scary, but everyone has had enough.”
I listened to and learned what I had been blind to for my entire 18 years of living in the same town: constant police surveillance, rat-infested kitchens, dirt floors, no jobs or opportunities, feeling unwelcome in the downtown area. Our childhood classmatess felt trapped, with no access to the American Dream, even in this small farm community in California. Only the brothers who moved to large cities and attended college had a chance to prosper, but even their chances were in deep doubt in 1968.
For me to feel their plight in my heart took a plane crash, paralysis, and experiencing firsthand the underside of American culture from the viewpoint of a wheelchair user. The discrimination was subtle as well as overt, and I felt it every day.
We sold copies of our documentary to Fresno State and San Francisco State Black History programs and almost recouped our investment. The film never made it to 16 mm because we had no money and no contacts. But I will never forget one impassioned plea from the soundtrack that is as true in 2021 as it was then: “All the brothers want is a chance. We don’t want no violence. But we keep getting denied. We’re loving people. You can’t deny love. How can you deny love?”
In the late 60’s the Black Panthers had formed in Oakland, California as an act of self-protection, openly carrying weapons as a warning to overaggressive police. Fifty years later, in 2020, groups of white supremacists congregated in cities and towns with rifles and guns on their hips as a way of threatening Black Lives Matter protestors.
Is America on the verge of a racial war? Will we ever expunge the hatred from within and act boldly as a unified nation, driven by love, not self-interest? Only then will we truly live in the land of the free.
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