Under the Baobab: Sticks and stones may break our bones but words can hurt us

Sticks and stones ...

A while ago at a local State College justice rally in front of the Borough building, an African American high school student tearfully talked about being taunted and ridiculed at her predominantly white school. It wasn’t everybody, she said. It wasn’t even most of the students. It was enough to make her cry. It reminded me of my own high school experiences 60 years before.

In 1960, I was a senior at the predominately white DelaSalle High School in Chicago. There was an incident which changed my life. DeLaSalle won the Catholic League Championship. Marshall, an all-Black team, won the public school championship. There was an annual game where the Catholic school champions played the public school champions for the City of Chicago championship. In 1960 it was going to be DeLaSalle vs. Marshall, us vs. them. At a rally, one of my best friends, Douglas, shouted,

“We have to beat these n------!”

The word came easily to him. It hurt me deeply. I was confused. I was a DeLaSalle student and a Negro. If I had screamed with Douglas, I would still be a n----- in Douglas’ world. We would be DeLaSalle Men forever, but I would be a Black man beyond forever.

“We have to beat ...”

I rode the No. 3 Cottage Grove bus to school. Every day it would pass projects, tenements, storefronts, then the very nice middleclass high-rises of Lake Meadows. Stopping near the school, just short of the railroad viaduct, it would turn to go downtown. The viaduct was the inviolable border, the militarized 38th parallel which we, Blacks, could approach but could not usually cross. It separated Bronzeville from the white West Side, from Comiskey Park, from all things good and prosperous. I realized that if I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, to avoid looking white folks in the eye, I might cross that viaduct. I might go where the No. 3 bus could not go.

In those days Major League Baseball was often played during the day. After school, Douglas and I and others would walk to Comiskey Park to watch the last three or four innings of a White Sox day game. We would share a hot dog or Polish. Then head home. It occurred to me that in two-plus years, I had never been to Douglas’ home, nor he to mine. I had never been to any of my white classmates’ homes. It was just the way things were.

“We have to beat ...”

The modern civil rights movement was beginning. In 1960 four Black students from North Carolina A&T sat at a Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter, reserved for whites, and asked for service. There were no segregated restaurants in Chicago refusing us service, discrimination was rampant in other areas like housing, education, jobs. During his northern campaign Martin Luther King Jr. would refer to Chicago as the “most segregated city in America.” As a teenager I didn’t understand how to navigate the racism and the pain that it caused.

One day, coming home from school I went past my stop, down to 63rd to the Tivoli Movie Theatre to see a double feature, to lose myself in the comforting non-reality of film. I didn’t return to school for a while. Some of my old patterns resurfaced. I went back to drinking Thunderbird and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose with my Southside “colored friends.” I started hanging out on stoops, late at night, harmonizing with duwops. It was familiar. It felt comfortable. Meanwhile, my grades slipped into the toilet. By mid-semester, I was failing two courses.

Mom was unaware of my downward spiral. I lied my way through by telling her I was at a friend’s house doing homework. “Lots of homework in the senior year,” I said. I couldn’t hide from Father Clements,who had gone out on a limb to get me into DeLaSalle in the first place. The school had called to inform him of my progress, or rather lack of progress. He confronted me. He told me I was not just at DeLaSalle for myself. I was there to open the door for all Negroes who might come after. It wasn’t just the courses I was failing. I was failing everything, everybody.

I was ashamed and I felt alone. At the time, I didn’t have the analysis or the words to explain. I didn’t graduate that June. I didn’t ever graduate from DeLaSalle. I got a high school diploma years later with a GED.

Sixty years later, this young African American woman is telling a similar story. Only she is speaking to a crowd of a thousand mostly white kids, allies, who cheer her courage. One of them gives her hug despite the pandemic. My tears come, not from pain but from the possibility of hope.