Greensboro Beginnings: 1955-1978

Through junior high school (revised and consolidated).

Nevertheless what small part I can keep
of that holy kingdom treasured in my heart
will now become the matter of my song.

                       Dante - Paradiso Canto 1

Let’s begin at the very beginning. My parents were married on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955. Daddy was taking Mama to work in late November when her water broke, unexpectedly. By 11 am I had arrived. Now, Mama used to say I was her special 7-month baby. In support of that calculation, she was headed to work, not expecting my arrival for another two months. Also, in support of that calculation, she told me that she had eaten some clam chowder several weeks earlier and got sick and decided just to stop eating. Dr. Evans told her she had to eat for her baby. She resumed eating, but I think the die was cast. My sister and my wife both say I was my parents’ love child, that it was a normal pregnancy, and that I must have been conceived prior to their marriage. I’m going with my mother’s story, though there are worst things than being a love child!

I cannot remember a time in my life when I couldn’t read and write. There must’ve been a time, but I certainly do not remember it. I remember reading bible verses in Sunday School and writing letters to my aunts and cousins, all before first grade. Mama would sit at the kitchen table with her stationery and fountain pen and write letters to friends and relatives who I’d later understand to be participants in the Great Migration. Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York all stand out in my memory as destinations for her letters. She’d allow me to write a paragraph inside the letter, showing off her son’s writing skills perhaps.

My handwriting, maybe because I started writing before developing necessary hand motor skills, has always been awkward, distinct, unique. (In later years I’d blame my handwriting on the mefloquine, a malaria suppressant I took while in West Africa). Sheila (my sister) says she can recognize my handwriting from a mile away.

Speaking of which, both my parents had traveled away as teenagers, one north and one midwest, but returned and began their adult lives in Greensboro, NC, a bit of a migration from the rural farming towns nearby where they grew up. Mama, after finishing a junior college secretarial program in Jacksonville, Fl, got a job in Chicago where she had relatives. She didn’t stay too long. Daddy moved to Washington, DC and stayed with Cousin Colina immediately after finishing high school. But it was in the midst of the Great Depression and there was no work to be found.

Daddy would tell a story about being on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC in 1933 when a truck rolled up, hauling people to Florida to pick oranges. He signed on and traveled to Florida, but he hated picking oranges! He saved his earnings until he could afford a bus ticket back home. “You can always go back home,” he would tell me in later years when he told the story. He wouldn’t travel again until World War Two, where he experienced combat action with the Army Air Corps in Italy. 

Our nuclear family. Clockwise from the top, my sister, Sheila Anne, my mother, Sallye Anne Hairston Maxwell, me, and my father, Raymond Robert Maxwell

I remember helping Mrs. Cooke, my first grade teacher at Bluford, with other students having their first exposure to reading lessons. I was already an advanced reader at that point, having learned and practiced at home. I think, in retrospect, that learning to read early, so early, was one of the great family legacies of slavery and emancipation. Enslaved children and adults were forbidden by law to learn to read and those rules got more stringent after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. Black people had a deep hunger for literacy, and through writing letters they sought to reunite with family members who had either moved away or had been forcefully relocated.

Class of 1961 at Metropolitan Day Nursery and Kindergarten. (I am 4th from the left on the back row.)

I should also mention that everything described here took place in Greensboro, NC, mainly in the Dudley Heights community. On Sundays we’d take road trips to see my dad’s family folks in the Jackson community of Brown Summit, NC, just a few miles up US 29, or to see my mom’s folks in Draper, NC, a few more miles up US 29. Our whole lives existed within that one hour radius.

I haven’t said much about the other kids in our African village. And that’s what it was, an African village. I’ve seen enough of them to know.

Pete across the street was an expert at shooting marbles. People would come from other neighborhoods and Pete would beat them and take their prized marbles from them. Bobby was the engineer. He could take your bicycle, or your television completely apart and put it all back together again. I think he actually became an engineer. Kenny was a great all-around athlete, though he ended up playing baseball and tennis, both spring sports. The Banks boys were intellectuals, militants, and entrepreneurs. I remember them during high school excelling in ROTC precision drilling and something called Junior Achievement. Joey was a ping-pong champion. He went to other cities and states playing ping pong. I don’t know whatever happened to Joey. And there were just average guys like me, a good student who became a fairly decent middle distance runner. Nothing special.

Claudette Alexander was the first of our generation to pass on. Then Robert Swann, from injuries he got in Vietnam. Pete Peterson passed while I was overseas. Michael Banks, Janet Banks, Skip Bryant, and just a couple of years ago, Annette Anderson. “The innumerable caravan that moves to that mysterious realm.” Annette had been sick on and off for a couple of years. Cancer. She fought it valiantly. I wrote an elegy sonnet for her.

I remember weekly trips with my dad and my sister, Sheila, to Carnegie Negro Library to check out books. Daddy was superintendent of Sunday School at his church and would go upstairs to the adult division to research his lesson, leaving us free and unattended to roam the basement where books for children, teens and young adults were kept. I developed an early love for the library and for librarians.

Daddy’s day job was as a parts clerk at an electrical ssupply shop. On the weekends he did electrical work, mainly on old houses out in the country, wiring receptacles, wiring whole houses. Most of his in-town work involved installing 220-volt receptacles for air conditioning units, the newest rage at the time. He was a fairly proficient electrician. A good electrician, in fact. But something happened somewhere along the way and alcohol became his mistress. All his electrical tools just walked away.

Daddy bought me the 24-in-1 electronics kit (Norelco) where you could build projects on a peg board. That was third grade. (Just checked and that kit is still available on Ebay in the original box. Amazing!) I fell out of love with libraries and in love with building electronics stuff, radios, musical keyboards, light and moisture detectors, etc., which was probably the point! Also in the third grade I began playing viola and did that right up through 8th grade jayvee football.

A Pichard Street birthday party. I think this was 2nd or 3rd grade.

My third grade running buddies were Dale Hall and Byron Griffin and we were together all the way through elementary school thanks to the tracking system they had us in, i.e., academically gifted and talented, whatever the heck that meant.

My mother had trained to be a secretary and did secretarial work in her day job and in community and church-related groups. But she stopped working when we started elementary school. Later, she felt like she needed to return to work when Daddy’s work became inconsistent. She did domestic work for a while, and hated it. She returned to secretarial work, which she did until her untimely death at 56.

Byron, Dale and I were selected and trained by the school librarian, Mrs. Burnett, to test for and get the audio-visual equipment operating license. Once we got it, we could operate all audio-visual equipment in the classroom. Sometimes we’d go to other classrooms to operate 16mm projectors. That was pretty cool. Of course, only boys were selected. That was a 60’s thing that I hope is different in these times.

I remember questioning in junior high why boys could not take home economics. Didn’t we need to know how to do that stuff like cooking and house cleaning and keeping a budget? One more note on the gender subject. I went with my sister to sign up for the summer dance program. They told me they weren’t taking boys.

Dale knew how to cuss and I desperately wanted to speak that new language. Somehow Mrs. Morrison caught us practicing the new language in 4th grade and gave us a stern lecture about people using profanity because of limitations in their vocabulary. She never told our parents and we never got into trouble at home for it. But I remembered what she said to us. I think we also bonded with her as a result.

We’d all go to Hook Street to play in the woods after school. Dale kept a carton of Kools in a hollowed out stump by the creek. We would sneak and smoke Kools and cough and act like we were grown. 

Byron lived out beyond the Mt. Zion community where Daddy had a lot of relatives. His mother would pack us sandwiches and we’d go out exploring in the woods on weekends for several hours at a time.

It was the 4th grade when I started reading whole books. I don’t mean kiddie books, but what would now be considered teen and young adult fiction. There was the book about the puff snake, and the book about the time-traveling boy who came back to play in a professional baseball game. That year I also started with the Newberry Award classics: I, Juan de Pareja; A Wrinkle in Time; Shadow of a Bull. My favorite book, which I read cover to cover, over and over again, was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It was also in the 4th grade that Sheila and I joined the string orchestra, both laying viola. Originally I wanted to differentiate myself and play cello, but the cello was too expensive and if we both played viola we could time share one instrument, I played up through 8th grade, but Sheila stayed with it through high school. By junior high Mr. Scott would bring us sheet music and we would perform what we considered classics: The Sound of Music, Finlandia, excerpts from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and other small pieces I can no longer remember. I loved playing viola and often wished I had stayed with it. No joy like making your own sound.

In the fifth grade I discovered the black classics, no doubt assisted by my favorite teacher of all time, Mrs. Lillian Jeffries Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy and my father grew up together out in Brown Summit, just 16 miles away. Or maybe it was just Washington Street School and Dudley Senior High. I always suspected something had gone on between them back in the day. She brought me dog-eared copies of the Richard Wright novels, Black Boy and Native Son. I didn’t understand everything I read, but plowed through it nonetheless.

It was also in the fifth grade when we wrote and submitted essays for local competition, entitled ”What Americanism Means to Me.” It was a kind of combined writing and civics exercise, and I remember drawing ideas from the nation’s founding, the Civil War, and the then current civil rights struggle. None of us at Bluford School won the competition. I believe it was city-wide.

Then Mrs. Kennedy kept us for the 6th grade, she said she loved us so much but it may have been a purely administrative thing. She graduated my extracurricular reading to Ellison’s Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and all the James Baldwin paperbacks at the time, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Notes to a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time (the mother of a gal pal who was also a teacher would later introduce me to Giovanni’s Room and Blues for Mr. Charlie. I read through both with a more mature relish). And poetry. Mrs. Kennedy taught us poetry that we would memorize, and monologues from plays and famous speeches and writings like the Declaration of Independence and Julius Caesar monologues. And there was viola twice a week with Mr. Scott and practicing at home.

Meanwhile, on the weekends, I would go with Daddy on electrical jobs. I’d be the one to crawl into attics and underground crawl spaces and between walls and pull the wires. Daddy would say “Don’t be scared now,” but truth be told, I was often terrified in some of those dark and damp spaces. Terrified! But I told myself I could do it and I wanted to help my dad and be a real electrician’s helper! Then after we were done, he’d take me fishing out in the country (most of the jobs were in rural areas in Guilford County) and that made it all worthwhile.

On Sundays, driving home from church, we’d stop at a very crowded Ethel’s Bakery on Gorrell Street for Sunday dinner rolls, jelly donuts if we were lucky, and, for me, comic books.

About church, it sounds pretty whack in retrospect but as children it all seemed very normal to us. We went to my mother’s Baptist church, United Institutional Baptist Church, for regular service on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Sundays. But we went to my father’s Methodist church, Mt. Tabor United Methodist Church, every 1st Sunday for communion, unless it was the first Sunday of the quarter, when we reverted back to the Baptist church for communion which only happened quarterly. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Was it a deal they struck? Might things have worked out better for them had we all attended the same church? Each had their reasons and, perhaps, their separate lives. I won’t be too critical in retrospect.

A song I remember from the Methodist church:

At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day!

Another church memory. There was a point in the late 60’s when, in my young and impressionable mind, it seemed we were attending funerals at Institutional every Sunday, immediately after the 11am service. What I didn’t recognize at the time was that all those funerals were for soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Was it a conscious decision to hold there funerals right after the Sunday service to maximize attendance? Was Reverend Anderson making a political statement? I never got these questions answered.

At some point we, that is, the boys in our neighborhood, the 1400 block of Pichard Street, Kenny Swann, Pete Peterson, Rodney Alexander, Larry Banks and I discovered the wonders of riding our bikes down to Buffalo Creek to catch tadpoles and guppies and the occasional salamander. Then I’d transfer the tadpoles to a big metal tub in the backyard and watch everyday as they turned into little frogs and escaped. One day we discovered that the stream at the end of our street was just a runoff tributary to the real Buffalo Creek. As we walked along the side of the stream, all of a sudden the grass got higher and the water got deeper and we got more and more afraid and began to backtrack to safety. When I told my father about it, he drove me out to a bridge on Willow Road that crossed the real Buffalo Creek and showed me how water moccasins skimmed the surface and copperheads hung out on the shore. Never again would we “discover” Buffalo Creek tributaries!

We (my sister and I) attended two weeks of Vacation Bible School each summer at Institutional (United Institutional Baptist Church, where our mother had been a member since moving to Greensboro in the 1940’s) up to about the 5th grade. We’d arrive at 9 am for a small devotional, hymns and prayer, go to our respective classrooms based on age, and attend a small devotional at noon followed by a lunch of potted meat sandwiches and kool-aid. Gotta have that kool-aid! I remember having a huge crush on a girl named Judith George. We lost contact over the intervening years.

It was there I finally figured out, singing those songs from the Bible School hymnal made especially for us, that religion was all about behavior control. I was able to find the lyrics of one of the standard songs we sang, every morning, on the internet:

Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
Wean it from earth; through all its pulses move.
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art,
And make me love Thee as I ought to love.

In the 5th grade I joined the Boy Scouts. It was Camp Wenasa every summer and sometimes twice a summer. (Note: Camp Wenasa had just integrated and black scout troops were allowed to participate. Occasionally, my troop alone, Troop #442 sponsored by Grace Lutheran Church, would go to Camp Carlson, an old, abandoned camp where black troops used to go on weekend camping trips before integration, the colored camp as it was known. End note.) I would lug books with me for reading between camping and hiking and campsite projects and merit badge meetings. Every merit badge dealing with nature and conservation, and every one related to electronics, radio and computers was on my merit badge sash, along with a few of the required ones. And Camp Wenasa had the best blueberry pancakes for breakfast!

There are skills I acquired in the Boy Scouts that I’ve relied on throughout life. Compass and map-reading skills paid dividends even though we now use GPS on our phones for everything. Planning for hiking and camping trips informed later project and program management talents that have served me well. In the Boy Scouts I learned social skills for dealing with people who were not like me, not from my neighborhood, not members of my church. It was my first experience with human heterogeneity.

It couldn’t have been long after that the movie theaters integrated in Greensboro. Mama called and said she was getting off work early and I needed to meet her downtown for a surprise. We met at the bus stop and she took me to a movie theater on Elm Street, across the street from Woolworth. Yes, THAT Woolworth. Was it the Center, or the Cinema? I can’t remember. But I remember the film. It was To Sir, With Love, starring Sidney Poitier and a British girl who became a top hit singer. Can’t remember her name. Mama wanted to see the film and I guess it was a training opportunity for me. We got popcorn and found a seat downstairs, not in the balcony where Negroes used to have to go in the National or the Carolina. I fell asleep. Mama really enjoyed the film, though. I didn’t quite understand the parts I didn’t sleep through. My first movie date.

I think this was the same summer that I ended up with three yards to cut. Mr. Foster on Lincoln Street and Mr. Speight on Benbow Road had their own lawn mowers and I just had to show up and push. And there were always nice snacks. For Mrs. Whitehead on Lincoln Street I had to bring the lawnmower from home, but it was just a block away. And paid a bit better. And no snacks! It could have been an every summer gig had I stuck with it, but in the 7th grade I chose to go out and get a summer job with a local government outfit called the Neighborhood Youth Corp (or something like that). I started out with library work at Gillespie Park School and finished the summer doing windows and janitorial work at UNC-G.

This would have been around 1968, the year of King’s assassination. UNC-G counterculture was at its height – bookshops, used record stores, funky restaurants. I remember buying my first John Coltrane album, Sunship, and I discovered in a Tate Street bookshop, called Daedalus, the Franz Fanon trio, The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin White Masks, and A Dying Colonialism. Heady reading for a rising 8th grader but I was up for it.

I was headed to Eagle when time ran out. I quit Scouting (at the rank of Star) and the viola in exchange for 8th grade football. Not sure why but at the time it was one or the other. I “went out” for Lincoln’s jayvee team and survived summer training. Coach Kanoy made me jayvee captain and I played offensive and defensive end and every special team. We only had five games but we went undefeated and unscored upon. I knew I had a future in the NFL! We’ll come back to that in a subsequent post. Maybe.

The Carnegie Negro Library moved from Bennett College campus and became the new Southeast branch of Greensboro Public Library after integration. Hanging out with the big boys, Reggie Greene, Skip Bryant, and Rodney and Bobby Alexander, we biked downtown to the Central Library to get library cards immediately after integration came. I didn’t tell my parents until we got back. I got in a bit of trouble for that. 

The librarians all transferred from the Carnegie Negro Library to the Southeast Branch so we already knew them and they knew us. We’d go every afternoon for homework and flirting with girls who went to different schools, evenings during football season.

Kenny and I took over the newspaper route in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade year. We had about 100 customers across Dudley Heights. Kenny did Pichard and Dunbar Streets and I covered Lincoln and Hook Streets. The four or five dollars a week we cleared after paying the weekly paper bill kept us in comic books, a summer that began innocently enough with Superman and Batman and the Fantastic Four and ended with Daredevil, Spiderman, and, wait for it, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos (the rising Vietnam influence). And the occasional movie at the National Theatre (where blacks still had to sit in the balcony) and the Carolina (same seating arrangement except the Carolina actually had a separate outside entrance), and french fries at a seedy downtown Greensboro bar that we should not have been going to.

In the spring of my 7th grade year, our French teacher Ms. Brown took three of us to UNC-G for language testing we were not prepared for, but it was an interesting, and obviously, memorable experience! I always felt so sorry for Ms. Brown, the only white teacher at Lincoln Jr. High, who had to endure a lot of abuse from students that was clearly racially motivated. She was young, and I think it may have been her first job out of college. She had a soft but distinct southern accent that replicated itself in every dialogue we memorized. But back to the test experience. We sat in little booths and listened to a guy narrate in French, then ask us questions. I was completely lost as were my classmates and I think Ms. Brown knew it. But it was one of those formative things. Afterwards she took us all to Burger King on Summit Avenue, a fairly ballsy move for her and for us back then, considering the most racist motorcycle gangs in town all hung out in the parking lot at that Burger King.

Also we were in a special writing program in the 7th grade. A white lady would come to Lincoln from downtown, pick up our compositions, and drop off the ones from the prior week full of red marks. We'd get two grades, one for style and originality (on the top), Composition, and one for grammar and punctuation (on the bottom), Mechanics. I always aimed for the A/A but didn’t always get it! At the end of the year, we did a long paper on a subject of our choosing. I chose as my subject the Negro Cowboys. I wrote about Nat Love, also known as Deadwood Dick, and Bill Pickett, and my favorite, Bass Reeves, the original Lone Ranger. When it came back there was a note from the white lady saying she had never heard of Negro Cowboys. A full 25 percent of cowboys were black. Maybe even more.

The reading never stopped. Not that I understood everything I read, but a lot of it was beginning to make sense. I especially loved reading the steamy stuff in the coming of age books, Manchild in the Promised Land, Down These Mean Streets, and The Learning Tree. We passed that stuff around like it was pornography. For us it was pornography.

The first “black” bookshop in Greensboro was a place called The House of Weusi Umoja (Swahili for “black unity”) on the corner of Benbow Road and Market Street just on the edge of A&T College campus. It was run by a couple, Bill and Evie Adams. It became my new hangout as a rising 8th grader who loved to read and it was a heady time, immediately following the King assassination when the black revolution was coming into vogue. I seem to recall it was at The House of Weusi Umoja where I met college students forming a new youth movement, YOBU, Youth Organized for Black Unity. On the weekends we would meet at a place called the Sebastian House, just four blocks up Benbow Road at McConnell Road, a block away from Grace Lutheran Church where I had previously belonged to Boy Scout Troop #442. At the Sebastian House we would do layout and editing of a nationwide-distributed newspaper, The African World. I got real good at measuring column inches and headline layout and thought I may have had a future in journalism. The older kids graduated to SOBU, Students Organized for Black Unity and later in college they embraced something called Marxist/Leninist/MaoTsoTung Thought. I may touch on that in a later chapter.

About that same time, activist Howard Fuller set up Malcolm X Liberation University over on Asheboro Street. A girl from the neighborhood, Annette, went with me for Swahili classes. It was about a ten block walk. Fuller later moved to Milwaukee, got his PhD, and became a big man. I hear he recently retired.

It was our 8th grade year when they had the big riot at A&T that resulted in the sending of the National Guard to campus, the shutdown of the city, and the death of A&T student Willie Grimes in Scott Hall. There was a spillover at Dudley High School, right across the street from Lincoln, related somehow to the election of Connie Herbin as student body president and the write-in candidacy of Claude Barnes. The rioting spread to Dudley’s campus, the National Guard used tear gas to dispel the crowd, and a cloud of tear gas drifted across the street to Lincoln, making us all sick with runny noses and swollen eyes. I remember we all gathered in the auditorium, where our parents picked us up at midday.

It was the summer between 8th and 9th grade when I met the Baha’i people and the Black Muslims. Both groups had folks going door-to-door in the neighborhood proselytizing. It was the same summer that I got my first summer reading list for Woodberry Forest and chose to read The Greening of America, Future Shock, Silent Spring, and Soul on Ice. Soul on Ice was, frankly, a tough read for a 14 year old!

Thus armed, I packed my belongings in a trunk and made the trip with my mother and uncle to Woodberry Forest.

******************************

A side note on getting the scholarship and meeting Dr. Kilimanjaro               

Been sitting on this one since posting these tweets on my Dad’s birthday, January 12. There are only a few more days of Freedom of Expression, though. Come Inauguration Day, the Biden folks are going to squash all first amendment rights under the banner of whatever banner they choose. AOC’s new Ministry of Information plans to “curate” all truth to fit in with her/their idea of propaganda. Biden and Big Tech are on board. Information is dead. Democracy dies in darkness. But you can still buy a lottery ticket. Third highest jackpot ever.

It was a big deal when we got the prep school scholarships back in 1970. My next door neighbor, Mr. Gibbs, was an English teacher who worked part time for the Carolina Peacemaker, a local newspaper, one of two “black” newspapers in Greensboro (the other, The Future Outlook, had its day but moved on in the 70’s). Anyway, they decided to do a big feature article on the four of us who got the scholarships and Mr. Gibbs offered to arrange for me to meet the editor and publisher of the Carolina Peacemaker, John Marshall Kilimanjaro.

Dad drove me and we met Mr. Gibbs at the newspaper office. Of course, Dr. Kilimanjaro made us wait – that’s what important people do. At length he came out, looking like he had been asleep, clothes kind of frumpy and wrinkled. But he was friendly. We sat down around a coffee table filled with magazines and old newspapers. I was eager to impress.

Dr. Kilimanjaro said to me, “Son, what do you want to be, what do you want to do with this high falutin’ education you are about to get?” He only had daughters, so calling me “son” was a high honor. I told him, and it was true that week, that I had an interest in history and African American studies, but that I really wanted to be a journalist. He looked at me with that piercing look and said, “Son, you don’t want to be a journalist, journalists can’t pay the rent. You want to be a newspaperman. Layout, design, advertisement, subscriptions, content.” I thought to myself, almost out loud but I managed to suppress it, shouldn’t content be first in that order?

Then he nodded off and was out for about ten minutes. We waited. When he awoke he thanked us for coming by and wished me luck. Narcolepsy, maybe? I don’t know.

It would come full circle years later when, processing a collection at Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center, I came across a letter a young John Marshall Stevenson (Kilimanjaro’s original name) would write to a Howard medical school professor about preparations for med school. He ended up a English and drama professor before going into newspapering. I think his daughters still publish the newspaper in Greensboro.

I have had dreams about returning to Greensboro and running a newspaper. Not sure what the demand is for black newspapers anymore. I’d call my paper The Greensborough Patriot, after a pre-Civil War rag that lasted for a couple of decades. Who knows? It’s never too late, but it might not be feasible in the new Biden information environment.

Ch. 2. The Woodberry Forest School Experiment. 1970-1972.

Introduction

Yes, this chapter requires an introduction. It has so many seemingly disparate pieces, written over so wide ranging a period of time, that only an introduction (and possibly concluding remarks) will hold it all together.

For one, fourteen through sixteen are influential years for an impressionable boy seeking his way into manhood under any circumstances. But 1970 was a critical time to head into that transition. It was the end of the civil rights era, for all practical purposes. It was the heyday of black nationalism and the flowering of the black arts movement in the US. Marxist elements were coming into vogue with the emergence of the very popular and photogenic Angela Davis, aligned with the Jackson brothers on the west coast, and her interpretations of her East German radical professor, Herbert Marcuse. Traditional elements of the community, some may argue, like the church, were entering a decline. Veterans were returning from Vietnam with lifelong ailments and drug addictions. But we were insulated from most of this inside a safe and secure bubble at Woodberry Forest. For the most part.

As part of the overall process, we were entertaining new ideas while being kept in check by the old ones, the old ways, tradition. So there was always a tension, a push and a pull in effect.

More rumination than poetry . . . . the great experiment - a preface of sorts

We were coming up on the 40th anniversary of the graduation of the first group of Anne C. Stouffer Foundation scholars. To mark that achievement, a bunch of us held monthly conference calls to plan a February 2016 reunion in Atlanta. Perhaps we would include some of the prominent luminaries, educators, politicians, etc., who were involved in the original experiment.

Here is my oral history submission from the archives:

It was an interesting, and maybe even a noble experiment.  

Prelude.

Lincoln Jr. High had never seen so many white people! John and Rosemary Ehle and a couple of other people working tape machines and taking notes took over the library. I recall that once we were interviewed, tested and selected, we had to submit a preference for schools. I thought Asheville School for Boys, because it was closer, but my mother did some checking and discovered a whole bunch of Greensboro folks were already in the Woodberry family. My father was dead set against the whole enterprise, I remember, and he had his reasons, but my mother was all for it and all in for Woodberry Forest School.

We (my mother and I) took a Greyhound bus up to Woodberry Forest for the interview. It was winter and it was cold. Snow met us in the parking lot when we arrived by taxi from the bus stop in Orange, VA. Driving up the winding country road to the main building on campus, Walker Building, there was a sense we were entering someplace special. I don’t recall the exact conversations, but I do remember meeting with the headmaster, Baker Duncan, a tall and frankly intimidating man. After the meeting with Duncan, I met Mr. Stillwell and Mr. Glascock. It was a whirlwind of a morning after barely sleeping on the bus the night before.

On the return trip we met up with some relatives in Richmond, where we spent the weekend. I crashed early but they partied into the night. That Sunday we returned to Greensboro and Lincoln Jr. High. I finished out the semester, but learned before Spring that I would be Woodberry bound.

Being there

Ron Long, Terry Jones, and Art Gaines led the charge in 1969. They were the first generation, the pioneers. I think they had some interesting experiences, but I’ll leave that story to them to tell.  In the second year, 1970, Ron Lipscomb, Kevin Miller, Wayne Booker and I arrived as boarding students, and Gary Mance and Wayne Williams came in as day students, tripling our numbers and making a significant addition to the number of variables in the social experiment. In 1971, Clifford Johnson and Robert Long, Ron’s younger brother, joined us, both as boarding students. 

Fourth Form, 1971

Of course, it didn’t take long for us to discover one another. Kevin and I both came from Greensboro and from Lincoln Jr. High. (Five Lincoln students went to Virginia prep schools that year sponsored by the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation. Veda Howell went to Foxcroft, another girl went to Chatham Hall whose name I can’t remember.).

I don’t remember if we came together officially or if we just gravitated to a center. Gaines, Long and Jones were the big brothers we went to for advice. Ron Lipscomb and I had classes together. And we all played football that first fall: Ron, Art, Wayne and Gary on JV, Terry, Ronald, and I on Junior Orange, Kevin and Wayne Williams on Junior Black. That first winter I decided to run track and we all tried a variety of events to see where our best talents were. I remember hating the pole vault. The coach thought I had some natural abilities in high hurdles but I never quite overcame the fear of crashing into one and never got into it. In my second year I gravitated to cross country in the fall after showing some promise as a middle distance runner the previous spring. Several of us continued together in winter track, though Ronald Lipscomb early on distinguished himself in JV basketball in the winter, as did Ron Long in varsity baseball in the spring.

Was I really the first African American in the history of the school to letter in cross-country? Damn, I guess I was.

Bynum Merritt, Austin Ball, Hugh Hoy, Cameron Hilton, and me in the rear of the 2nd group.

We (the handful of black students) got into the habit of sitting together in the dining hall for Saturday and Sunday breakfasts, which were buffet and informal (no coat and tie, and no assigned seating). It is amusing looking back on it, and maybe even a bit contrived, but at the time it seemed the natural thing to do.

To call the first trimester an adjustment period academically would be a gross understatement. While I excelled in English, Spanish and Mediterranean Studies, I fell flat on my face in Earth Science and Algebra. Algebra was self-paced and programmed learning. Perhaps for mathematics in so different an environment I needed something a bit more structured. I had always been a good science student - I just needed more focus.

Dave Bloor tripled as my earth science teacher, track and cross country coach and assigned academic adviser. He was definitely one of my favorites. I learned so much from Mr. Bloor, in the classroom and on the track. I will never forget him.

Bob Vasquez, my Spanish teacher, started me off on a language learning track and a curiosity about language that would sustain me throughout my future careers (he was also my basketball coach, though his best efforts at converting me to basketball fell short).

Wilfred Grenfell ranks right at the top. I lived for his history lectures, and he, more than any other, bears the blame for my insatiable curiosity about Middle East issues and about foreign affairs in general.

Robin Breeden, our dorm guy, maybe we called him dorm master, would invite us into his apartment for “tea and biscuits” and tell us about the time he swam the English Channel. How I adored those “civilizing” chats.

Jim Ebert’s Vietnam stories sandwiched between learning geometry proofs and a new way of mathematical thinking were a daily delight.

And the Bond couple, Tom and Vicki, with whom I studied both Spanish and French, fueled my thirst for foreign language skills that continues until today, with Portuguese and Arabic added along the way. 

Lucky for me I came to my senses and abandoned football after my first year. Cross country was tough and the other black students made fun of me doing it, but we had a great team and great guys.

Here is an almost lost memory. That first Woodberry-EHS football weekend bonfire was quite terrifying for me. White boys were acting crazy and there were Confederate flags all over the place. I took it all in stride, but I never talked to anyone about it. We as black students never talked about it among ourselves. It just didn’t get discussed. But everybody saw it and everybody experienced the same terror.

Home during the summer between my first and second years at Woodberry, I learned about a bus trip being organized by Hayes-Taylor YMCA (or was it Malcolm X Liberation University?) from Greensboro to Durham for the first USA-Pan Africa track meet. You know I got a seat on that bus! Not only did I see the great African runners Kip Keino, the great Kenyan miler, Ben Jipcho (who was a student at NC Central, I think) and Mirus Iftar, the phenomenal Ethiopian 5k and 10k distance runner, but I also got to see the renown NCCentral sprinter, Larry Black, and middle distance phenoms Marty Liquori and Steve Prefontaine. CEntral also had a world class hurdler whose name I cannot recall. Here is an article commemorating the 50th anniversary of this important event: https://fansided.com/2021/07/19/duke-pan-africa-usa-international-track-meet/

I have only fond memories of running cross country. Those long autumnal runs, named Arrowpoint and Chicken Ridge, and the long 13 mile trek to Achsah, VA and back, introduced me to and acquainted me with the beauty of Orange County. Those runs were the ambrosia that nourished my soul. The habit I formed, of finding wonders and magic in routine and mundane chores, like long distance runs, would later prove to be a source of personal and professional strength. But I digress. We had a great cross country team, eventually winning the Virginia Prep League championship. The camaraderie of that team filled a social and a personal void for me. 

Woodberry Forest School cross country team, 1971. From The FirTree, 1971.

Here is an almost lost memory. We had structured room study every night after dinner. At some point, though, perhaps around 9pm, we’d all go downstairs for break and a snack. And the snack food was several pitchers of ice cold milk (the school had its own dairy farm back then) and all-you-could-eat saltine crackers. And man, those crackers were so good with that milk!

Another almost lost memory. At some point, I noticed that my running buddy and study partner Ron had a different color biology textbook. His book had a green floral design and mine had a blue geometric design. Thumbing through the pages and reading just a bit of a few chapters I was able to figure it out. Mr. Gillespie taught creationist biology, while Mr. Dewey, my teacher, was teaching evolution biology. Woodberry Forest had two different biologies being taught at the same time!

In retrospect, my most enduring thoughts about the Woodberry experience centered around its well known and highly regarded honor system. The honor system, as I understood it, was a give and take thing. You were entitled to respect as an individual as long as you paid respect to others and to the system. Writing “I have neither given nor received help on this examination” on each test paper was only the beginning. Each “boy” was due his propers, his space to explore, his realm for growth and discovery, as long as it didn’t encroach on anybody else’s.

I never accepted getting hazed by seniors as part of the honor system, as hard as they tried to make you think it was, nor did I accept skipping mandatory chapel as a honor code violation, though it was easy enough for prefects to count heads and know that one of the Negro students was not in attendance. It will require an addendum to discuss more aspects of the honor system, how I internalized it at the time, and how it informed and influenced me in later life.

Deciding to leave.

Still, though, for reasons perhaps imagined and perhaps real, thoughts lingered and grew within me that I really didn’t “belong.” Those thoughts reached a height in the spring of my second year, a growing and gnawing loneliness that I couldn’t explain or even understand. At the end of my second year, I told myself I would not return. The loneliness and alienation I felt at Woodberry, I would later come to learn, had a lot less to do with Woodberry and a lot more to do with me and my emergence from adolescence and puberty. 

Years later, and in fact, only recently in answering questions with my cardiologist would I learn that what I thought were stress-induced stomach cramps during intense repetitive training spring track workouts were actually little heart attacks where my heart wasn’t getting sufficient volumes of incoming blood, sort of like pump cavitations I studied later in submarine engineering. I survived, but the pain I endured steered me away from track in later years. The condition sometimes results in sudden death, especially among high school and college athletes with a predisposed heart condition.

****

Afterword

A nagging feeling would stay with me through college, where, like a ship without a rudder, without an anchor, and without a means of propulsion, I bounced around for three long, uncertain years, changing my major almost every semester, back and forth from electrical engineering to biology to economics. It was actually an interesting combination.

Finally, midway through 1978, the year I should have graduated from college, I left school at mid term, degree-less, and enlisted in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program and the submarine force. It was there that I finally hit my stride, serving four years in engineering billets on the USS Hammerhead (SSN-63) and the USS Michigan (SSBN-727(B)).

In the intervening years, I lost track of everybody. I bumped into Ron Lipscomb on Duke’s campus, maybe in 1976. A girl I dated knew Wayne Williams, also at Duke. Kevin Miller (God rest his soul) and I had mutual friends in Greensboro. In 1985, I went back and finished college and upgraded my Navy status from enlisted to commissioned. My tenure as a reserve commissioned officer was a pre-set duration - I owed the Navy at least four years. I finished my four-year obligation and transferred to State and the Foreign Service in 1992. 

While serving the London Embassy, I completed an M.A. at the School of Oriental and African Studies. There I earned the credential “Africanist.” It would serve me well in subsequent assignments, focusing my studies on decolonization, resolution of border disputes, and transnational organization legal identity.

I stumbled on Ron Long’s name in the news in the late 90’s and got back in touch. He was high up in the SEC at the time. Ron put me in touch with Art Gaines, who by that time was doing humanitarian relief work in East Africa. Following assignments in Guinea-Bissau, London, Angola and Ghana, I landed a Washington job also covering East Africa. I thought maybe our paths would cross on many trips I made to Khartoum, but it wasn’t to be.

***

The integration experiment was not for our benefit exclusively. The primary purpose, I concluded, was to produce a slightly different environment for the white boys who would be entering a changed world, a multi-colored world. One might even say they (the white boys) would need to get an early start developing more nuanced negotiating skills to retain mastery in that new world. 

We were funded by an external foundation that counted every penny they spent on us. There were always questions about whether there would be funding in outlying years and threats that our families might have to pay an increasing portion of our expenses. It wasn’t enough that we were being provided as subjects in an experiment. 

In retrospect, there were so many racial undertones to the constant hazing we were subjected to as “new boys.” The honor system we were constantly reminded of and grounded in provided no protection against the constant barrage of hate speech and racist micro-aggressions. 

One night during room hall I reached my breaking point. Two known racists, twins no less, and one of their little whipping boys were outside my room talking about “nigger this” and “nigger that,” and “that little son of a bitch, Maxwell.” My mother had sent a pound cake and I took a table knife from the dining hall to my room to cut slices. Well, without much thought, I grabbed that table knife and went out into the hall to confront my enemies. No blood was spilled, but telephone calls to parents got me a meeting the following day with the campus disciplinarian, Jack Glascock. 

No disciplinary action was taken on either side, but for them, and for me, everything changed. From that point on there was no more shouting of racial epithets outside my door, but the whispering throughout campus made me feel totally guilty and unworthy. It was as if I had violated some unwritten code. Perhaps I had. When I packed at the end of that semester I knew I would not be returning. What I didn’t know at the time was that the pendulum had been set in motion and I was yet to experience the other side of its swing, a Dantean descent of sorts. 

A response 50 years later to the whipping boy: 

20130329. Thanks for your e-mail. The years have passed. I would not have expected to hear from you, even with the e-mail I sent out to the general alumni crowd. It took some courage, moral courage on your part to reach out like this, and I want to acknowledge that courage from the outset. There is far too little courage left in the world.

That small event between you and me with the cake knife was a part of my decision not to return to Woodberry Forest for that third year. But only a small part. We were both young and trying to figure out the worlds we were about to enter. Whether being rich or poor, spoiled or not, was, over the long haul, largely immaterial. I felt at some level the need to return to Greensboro to spend time with my parents, to get to know them better in the few years they had remaining. To hear my father recite poetry. To hear my mother’s hopes and dreams for her children. I would have missed that had I returned to WFS. Looking back, I am glad that I remained home. Everything else worked itself out in time, though there were plenty of bumps in the road. But it was those bumps that made me the person that I am, that I have become, so no complaints there. 

That’s my story. Roller coaster ride through college, dropped out and joined the Navy, two submarines in five years, back to college, Navy commission, back to sea on an aging destroyer, foreign service assignments in Africa and the Middle East and that most foreign of countries, Washington, DC, wonderful wife, pages and pages of poetry I’ve written that I can share with good friends over aged scotch. Early retirement in a city apartment filled with books. Not too shabby for a poor boy from Greensboro.    

I never disliked you and I bear no grudges. I stopped doing grudges a long time ago. I have wondered how those Peterson boys were doing, but I imagine they are functioning in their world, as I am in mine, in the world I have created for myself. That’s what we do over the years, isn’t it, create our world for ourselves and live in it? 

I hope things are going well for you. There are bumps in every road. I have helped people navigate their bumps, and people have helped me navigate mine. It is a continuous process, one that keeps unfolding in front of you.  

I have meandered. Forgive me for going on and on. It is my therapy and maybe it works for you too.

Let me know. We can continue.

Ray

p.s.  Keep being courageous. The Portuguese say, “Coragem!”  (Have courage!).

********************

A “catching up” email on a similar subject: 

It’s been a busy summer, even though the lockdown has us teleworking 99% at the memory factory (but I’ll get to that later).

50 years ago this summer I was girding up for what would become the signature experience of my life, the integration of Woodberry Forest School. Here’s the interesting story in a nutshell. Ex-Confederate Captain Robert Walker acquired a mansion and a large plot of land, a plantation, in fact, in central Virginia from President James Madison’s ne-er do well baby brother, Willey, designed and architected by Madison’s partner in crime, Thomas Jefferson (though we now forgive them all). Walker started a school to educate his sons, pulling his oldest son out of UVA law school and installing him as headmaster, a post he held until his death 50 years later. (p.s. James Madison was a leading proponent of Negro repatriation, and we have Liberia (Americans), Sierra Leone (British) and Nigeria (Brazilians) to show for that brain fart.)

In the 60’s, the great white fathers of Woodberry decided that their sons needed a more “multi-cultured” exposure because the world, she was a-changing. They called up an alum who ran a foundation in North Carolina to dispose of the fortune of another parent alum who had been huge in North Carolina textiles and said, “We need to integrate. Find us some worthy colored students.” But not yet. Wait until after the capital fund-raising project in 1968 so as not to scare off big donors. In 1969 the school admitted their first African-American students, their first Asian student, their first Jewish student, and their first known Native-American student. Also their first female students were admitted, all daughters of faculty members.

Greensboro, Durham, Fayetteville, Houston, and Washington, DC would provide that black human fodder. And off we marched.

This year we lost one of the original crew to ALS. That event has served to reconnect the remaining few. My re-entry to the Woodberry orbit came in 2013, when, you guessed it, one of my classmates made the connection between me and that guy involved in that Benghazi mess. Good guy, did a stint in the Marine Corps and returned home to run the family pipe business, found me and called me up. “Ray, are you that guy? What can we do to help?”  Small world.

Impossible to make this all up, I am turning my hand to fiction-writing after penning a two-act play I buried and over a thousand pages of poetry my grand nephew has been instructed to publish posthumously.

And the memory factory. While on extended admin leave, I started taking classes in the Library and Information Science program at Catholic U. After finishing it I worked a series of librarian and archivist jobs, settling on archiving as my calling. While serving as town archivist in the tony Maryland suburb of Garrett Park, I got a call from Howard University’s famed Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where I worked for almost two years. Y’all would not believe the stuff they have. But I am fairly certain that after the BLM and Antifa vandals take down all the statues, they’ll be coming after the libraries, archives and museums next. America’s Cultural Revolution. So, as we speak, I’m planning my next caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis.

Fifty year anniversary of integration at Woodberry Forest. February, 2019.

*****************

Notes to the new headmaster

January 31, 2019

Thanks. As you may know, I am a Woodberry dropout, leaving after my 4th form year. I watched others leave, the Native American student named Gentry (never really knew him and can't remember his first name), for example, and my friend Art Gaines (who I almost ran into many years later in the Sudan, but not quite). In retrospect, in total retrospect, while I may wish I had returned, my motivation at the time was a simple one: through my actions I violated the honor system, my own honor system, and the remedy was self-dismissal. Of course, there were other extenuating circumstances.

Just this past weekend, I googled and found the J. Carter Walker statement on the honor system appended to your statement: https://bbk12e1-cdn.myschoolcdn.com/ftpimages/51/misc/misc_159498.pdf. I had never seen it before. It was very revealing.

Later, I posted the following to a Facebook thread on the weekend visit:

"Thanks, John. In retrospect, the Woodberry experience put my life on a unique trajectory. But most importantly, during a period of extreme adversity (which we all must experience unless we are content to be mere spectators in life), Woodberry's "hidden lessons" gave me both the strength to endure and the courage to fight the bastards back. I feel nothing but gratitude to the institution and all the people I met and came to know there."

I think it will be worthwhile to develop this theme further as I work through the memories of the Woodberry experience that have remained buried deeply in my psyche up until now. That's what I plan to do, and will be honored to share it with you.

May 25, 2019

Hi: Thanks for your note. I can say briefly that exposure to the honor system at Woodberry made a difference in my life that I might not have imagined at the time. Transcending race, creed, even class, I felt liberated to be seen as an individual under a system of ethical and moral control. Frankly, had my youth not been somewhat troubled, I would have finished Woodberry. Instead, I stumbled into college and made a bit of a mess of things there as well, though I carried throughout a strong (maybe too strong) sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair play, especially where I felt the external expectation should have always been that one's word is one's bond.

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. What happens when that Woodberry-instilled sense of honor (and it is very real, even if subjected to it for only two years; perhaps especially because it is something one really tries to hold on to) comes face to face with, collides, and/or confronts dishonor and lack of positive expectation?

Lucky for me, my stumbling led me to enlist in the Navy (I had to make something of my life), where I voluntarily came under the indirect tutelage of the Adm. Rickover and Adm. Stockdale brands of stoicism. I felt Woodberry had especially prepared me for that in ways that nothing else in my background, not family, not church, had. It was the military ethos of personal honor and personal sacrifice that brought me full circle.

Perhaps it is unfortunate that more Woodberry Forest boys don't do a stint in the military, we would have a bigger database. But the few have made the spiritual connection, I am sure. I met a Marine in Cairo, Egypt who was a Woodberry grad (don't even ask me how that came up in conversation, but it did) and although we never discussed it directly, I believe it was a bond we shared.

I carried that ethos into my next career in diplomacy, where, frankly, I met some very unethical characters across the board. At length, towards the end, I was forced to confront ideas and even people (who bore them) at a very senior level who had no sense of honor whatsoever.

Here is the second crux, the same crux. How does one sustain oneself in an environment devoid of the honor system one buys into as a 14 year old? You either abandon it and "go with the flow," or you hold on to it and endure the storm. There is loss, of friendships, of prestige, even of post-service contracting opportunities (smile!) when you don't "go with the flow." A corrupt system may see you as undependable, not cut from the same organizational cloth. That is OK.

A lot of this crystallized for me when I returned to Woodberry this past winter. I found Walker's statement on the honor system on the internet and so much of it rang so true for me after so many years. 

Here in post-retirement, I am working at a college library, an archive, actually. I returned to school at 57 to get a masters in library science and here I am. And it is the end of the semester and things are pretty haywire. I'll be better able to have a phone chat next week, whenever it is convenient for you. I am on duty at the reference desk Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but most any other time works for me.

Thanks for reaching back. I await hearing from you.

Ray

********************

Poems from the period. These are the earliest poems I wrote that have survived. Most are quite awful! the blog includes poems from the entire period, 1970-1974, and my gap-year, so-called, 1975.

*******************

Ch. 3. James B. Dudley Sr. High - Return to Greensboro

I left out an important year. After two years at Woodberry I returned home to Greensboro and enrolled for my junior year at James B. Dudley High School. I may have mentioned earlier that my father graduated Dudley Class of 1932, so I had roots there. But by this time my father’s drinking had gotten worse and his work, less frequent. There were problems.

Not meaning to dwell on it, but as the crow flies, Dudley was halfway between our house and Daddy’s favorite drinking places in an adjacent area known as the Grove. It was not unusual to see him walking home during school hours. And so embarrassing. 

OK. Enough.

Thomas Murphy went away to college and I applied for his position as library page at the Southeast Branch Greensboro Public Library. The branch was formerly known as the Carnegie Negro Library and had recently consolidated as a part of overall integration of city facilities. The minimum wage at the time was $1.65, but the city got a special cutout because it was library work. So I made $1.25 an hour.

Older guys from the neighborhood graduated and moved to a house with friends on Reid Street, not far from my new work place. I think they may have been students at A&T or UNC-G at the time. Most likely UNC-G by the number of white girls who hung out there. I stopped by one evening after work and they had a big water pipe going. It wasn’t tobacco. I took a puff when my turn came. I recall it was relaxing but not hallucinogenic. I stopped by a second time, same situation. I sensed a trend developing and I stopped going there after work. No drama. It was cool but not what I wanted for myself at the time.

I worked Monday thru Thursday nights, 6-9 pm, and Saturdays all day, 9 am to 6 pm. I shelved books each evening, then read shelves and cleaned if there was any time left until closing, That was normally my sneak reading time. On Saturdays I cleared garbage out of the parking lot (the library parking lot quickly became a bit of a lover’s lane on Friday nights so there was always garbage), trimmed the hedges outside and washed all the exterior windows and glass doors. 

My junior year courses included Advanced Composition, US Today, Spanish 3, Algebra/Trigonometry, Typing (to meet girls, but it gave me a useful skill that I still retain), and Journalism. The memories of stories are starting to rush back to me now! I ran cross country for a couple of weeks at Dudley but when I got the job at the public library after school I quit the team because we really needed the money I earned on the 20-hour a week job as a library page. 

I fell head over heels in love with a senior girl in my Spanish III class, and played it to the hilt in helping her with the finer points of the Spanish subjective I had mastered the year earlier at Woodberry. But in a strange twist of fate, she told me upfront that she hated her home life and wanted to get married and move away as soon as she graduated. Married? That was the farthest thing on my mind. So I let it go. She started hanging out with a guy who graduated the year earlier but was still hanging around campus. He joined the military and she got married to him the following summer. They lived happily ever after.

That Thanksgiving we were out playing sandlot football, the annual Bluford School Turkey Bowl we called it. I ran a button hook and go pattern, but Kenny’s pass was just beyond my fingertips. I dived for it, missed the ball, and had a minor collision with the earth. And I heard a strange crunch sound as I hit the ground. I broke my collarbone and spent the next several weeks in a right-arm sling that put a severe damper on my ability and performance in Advanced Comp and typewriting. Lucky for me I had already made my first run at the SAT’s my junior year, which I killed with a very high score even among the seniors.

Why I was back home for my junior year is a whole different subject that you’ll have to read about in my memoir to fully fathom. Dudley and the rest of Greensboro were under court-ordered busing to achieve a racial balance of 70% white and 30% black in every high school, even though Dudley had been historically Greensboro’s black high school. My grand uncle, Ernest Rankin, known around black Greensboro as Ice Man because he sold coal in the winter and ice in the summer, brought my father and his sister from Browns Summit to live with him to attend high school and college. Also another story, but let’s not digress. 

Nixon’s re-election campaign was in full swing even though the Watergate break-in was out there and everybody knew Nixon was guilty as sin. (This is history, y’all!) 

In Mrs. Proctor’s U.S. Today social studies class, every day’s discussion ended up being about Nixon and busing and race. About half the class, the white half, anxiously and whole-heartedly supported Nixon. I’d look at them and just shake my head. I mean, Watergate? Really? In the best case, the most they could come up with was “He’s not a bad guy. It’s those plumbers that went rogue on him.” 16-year old me was like, “Come on, y’all, the guy’s a crook. Stevie Wonder can see that!”

But for them it was all about race, about riding that bus, about being in that black school. Some of y’all remember. Me, I walked to school, less than a block away after crossing through the PT field and Bluford’s campus. Our neighborhood was called Dudley Heights! And my father was a Dudley alum, Class of ’32, Dudley’s first graduating class, so I fully belonged there. But I digress again. The point is, fueled by whatever, these kids were supporting Nixon no matter what, because for them it was about something else altogether. 

So in the end, Nixon was re-elected. I can’t even remember the Democrat’s name but I believe it was nearly a clean sweep in the Electoral College. Let me look it up. Yep. Clean sweep. Nixon won every state except Massachusetts, the only state McGovern carried.

The rest is pretty much history. They voted Nixon in anyway, overwhelmingly, and in clear view of all his crookedness, as least as far as I could see. The Watergate hearings happened the following summer, 1973, and we watched it every day at Governor’s School. Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned the following year and I don’t remember the exact reason why. He selected a member of Congress, Gerald Ford, as VP. The following year, 1974, following impeachment but short of actual removal from office, Nixon himself resigned, in disgrace, and spared the country the pain of a bipartisan removal from office and reversal of a near unanimous Electoral College victory.

Now, don’t get it twisted about the party labels. Nixon was a Republican. This year the clearly evident crook is the former VP, a Democrat. I’ll not go into any of the gory details here because it’s just too yucky and some things, once you see them, cannot be unseen. Yet folks are backing him anyway because again, it’s not about what it appears to be on the surface.

I don’t know how this tale ends, but either way, the winner will be my President. I will salute smartly and carry on. That’s what patriots do. And I am a patriot. Nor will I bitch and moan and groan like some many did after the 2016 election and for the next four years.

Hold on to this blog post, because where history may not repeat itself, so it is said, it certainly rhymes. And this history is poetry, epic poetry no less.

A couple of milestones in the spring. I had Mrs. Coley for Black Literature and wrote an essay on Langston Hughes that she submitted to the North Carolina English Teacher, a biannual trade journal. It was selected for publishing though I didn’t find out until the summer while I was away at Governor’s School, another signal achievement. The third thing was meeting Dr. Lonnie Shabazz, the Washington, DC minister of the Nation of Islam and director of the soon to be established college division of the University of Islam. It was the escape I thought I needed at the time, but I wasn’t sure how to pull it off.

Daddy’s drinking continued. But one night he came in sober. I was at the kitchen table doing homework. He asked me how things were going. I told him things were ok, but I couldn’t get girls to pay any attention to me. He said, “You keep making the grades you are making and one day the girls are going to be lined up outside your door.” It happened, kinda. Many years later.

I met some interesting people at Governor’s School, which I attended the summer of 1973. It was a summer that changed my life’s trajectory in so many ways. We had great discussions with Dr. Plowman in our Area One Social Science pod, and the drama group put on a succession of great plays, Ionescu’s The Bald Soprano, Marat/Sade, and 1776. I made friends there I would keep in touch with for at least the next ten rocky years. 

Our Social Science pod. NC Governor’s School. 1973.

I made the fateful decision to not return to Dudley and instead to run away to Washington. Yep, that’s what it was. Read the poems.

postscript. For a high school reunion I put together a playlist of hits from 1970-1974. Check it out here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXb4GbrQzKyYL38sAtrnUdP3

The Hijrah. 1973-1975. Washington, DC

Adventures at Shabazz Bakery

In the spring of 1972, I voluntarily withdrew from the prep school integration experiment to be followed by the public school integration experiment. The pendulum swung and I took a deep dive into my black nationalism period. 

From September, 1973 until July, 1975 I lived in Washington, DC and for the majority of that period I worked at Nation of Islam-run Shabazz Bakery. During the day I was finishing up my senior year in high school and taking university-level courses. I worked second shift, 4-12 midnight, at the bakery. It was tough going back and forth, catching one bus on Florida Avenue to 8th and I St, and a second one to Anacostia, but I was young and energetic and I pushed through it. I remember having to walk several blocks through a then tough neighborhood from Florida Ave up 4th street after midnight when I got off the bus at the end of my shift. The brothers I shared a house with, the FOI house just blocks down the street from the 4th Street Mosque, told me to walk fast and look straight ahead. That’s what I did and nobody ever bothered me. It would turn out to be a good lesson in life: Walk fast and look straight ahead!

I lived at 1223 New Jersey Ave NW with a bunch of guys, most of whom worked at the bakery, Shabazz Bakery. Carl, Nelson, James, Melvin, James, John, Richard. There was one resident who wasn’t a bakery guy. Can’t remember his name. He had been a student at Howard who joined the Nation of Islam and had had some sort of menttal breakdown. He pretty much kept to himself. My job didn’t start for about a month, though classes began immediately and I spent my free time at the public library a few blocks away at 9th and G.

In my first bakery position, I was apprenticed to the pastry maker. I made mistakes, God did I make mistakes! I let the donuts proof too long, and sometimes the icing came out either too thick or too watery. I figured it out quickly though. 

My boss was a funny guy. Often I could feel him staring at me from behind the cooling racks. He always went there to eat pastries we had prepared. Oh yeah. The bakery had a firm “no snacking” policy, which I was ok with, but those who broke the rules had to sneak while doing it. The real sin was in the sneaking, I always thought. I’ll not mention my supervisor’s name because he died in ’75 and one should not speak ill of the dead. He came down with some sort of virus, got weaker and weaker, and his absences from work got longer and longer. Eventually he passed away. I had moved back home by that time, but was still in the area, on an engineering co-op at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. I hitchhiked back to DC for the funeral.

From pastries I went to pie crusts, replaced in pastries by a new Fruit of Islam (FOI) member, Linzell X. (The FOI was the paramilitary organization to which all male members belonged in the Nation of Islam (NOI).) I would prepare a predetermined number of large and small pie shells based on the orders from the front shop and the route salesmen, stack them up, and have them ready for the pie guy who came in at midnight. Brother George. Very patient guy, very even-tempered. Student minister. Occasionally I would stay and make the pies with him if there was a surge in orders. 

Brother Richard also came in around midnight to wash the pots and pans stacked in the stainless steel sinks from the previous day’s production. He and I lived in the same FOI house in Northwest. Richard took me under his wing. Somewhere I have a poem I wrote about him and the church songs he used to sing while slinging the pots and mixing bowls. Richard had made two migrations in his life: from Mississippi to Chicago, and from Chicago to Washington. My only migration was from Greensboro to Washington.

High school graduation was held in February, 1974, and my mother and sister came up from Greensboro to celebrate the occasion. I fell asleep at my cousin’s house after dinner and they let me sleep through my bakery shift. George stepped up and covered for me. What a prince of a guy! I still see him in dreams every now and then.

On those overnights I became buddies with the guys in shipping, Lawrence, Dayne, and Carl. Their main job was to prepare the orders for outgoing distribution the next morning. There was bread to bag and label, pies to wrap, and cakes and cookies to box and/or wrap. And gingerbread, our famous gingerbread with raisins and chocolate icing had to be iced, cut and individually wrapped. 

We had three route salesmen, Jeffrey, Darnell and James. James was from Martinsville, VA and had studied engineering at A&T. Jeffrey was the Mosque’s leading Muhammad Speaks salesman. I think at one point he was pushing over 1000 copies per week. The day bakers were Ralph, Charles and Floyd. Michael came later. Ralph and Floyd both adopted me as their little brother and showed me the ropes. Charles had been a basketball player at Howard and was always very intellectual and sophisticated. We had long chats and conversations about life from time to time. He had been friends with Paula Swann, a girl from Pichard Street who went to Howard. And the Bakery had two managers, James and Melvin. Melvin was from Greensboro. James was from New Jersey and had also been a student at Howard.

The folks in the Mosque referred to the bakery brothers as “the scientists.” It was a derogatory reference to conversations we had late at night, on the midnight shift, that leaked out perhaps, conversations questioning a lot of the fundamental tenets of the faith. No, we had concluded, for example, W. Fard Muhammad was not God in person and no, Elijah Muhammad was not infallible. No, white people were not all devils, and white people were not the only devils. No, twelve black scientists did not separate the moon mass from the Earth and send it hurtling into space. And yes, a lot of really bad shit went down in Detroit and Chicago in the 20’s and the 30’s, including murders and ritual sacrifices, all of which resulted in the founding of the Nation of Islam under a cloak of secrecy. But the Yacub thing, and the Tribe of Shabazz thing? Well, maybe? Origin mythology. August Wilson says we need one. I still haven’t figured it out.

As an aside, for several months the DC Mosque (Mosque #4) was locked in a rivalry with the Philadelphia Mosque (#12) over the sale of Muhammad Speaks newspapers. When we went up to 60,000 (weekly circulation), Philadelphia increased to 75,000. When we went up to 90,000, Philadelphia went up to 100,000. We pushed past to 105,000 and Philadelphia went to 125,000. This was about the same time that the so-called Black Mafia in Philadelphia had completely infiltrated the Mosque and was using it as a front for criminal operations, mostly drugs, extortion and prostitution. Street gangs controlling turf would be forced to buy bundles and bundles of Muhammad Speaks newspapers whether they sold them or not. It was probably a good time to be in the newsprint recycling business! Washington had no such Black Mafia infiltration, though we probably had plenty of US Government agents in our ranks. Eventually we yielded to Philadelphia’s numerical superiority. There has always been a tale of two cities thing going on between Philadelphia and Washington, going back to the early days of the republic. We were just another manifestation of an age-old struggle. 

For a short while during the following summer months I shifted my hours to begin a bit later and work through the night making pies as demand for them increased. We were doing something right. And for a short while, as demand for carrot cakes also increased, I would get an early, pre-dawn start before her arrival helping out with cake decorating, which took some practice. Charlotte needed the help, I was a quick study and the cakes were a high profit margin item.

The cake decorating training was where I fell in love with an older woman, or so it seemed at the time when I was 18 and she was 27. But it happened. It was a period of extreme mania for me. I wrote poems and convinced myself the sky was the limit. There was this song Valerie Robinson played on WHUR’s Quiet Storm program every night, the Spinners, I’m Glad You Came Into My Life. It was our song. So silly. I lost the poems she wrote. I still have mine. Eventually Sister Robin was hired to help with cakes. One of the managers, James, had a thing for Charlotte and resented the attention she was giving me. So he pushed me out of that close proximity situation by bringing in a new hire. But by that time the die was cast. Love was in the air. I was eighteen and she was twenty-seven. It was scandalous.

Then things became complicated. The procedure for “dating” was that the man sought permission though his FOI captain to “meet” the woman. The FOI captain carried the message to the MGTGCC captain (MGTGCC was Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class, a para-military training organization for women that paralleled the FOI organization for men). The MGTGCC captain would get the woman’s permission to “meet,” relay it to the FOI captain, who would then relay it to the man. So I went to Captain Harrell X, requesting permission to “meet” Charlotte, though we saw each other every day at the Bakery. And every day, she was expecting to hear from her captain. Well, the information was never relayed, and we figured out that at a higher level, the decision was made that “this” was not to happen. Three or four weeks passed, during which her friends convinced her that this was not the best move for either if us, that she needed an older man than me, and I needed a younger woman than she, I supposed. 

Our eventual breakup marked the end of my manic period. WHUR’s Quiet Storm played a new song by that time whose lyrics I didn’t really understand but I knew it had some bearing on my situation. It was another Spinner’s song, Love Don’t Love Nobody. Lucky for me the pendulum did not swing from manic to depressive, or if it did I never noticed. 

At some point I moved from pies and cakes to front shop management, working for Nelson. Nelson was a cool guy who didn’t suffer fools gladly. And I was a bit of a fool. But I learned a lot from him. In fact, I’d say I grew up under Nelson’s tutelage. Nelson ended up getting married to Sister Robin, the new assistant cake decorator. 

Somewhere along the way I decided that bakery management was a worthy career path. I was still studying, but I was wondering whether it was the only thing worth doing. The bakery was expanding, soon we’d have shops in Alexandria, in Arlington, in Seat Pleasant, and we, the original crew, would all get our own shops to run. Every other Monday we had Bakery meeting at the Mosque on 4th Street. Dr. Shabazz, the minister of Temple #4 who presided over the meetings (and who was also my calculus tutor, though I never became the mathematician he would have had me become) would remind us how important the bakery was to community economic development, and by extension, how important our individual contributions were to its success. And we would talk about these long-range plans for expansion. I was a true believer. 

I joined a bunch of bakery brothers who jumped in a car and traveled to Chicago in February 1975 for the annual Savior’s Day Convention. Unbeknownst to us, Elijah Muhammad was deathly ill and would die the night before the big convention. His son, Wallace, was installed in the leadership position and it was he who addressed us on February 26th in place of his father. A couple of months later, we all drove up to Philadelphia where the organization’s new leader, Wallace D. Muhammad, would give a seminal keynote address, “Remake the World.”

Interesting side note. Before 1975, joiners took on the X as a last name. So in Winston-Salem I was known as Raymond 2X, because I was the second Raymond to enter. But in DC I was Raymond 10X. I even concocted theories about the progression from binary (2) to decimal (10). And if you were important enough, Elijah Muhammad would “give” you a “holy name,” which is what happened in the case of Muhammad Ali and even Lonnie Shabazz, the DC minister. After the big change came in the organization with the death of Elijah Muhammad and emergence of his son Wallace (who would later be know as Warith ud-Din, i.e., inheritor of the Faith), people were free to choose their own names. After much deliberation, I came up with Abd al-Khaaliq, servant of the Creator, because I saw myself as somewhat creative with my poetry and even with recipes for new bakery products and processes. And Dr. Shabazz offered me the name Arshi-ud-Din, which meant, loosely, the “arshi” or “throne” or the superiority of religious faith, of obligation. Many folks went through a civil name-changing procedure. I never did officially adopt the name. Years later my dad would tell me, “Son, you don’t need to change your name. You already have a good name.” 

Along the way we started feeling the effects of the Russian wheat deal. That, and the effects of the Arab Oil embargo sent our commodity prices (flour, sugar, etc.) sky high. Almost simultaneously our manager, James, spent way more money than he should have on some used equipment he bought from a New Jersey mob-looking guy to mechanize our bread baking processes. The combination of events and their effects on prices of our ingredients pushed us into an unsustainable financial position. Oh yeah, and the Mosque leadership changed and the new minister insisted on changing all our recipes from all whole wheat to mixed white and whole wheat and from all honey and brown sugar to a white sugar mixture. Said it had worked for him down in New Orleans. It was the perfect storm.

Things went crazy, very crazy at the bakery, and I got an offer to work as a short order cook at a joint some FOI brothers I knew ran, also in southeast, Amir’s Oasis. That lasted for a few months. I moved from a shared apartment in Southeast on Lebaum St. to my own room in a rooming house in Northwest on 1st and Rhode Island Ave. I learned about a program a young organizer, Marion Barry, was running to find black students for scholarships to American University. I applied. It all lined up for me. But when my mother died unexpectedly, I packed my stuff and returned to Greensboro. The bakery in Southeast DC is now an Islamic museum. 

Poems from the period.

In later years I would memorialize the bakery staff in this stanza:

The bakery where I worked

was one big collective muse.

All my big brothers and sisters:

Nelson, Alvin, Floyd, Ralph,

Carl, Charlotte, Robin, Lawrence,

James, George, Melvin, James,

Linzell, Jeffrey, Darnell, Richard,

Charles, Michael, Dayne.

One big collective muse.

Ch. 5. Return to Greensboro. North Carolina A&T. 1975-1978.

Nothing could have prepared me for my return to Greensboro from Washington, DC following my mother’s passing. I was all of 19 years old. I didn’t have a job or a clue. There were lots of decisions to be made and I made many of them poorly. Family friends got me enrolled at North Carolina A&T. I was very unfocused and overwhelmed by multiple levels of grief and perhaps, trauma. Oh, I made so many mistakes. God forgive me for the errors I have committed in this world and grant me sustenance in the worlds to come. Amen.

I defaulted to the familiar and that may have been my greatest error. I re-affiliated with the Winston Salem Mosque. But truth be told, the mosque always had its own agenda. I leaned on relatives for moral support but they were dealing with their own stages of grief. I muddled through, missing deadlines and eventually dropping classes. This process repeated itself like a sine wave that oscillated through my life for the next two years.

I had a variety of jobs, some of which overlapped. I was a library page, then a library associate at Greensboro Public Library. I was a third shift orderly at a nursing home for a while, taking vitals and emptying bedpans. I worked as a short order cook at a trendy restaurant that refused to hire me as a waiter. They didn’t hire black waiters. I worked weekends as a Pinkerton security guard in a card box factory and as a ticket collector at basketball games at a local college. I filled in at Joyce’s janitorial firm when she needed help. I worked some Saturdays at Brandon’s Uhuru Bookstore. I flipped burgers at the newest sensation in town, Wendy’s. I even found time to volunteer at Greensboro Urban Ministry.

I changed my major back and forth between electrical engineering and biology, two, maybe three times. At length the system made me stop, though I thought it was just the right combination of majors. The jury is out as to whether I was out of my time or ahead of my time or both.

My second year I met a girl, Pat Everett, a senior who had spent her junior year abroad in East Africa, Tanzania to be exact. Pat had an apartment just off campus where we would meet and where she would regale me with stories of her travels in East Africa. She would make homemade soup that always warmed my heart. And she liked my poetry, such as it was, and I shared it with her as it was my only worldly possession at the time. It turned out she was the poetry editor of the college newspaper, though she didn’t tell me that when she encouraged me to submit my poems for the annual poetry issue. Very sweet lady. Went on to graduate school at UNC and though I visited her once at Chapel Hill, we lost track in the intervening years. Years later I would try to capture in verse the significance that this relationship deserved.

Other than Pat, girls didn’t pay a lot of attention to me at A&T. Every now and then I’d go out with my sister, like the time I got floor passes from a colleague to an Earth Wind and Fire concert. For a while I worked as an usher at the Greensboro Coliseum to help make ends meet. Sheila had introduced me to EW&F when we were high schoolers so it was a proper pay back. The band came to the stage in a spaceship extended from the coliseum ceiling. When they stepped upon the stage the crowd went wild! Once they started performing, my sister took these percussion instruments out of her bag. I was like, “Sheila, what you doing girl? She responded, “Ray, this is what you do at an Earth Wind and Fire concert.” I looked around, and sure enough, everybody was jamming with some type of musical instrument. A much calmer concert we attended together was a joint, or back to back Phoebe Snow/Dan Hill performance at Aycock Auditorium on UNC-G’s campus. Phoebe Snow gave a remarkable and unforgettable performance. What was there not to like about a woman singing about a poetry man? 

I started smoking a pipe. Silly me. Captain Black. Silly me. What the heck was I thinking? The hot smoke from the burning tobacco gave me sores in my mouth. I dropped that habit like a hot potato. I listened to jazz while I smoked. Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Milt Jackson, and Roy Ayers were my favorites at the time.

My favorite course at A&T was an elective I took, Urban Transportation Concepts, a fascinating course that blended economics, sociology, business, urban planning and design. It was taught by a guy named Benjamin, a Jewish guy who said he was from the same family for whom Benjamin Parkway was named. That was a pretty big deal in Greensboro as Benjamin Parkway was a major thoroughfare. Now every time I watch a TaaS (Transportation As A Service) infomercial, and I watch them all, I think about the professor and the course. I was also quite fond of a course I took in the biology department, Botany. Very eclectic academic tastes.

Later on I applied for a fellowship in the Transportation Institute. They had lots of scholarship money. But my application was rejected because my GPA was too low, even though its director was the wife of a friend. They made the right decision.

I went to Chicago for a summer research project financed by a North Carolina Fellows grant. Although I had a horrid GPA at the time, I went through the oral interviews and was admitted to the North Carolina Fellows program. Back then the NC Fellows was a cohort-based leadership development program with chapters at A&T, Davidson, East Carolina, and Chapel Hill. We also provided initial testing data for a new think-tank type operation in Greensboro, the Center for Creative Leadership, taking part in annual week-long retreats. Testing results indicated I was best suited for careers in banking and the military. 

In Chicago I found a dingy little room at a place called Hyde Park Arms. It was relatively inexpensive, right on public transportation line, and two blocks away from the Hype Park Public Library where I spent my down time. The research project I had proposed included first person interviews with leaders at three types of black organizations: a religious organization, the Nation of Islam; a political organization, Operation PUSH; and a business organization, Johnson Publications. Dr. Shabazz, my DC math tutor was there in Chicago and we had a nice reunion. My two first cousins on my father’s side, Billy and Robert Holt, were both there with their families, participants in the Great Migration. I believed I could make a home in the Windy City. I got an assembly line gig at Zenith Corporation.

(Side note: one Sunday at the mosque we were visited by none other than Rev. Jim Jones. He and Wallace Muhammad were planning to hold an inter-religious Spiritual Jubilee in a city park the following week. This was 1976 and Jones was gathering folks for his project in Guyana, later to be known as the Jonestown Massacre. He looked like a Native American, with white skin and slicked black hair. But he also may have been a white guy. After the whole Guyana thing went down nobody every talked much about the liaison.) 

I returned to Greensboro at the end of the summer to set my affairs in order for the move. I met Towanna at Brandon’s bookstore, Uhuru Bookstore, and decided to stay in Greensboro. Three months later she left town. I worked at the bookstore occasionally on Saturdays, just to help out. By that time many of the kids I grew up with who also frequented the bookshop had embraced a type of communism they called at the time Marxist/Leninist/MaoTseTung Thought. It wasn’t my cup of tea at all.

I buckled down in my course work and made decent grades for a change. I discovered I had a taste and a talent for economics and statistics and changed my major yet another time. Through economics I got the co-op job with Farmer’s Home Administration.

Things started to settle out when I got the job in Reidsville with Farmer’s Home. I found myself with a stable address, an entry level opportunity in a solid profession, and a love interest with a local librarian. What more can a young man ask for at 22?

I learned to process loans for government-subsidized mortgages in rural sub-developments. I also learned to talk mean to people whose monthly mortgage payments where three months and more in arrears. Threatening people with homelessness wasn’t really a part of my make up and I probably didn’t do it well. We also did financing for migrant housing, for rural electrification projects, and for individual farmer agricultural equipment. The white guys I worked with had farming backgrounds. I struggled to keep up but did my share of the work.

Partly out of boredom, and partly because I was not a good fir the for the job, my feet began to itch, an itch that Reidsville and even Greensboro couldn’t contain.

That was when I decided to enlist.

Poems from the period