Secondary Break. Marvin Williams
tobacco fields. My mother’s family did not own the tobacco fields, but when we visited our grandparents, they would immediately dispatch us to the fields to start cropping. Tobacco was big business in the area with major companies like R. J. Reynolds and Marlboro cigarettes. We went from being city kids to Deep South farmers with a single car ride.
The stench of segregation, racism, and hatred was everywhere in the South. I despised the attitudes and the tension created every time we were around white people. Even as a kid, I understood the sheer hatred of white people anytime a black person was present. It wasn’t because it was something that white people said, it was because their hatred came through in everything they said to black people and every action they made around us. During that time, white folks felt like black folks were not equal to them and that our only place was in the tobacco fields. We spent a lot of time, going back and forth to the South. I remember as a kid, reading Jet magazine while riding in the car on our way down South.
Jet magazine was the premier weekly magazine, highlighting stories about black people from all walks of life. This magazine showcased the good, the bad, and the ugly of the plight of the black person. I remember seeing a picture of a young black soldier, hanging from a tree in Georgia. The US military soldier had come home for two weeks to visit his family. He was then taken by some members of the Klu Klux Klan, a white racist hate group, and hung from a tree. This photo had such a major impact on my life that the image still sticks with me to this day. Racism was a part of our culture in New York as well but not as open and cruel as it was in the South. In New York, we all seemed to manage to get along with our neighbors regardless of the other person’s race because New York was one big melting pot.
My grandparents were extremely poor, and just like using the outhouse to go to the bathroom, we also had to bathe in a metal tub outside in the yard at night because they had no indoor plumbing. There was a bright spot in going to North Carolina during the summertime. When us kids weren’t out cropping tobacco leaves, I loved going to the countryside. On the countryside, there were wide open fields of land that I could play on. My family would stay with our grandparents for about a month during the summertime, soak up the sun, build lots of muscles from cropping tobacco all day, and conquer any possible fears we may have had from having to venture out to the outhouse after dark. At the end of the month, we would all climb in the car and travel back to the natural city life of New York. I remember this routine, summer in and summer out, until I was ten years old.
Chapter 2
New York, 1971. I was seven years old and was getting a real taste of real life. When I was seven, I learned all about gang life, the real meaning of friendship, and the definition of poverty. I also learned about how to lean on family, the reality of being black in a world where the Black Panthers existed, and an introduction into what would become my lifelong passions. You don’t really know something is going to steal your heart until you give your heart to it. In a split-second decision, I would learn what planting a seed into someone’s life would mean.
Now there was never a time when New York didn’t have issues, but they were different back then. Gangs, for instance, were a whole different thing. Today’s gang mess is just horrible all the way around. Back then, it at least seemed there was a “code”, a purpose beyond just being feared and proving you were harder than the next fool. Don’t get me wrong, territory was still an issue. Each gang would lay claim to their blocks and defend them, but not with guns and random shootings. The innocent kid getting shot down through his or her bedroom window was unheard of, unimaginable.
Gangs were about territory. You and your group claimed an area of the streets. This micro community was controlled or managed by the gang leaders. Like a corporation, gangs had hierarchies like a CEO, an operation manager or COO, management, and then the workers. Everyone in the gang corporation had a job to do and a central purpose: protect our turf, our area, our corporation at any cost. The gang corporation also had a family aspect. Members of the gangs were generally folks in the area of the territory that either had no family or had family that did not care for them. You could always get love and respect while also learning about life from the gang’s perspective, from the gang corporation.
Two of my best friends in elementary school, Tony and Montgomery, both had uncles who were in gangs. The challenge to the gang corporation idea was that the folks in the gangs still lived in the projects and were still super poor. One of the major gangs in Brooklyn were in the projects that Jay-Z grew up in, the Marcy Projects. The members of the gangs and those they protected, still had to hustle and scrape for the basics of life. I remember visiting Tony’s house one day when his uncle wasn’t at home. I went over there with my dad because as a community, if we saw a problem with anyone, we would step in and help where we could. I remember my dad, asking Tony about his uncle, when was the last time he saw him, and if he had food to eat. Tony told my dad that he had food and that he was all right. I think we were both about six or seven years old at that time. I went into Tony’s kitchen to check on how much food he had. I opened the kitchen cabinets, and all I saw were cans and cans, stacked as high as the cabinet, of ALPO chunky dog food. No beans or soup, no rice or bread, no milk or butter in the refrigerator, just dog food, and Tony didn’t have a dog.
I learned that day what poor really meant. I understood how bad it was for people. You hustle or work a job. You are just barely getting by, and still, the best you can do is feed the kids you are responsible for dog food. This was real poverty.
Today, when I look back at how the Black Panther Party was portrayed as a gang, or a domestic terrorist group, it pisses me off. The Black Panther Party in reality was neither a gang, nor a terrorist group. They were simply a group that saw issues in the black community that the government couldn’t understand and wouldn’t contribute funds to correct. Instead of waiting for someone else to fix things, the Black Panthers created solutions. The Black Panther Party that I saw provided resources, information, and programs for underprivileged communities. In my community, the Black Panther Party fought for kids to have summer lunch programs in every community. They were not concerned about race when it came to the underprivileged, except for the fact that most of the underprivileged kids in the communities I knew about were the black kids.
The Black Panther Party also used the strength and intelligence of the members of the party to fight injustices. There was a case in my neighborhood where an elderly white lady caused a riot. When you walked out on the stoop, you could almost taste the smoke from the ashes of the fire that were set some time overnight. When walking to the corner store, it was not surprising to see a massive city bus overturned on the streets. We could hear the clang of metal from chains or crowbars, connecting from the fighting that took place overnight outside our windows. The violence every night, a reaction to the frustration, anger, and outrage of people over the civil injustices, again against the mostly black communities. My parents were afraid for us kids, just walking down our street to the corner store because anything could happen to us from the time we stepped on the stoop and down the stairs outside of the brownstone just trying to get to the store to buy whatever until we got back home.
A teenage black kid that the elderly lady knew from the neighborhood was just trying to make some extra cash. He asked his neighbors for work tasks and odd jobs that he could do for money. One of his customers was this elderly white lady who needed her basement cleaned up. She was elderly, her husband had passed away, and she was unable to clean up the junk in her basement by herself. The young man and the elderly woman came to an agreement that she would pay him for coming over to her house after school to clean and organize her basement. Since the elderly woman had troubles getting down her stairs, she told the young man that he didn’t have to come to her front door to access the basement but, instead, let himself into the basement after school by taking the stairs on the side of the house.
The boy came to the elderly woman’s home within the next couple of days and did as he was told. He took the stairs on the side of the elderly woman’s home down to the basement to let himself in. Unknown to the young man, the elderly woman became frightened by the noises, coming from her basement area and thought there must be a burglar, attempting to get into her home. The elderly woman called the police and told them someone was trying to break into her home by the basement. When the police arrived, they found the young man downstairs in the basement holding a broom.