Manchild In The Promised Land

Once upon a time I was a young man.....Let's take it back even further....Once upon a time I was a child...When I was 13 and 14...I used to like to ride the Elevated Trains and at times the Suburban Trains and just wander around this huge city of Philadelphia... It mortified my mom...She was always being told by one of her friends or "ladies from the church" that her son was seen in "some part of town that he didn't look
like he belonged in." I got that a lot.

From an early age, I learned that there was a difference in where I lived and went to school and where other people who looked differently from me lived and went to school.

I was one of the lucky ones....After 5th grade, I attended school with mostly white kids and a few hispanic kids... I went to what they called a "Magnet School" where so called "talented and excelling " students from all over the city were pulled to attend ...

I had to ride the elevated train from my native West Philadelphia to what was then 90 percent white Kensington...The middle magnet school I attended was probably as old as the school I attended in West Philadelphia...but it was markedly different...My old elementary school in West Philadelphia had drab gray painted hallways that looked like they were painted when my mother and aunts attended the school some 20 years before I was born.

We had textbooks that were written in the 50's.....All fine and good...but I was in elementary school in 1967.
 My new school had brand new text books....They had a small television station at this school...(kid you not)
We did a small school news program every morning that was seen in all of the classrooms...This is where I first discovered I had a talent for communicating...The teacher allowed me to do the weather and ham that I was...I had the most interesting and funny part of the news every morning...I doubt if I could have conceived of this in my elementary school in West Philly....Like I said...I was one of the lucky ones...or Blessed...However you want to look at it..

For the good education I got....Outside  I got another education.....It was the first time I was ever called a nigger also....Not just the white kids....but their parents made it known that they didn't want us little niggers and them dirty spicaricans (That's what they called the Puerto Rican kids then) in their neighborhoods...

I enjoyed hobby shops...They had a nice one on Allegheny Avenue ..with model airplanes, trains, action figures...A friend and I hung around too late one afternoon...We both got a fierce beat down from the local white street gang that afternoon.

I learned that there was safety in numbers.....I learned about co-alations then too....The Black Kids and The Puerto Rican Kids had to band together, because we both were facing a common enemy...We rolled together and fought back....When the cops came of course....We were more than likely to be the ones to get
arrested or chided....I learned that too...I was barely 14 years old and already I had an attitude...

Mind you...This was before I had ever read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soledad Brother by George Jackson, Marx, Lenin, Frantz Fanon...any of that stuff...No ..My life radicalized me, My life taught me everything....By the time I did read all of that stuff.....I had already had my share of experiences...

But I don't want to go off course...I'm talking about school here...

After middle school...I was back in the hood for a year...I went to a Junior High School that was all Black....It had windows that were broke out.....and left unfixed for months...The hall had the smell of fresh morning urine...and it was right in the middle of two gang territories...The Moon Gang and the Summer Street Gang....

If you didn't get down with one, you had better get down with the other or be "cool" with enough people who were down as to allow you safe passage into one of their neighborhoods...

My Junior High school was a training ground for future psychopaths....No lie...My 9th grade year ,I was in so many fights that I can honestly say that I didn't learn a damn thing that year....

Again...I was lucky or blessed...My mom had had it with the Philadelphia Public School system by then...She shipped me out to the suburbs...Where I used my aunts address and I attended a mixed intergrated high school...

My high school was brand new at the time I entered it in the fall of 1973.... It had been built in 1972...It was about 50 percent Black, 50 percent White....We all got along quite well....None of the racial street fighting of my middle school years....We had nice up to date text books, and a modern classroom setting...A lot of my teachers were only about five to six years older than me...I didn't know that then of course...but it was true...
I got a pretty good education there...Excelled in Sports and went to a nice upstate college...

College was a whole nother story..Again, Predominately white....Brand new dorms , some being built as I arrived on campus...Two gyms...beautiful campus....600 Blacks out of 6000 students... Incrediblely beautiful
campus...

Prior to going to college ,I had never been upstate ......If I wanted to see Black folks...I had to go to nearby Harrisburg...the state capital....It was the closest thing to Philly I was going to know...I saw Amish people for the first time...They'd be in their horse and buggies and standing on the road....Getting free bus rides....I was stunned.... I was an 18 year old kid , away from home by myself for the first time....This was fascinating..

Fast Forward a few years...I pledged Kappa Alpha Psi in my junior year....and like every other person in any other fraternity,it was customary to visit other campuses...Our favorite campus was Cheyney State College...Cheyney State was a historically Black college which was closer to Philadelphia than my college...and yet ,completely different from where I attended school...

Visiting Cheyney was something akin to being in the 56th Street projects at times...I mean don't get me wrong...I loved it...They had the best parties...finest women.....but their campus was in no way as well kept as my predominately white upstate college.....

All of these things stuck with me....I kept asking myself....Why were there so many differences?? Was it because of the race of one group of people in one place compared to another?? And basically...What would have become of me had I been stuck in my neighborhood, in my schools...??? What would have happened to me if I had transitioned from my old elementary school to my house of horrors Junior high and then to a high school equally bad???

What happened to a lot of my friends who didn't get the kinds of breaks I got???

See I have to ask these questions.....I'm nobody special....I don't think I'm particularly smarter than most...but I was asking questions like this at every point in my life......These kids are asking these questions too...As they look at their schools, their neighborhoods and see other people's neighborhood...And no radical leftist literature is going to create the next wave of Black militants.....No...it's going to be their lives that create them...Just like it was mine....I'll stop now...but I've got more to say on this!