Tim May wrote:
It goes beyond just the "black leaders" thing--it's also about "black pride."
My eye-opening experience was my arrival in college (as Brits would say, "at university") in 1970.
Well, this post explains a lot about Tim's attitude. Myself, I never ran into this kind of crap in college. I attended college 10 years later, in a conservative state (Utah). The few blacks I've encountered personally have mostly seemed to be decent people.
I can support some of what Tim says. Although I was born in New York and absorbed some of the street ethics there, I grew up mostly in Los Angeles. During the late '60s, in an effort to encourage voluntary integration, the city (with state and fed help) designated "magnet schools" which featured enriched curriculum. My school, Hamilton High, was selected as the math center (we also became, briefly, the science center due to delay in the completion of Crenshaw High) and got a brand new IBM 1130 and a several college professors for the AP math, chemistry and physics classes. A few of us were sent to IBM's customer education classes to get up quickly up to speed (some of the regular teachers also attended but they did poorly). The advanced placement level math and science classes enabled me to ace the SAT and ACT test and entrance exams and get into CalTech (something I doubt I would otherwise been able to do).
Kids from all over LA were bussed to Hamilton. Most were good students, and I made a few new friends, not so some of the African Americans. Hami had always been a safe place, but almost immediately after the arrival of the busses there were stories of shakedowns in the rest rooms and on the lunch court. (like Tim, the faculty knew there were some bad apples but took no steps to identify and expel them from the program.)
I had been a serious student of martial arts (Shodokan, Aikido and Hapkido) since middle school and, though I was only about 5' 2", I was well along to my black belt by the time I entered high school (this was when getting a black belt in the U.S. was still roughly equivalent to getting one in Asia). When I heard of the trouble I took to carrying concealed martial arts weapon, usually a nanchuk or tonfa (now often used by law enforcement), on my back. My first incident happened in the athletics class.
As was the regimen then, the class would line up before and after activities to check attendance, then we would shower. To help the instructor the lineup order was fixed. It so happened that the student behind me was one of those being bussed in. I had not taken much notice of him until the day he decided that my back looked to be good target for his fist. His method was to punch me about every 5 seconds like clock work. It started at the first line up and continued to just before showers. (I know some of my fellow students saw him hitting me but they pretended not to and said anything.)
His locker was almost opposite of mine and as the class prepared to shower he continued his ritualistic abuse. I waited until most of the others were gone and just as he was about to land a blow I quickly turned, blocked his punch, grabbed and twisted his arm to lock it and drew him into a side kick to his throat. His trachea partly collapsed and he fell to the floor choking. I calmly continued undressing and went to the shower. When I came back some students we standing around him and an instructor was giving him mouth to mouth. I heard he was taken to the hospital. No one asked me about him, I never saw him again and none of the students said a word.
Several days later three of his friends tried to jump me between classes in a relatively isolated area of the campus, one had a knife I gave them a very painful lesson with my nanchuk. I never saw them again either, nor was I ever questioned about them by school administrators. Afterward, I took to walking to classes with friends, mostly other martial arts students, but no further incidents occurred. Its a good thing this happened back then. Today, I would have been shot and/or arrested.
steve
