That was a long summer, the summer of 1951. I was waiting for the scholastic record book to come out. In the spring I had won the mile in 4 minutes 28 seconds at the Missouri state meet for Negroes, one of the best high school times of the year, and I could hardly wait to see my name in the book when it came out in the fall. It was a long summer, and a hot one. The papers always had pictures of people frying eggs on the sidewalk in front of their houses. The mud on the river banks baked into a powdery dust that blew all over the city. All through June and July, Boo and Presley and I went downtown looking for jobs. Every day. Never got anything. “Sorry, boys, we’re not hiring colored today.” By August, Boo and Presley gave up. But I couldn’t go back to shining shoes and running to the store for the neighbors. My name would be in a book soon. I kept going downtown alone.
It hit 109 degrees one day that August, so hot that skin peeled off my hand when I held a brass door handle too long. I had a nickel in my pocket that day, no job, and I started to walk home. Forty-five blocks, and every time I took a breath, the heat got caught in my throat. I thought I was going to pass out. And then I saw a beautiful sign on a restaurant window—AIR-CONDITIONED—SODA WATER 5c. It was cool inside, and the soda jerk looked like an angel in his clean, white uniform.
“We don’t serve niggers here.”
I just stood there, trying to get my mouth wet enough to tell him what I’d gone through that day . . .
“What’sa matter, you deaf, boy?” . . . to tell him how good it felt in here, to tell him I was sorry I was a Negro.
Someone in the corner smashed a pop bottle against the marble counter and came toward me.
He came around in front of me, waving the broken bottle in his hand like Humphrey Bogart would do in the movies. There were others in back of him, grinning. He shoved the broken bottle at me, and I put my hand in front of my face. I didn’t feel anything, but they started yelling. The soda jerk came flying over the counter like Alan Ladd, and he and Humphrey Bogart threw me out.
I started walking again, choking on the heat and the dust, watching my blood run down the sidewalk and the insides come out of my hand. It was white. Then I fainted. A wonderful feeling, like falling away from the world.
When I woke up, a white lady was kneeling in the gutter next to me, her arm under my head. Her other hand was stroking the lump on my forehead where it hit the pavement. “Everything will be all right, you’re going to be all right, young man.”
There was a white policeman standing next to her, and I tried to tell them that I wasn’t bothering the lady, that I hadn’t touched her. But my mouth was still too dry.
“Leave him alone, lady, I’ll take care of this. The ambulance’ll be right here.”
“Where are you taking him, officer?”
“The nigger hospital.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Homer G. Phillips.”
“That’s too far. We’ll take him to Barnes.”
“Barnes ain’t for niggers, lady. You’d better mind your business.”
“Officer, do you know who I am?”
“Some nigger-lover who . . .”
The lady said her name then and the cop’s mouth dropped open and he took a step backward. “I have your badge number and you can consider yourself fired.” The cop began to apologize and help me into the ambulance. The lady got into the back with me. “Barnes Hospital, and quickly, please, this young man is seriously injured.”
They turned on the siren. For me. Cars got out of the way. When she took me into the lobby of Barnes Hospital, I was a little ashamed of all the blood and dirt on my clothes. I had heard of Barnes, but never expected to be inside. They treated me well. Right upstairs, no waiting, one doctor to clean my hand, another to sew eight stitches and put on a clean white bandage. They all seemed to know the lady, and she stayed with me all the time.
Afterwards, she took me downstairs and called a cab. The driver looked at us strangely, but the lady got right in. She asked me where I lived, and she told the driver. She kept talking to me the whole ride, but I didn’t hear a word. I just kept staring at the beautiful white bandage on my hand. Nobody in my neighborhood had ever had such a beautiful white bandage.
“I think I better get off here, ma’am.”
“But this isn’t North Taylor.”
“I know, ma’am, but my Momma would think I did something wrong if she saw me come home with a white lady.” That was true, but I couldn’t tell her I wanted to slip in the back door and surprise everyone with my bandage.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you really sure?”
“Yes, ma’am, and thank you very much. Thank you, too, sir,” I told the cab driver. When I got out, the lady waved to me through the back window.
I started to run. I felt so good I ran five blocks, then ten blocks past my house. Finally, hot, my hand throbbing, I went home. I slipped in the back door. “Hey, everybody, come in here, you want to see something, you really want to see something?”
Momma put me to bed and I stayed there for three days. I only got up to put white shoe polish on my bandage when it started to get dirty. Everyone came to see me, and I told them about the white lady and the ambulance and going into Barnes Hospital. I didn’t know the lady’s name, and I think some people didn’t believe my story.
After a week or so, Momma told me to go to the City Hospital to have the stitches removed. I didn’t want to go there, but nobody at Barnes had said anything about my coming back. So I took the stitches out myself. One by one, with a needle and scissors. It wasn’t that hard.
That September the scholastic record book came out and my name wasn’t in it. I went down to the Board of Education and a man told me that records set in all-Negro track meets were never listed. Coach St. James told me the same thing. You have to run with the white boys to get your name in the book.
The next time I went down to the Board of Education I took a couple of thousand friends with me and I got my name on television and in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
What really happened was that the Sumner High PTA organized a march on the Board that September to protest overcrowded conditions. There were a lot of tensions and fears. Pop Beckett stood in front of the school with a baseball bat in his hand and when he saw me he told me not to get involved.
“Got to go, Pop. My Momma doesn’t know I was one of the best milers in the country this year.”
He just looked at me, amazed.
My job on the march was to run up and down the line, keeping the kids in order and warning them not to steal from fruit stands along the way. The line got longer and longer, as kids from other Negro high schools joined. I never did get a chance to talk to the Mayor about my time for the mile. The newspaper and television reporters along the way thought I was kidding when I said I was protesting because my name wasn’t in the scholastic record book. So I told them how there were eighty kids in the English class, and we learned math in the machine shop because there weren’t enough rooms in school, and the last ten kids to get to History had to stand up for an hour because there weren’t enough seats. They wrote in the papers that I was the leader of the demonstration. It’s not as if I really told them that.
The police broke up the demonstration at Locust Street, in front of the Board building. They said it was a breach of the peace. And a man came out and told us that if we wanted better schools we should return to them. And another white man said that six adults from the PTA could come into the building and discuss the matter if the rest of us went back to classes. We did. The city was pretty well turned upside down by all this Negro marching and chanting and sign-waving. It wasn’t even a matter of wanting to sit down. Back at school everyone told me I was going to get expelled, and back home Momma was all upset. The white folks had told her that the march was Communist-inspired. I told her I didn’t even know how to spell Communist.
Nothing much happened right away, but the next week the high school cross-country program was integrated. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the march. It was the first time Negro and white ever competed against each other in the high schools of St. Louis, and things really began to open up for me.
It was wild. There were rumors and excitement and electricity in the air. We didn’t know the white boys and they didn’t know us. We’d never had a chance to love or hate each other on a man-to-man basis, to watch each other run, to see each other naked. There were Negro rumors that the white boys had special conditioning and food that gave them the strength to beat us in the long distances. There were white rumors that we needed only three runners at a track meet: one would win the 100 and the 220, the second would win both hurdles, and the third would win the half and the mile. Then the three regulars would borrow a Negro water boy and win the relays.
My first integrated meet was a cross-country run over at Wood River. I was so nervous I was shaking when we came to the line. Coach St. James had given us a big buildup for weeks. He had made us learn strategy all over again, made us promise to lay off the grandstanding. No argyle socks, no saluting, no crossing the tape holding your buddy’s hand, no waving at your girl friends. This was big time. If we won we’d get our names in the white newspapers the next day—we wouldn’t have to wait until the Argus, the weekly Negro newspaper, came out on Thursday. And the coach had told me that there was a little white boy in the race who had one of the best scholastic three-mile times in the country, and if I could beat him I could win the race. But we had never run the course before. And we didn’t even know which was the white boy to beat.
Bang.
I didn’t break out too fast. Let the pack go on ahead, this is a long race. You could see right away how different it was, running against boys who had eaten better and taken better care of their bodies all their lives. They looked smooth, they ran smooth. I moved up into the pack, and then went on ahead. I didn’t know any of these white boys, which were the early pace-setters, which were the ones saving themselves for a final sprint. So I decided to stay with the leaders. There was a little white boy way ahead of everyone else, running as easy as flowing water. He took the corners sharply, and never seemed to get scratched by the bushes along the course. I got scratched all the time. I decided he had to be the white boy to beat.
I moved up, past the leaders, and started to dog that white boy. He was running too fast for me, and when I tried to match his pace my breath got short and it felt like somebody was sewing up the left side of my stomach and there was broken glass inside my shoes. He kept running easy. I knew I could never outrun him. Have to trick this race, Greg.
About the two-mile mark, I came up alongside him and slapped him on the butt. “Nice going, baby,” I said, and I fell back fast so he wouldn’t hear me panting.
A little bit later I came up again and kicked him on the heel of his shoe. Not enough to break his stride or bother him or get myself disqualified. Just enough so I could say, “Excuse me, baby.” Again I dropped back fast so he wouldn’t hear my breath come out. That upset him, but he didn’t break.
Not much time left now. Last chance. I came right up behind him and I held my breath. He felt me running right behind him and he heard my feet, but he never heard me breathe. There was a fire in my chest, and my mind got fuzzy, and when I tried to take a shallow breath my brain kept clicking to shut it off, but he was looking around him now and his eyes were wide and he was so scared he speeded up. I held my breath as long as I could, then I dropped back to where he couldn’t hear me and I let it all out and got myself together again. He had speeded up too early, and when he tried to slow down and settle back into his pace his smooth stride was broken, and he was off. He was destroyed. He wasn’t running his race any more; he was scared and his mind was all messed up.
I came up again and I knew I could pass him any time I wanted to, now. But I didn’t know the course, and I didn’t want to take the chance of making a wrong turn and getting disqualified. So I stayed a few yards behind him until the last 200 yards, a straight shot to the tape. I could see the officials and the band and the crowd and the photographers and I passed him going away, and watched my knees all the way down the stretch, higher and higher, right through the tape. And then I got to see how Whitey treats his heroes.
First-class all the way. Had my picture on the front page of the Wood River paper, and on the sports pages of all the white St. Louis papers. Dick Gregory. No. 1. That was the start of a hell of a year, that last year in high school. I won the state cross-country meet at Forest Park, white and Negro. State champion. And then I finished second in a fifteen-mile race, the only high school runner in a field of college boys. People started listening to me that year, taking me to dinners, giving me awards. Outstanding citizen. They always introduced me as Dick Gregory, a boy who was born and raised on relief. Look at him now, they said. As if relief was all in the past, as if Momma wasn’t still dragging home from the white folks, as if I wasn’t taking five dollars at a time out of her pocketbook. I was too busy being a good example to go out and work, to be much of a son or a brother.
I took the high school cooking course that year because I wanted to learn etiquette. I was getting to be a big man around and I wanted to learn how to hold a knife and fork. I always used to eat one course at a time, clean off the meat, then turn the plate and clean off the potatoes, turn it again and clean off the greens. I had to convince them at Sumner that I was going to be a cook after graduation so they would let me take the home economics course. That meant I had to take sewing, too. But I learned how to eat right. I never told them the real reason I took the course, so they put COOK after my name in the yearbook.
Didn’t matter. I was captain of the track team that year, and the cross-country team, and I played the kettledrum in the orchestra and the bass drum in the band, and the bongos for a dance club called the Rockettes. Even started taking girls to the movies. I was so cool I always took them up to the balcony, the sophisticated place in those Negro movie houses in St. Louis. If the picture wasn’t so good you could always smoke and hug your girl and make jokes.
The trick there was to go to the movie house before you picked up your girl and slip the usher some money to save you a couple of balcony seats. Then you’d come back with your girl and wink at the usher and say: “Hi, baby,” and he’d take you right upstairs. Sometimes, the usher would be out to lunch and all the balcony seats would be filled. That was the worst feeling in the world. But usually you’d get up there, and when the movie was over you’d strut down from the balcony, real slow, so everyone could see how cool you were, how important. You knew somebody, you had connections. You never let anyone know you tipped the usher. In those days, all I really wanted out of life was always to be able to sit in the balcony.
That year, I was in the balcony all right, winning races, playing drums, going out. Everything went my way. Once there was a night track meet, and the lights went out in the middle of the race. I sneaked off across the field, taking a short cut, and fell over a hurdle. I was lying there when the lights went on again. The officials tried to disqualify me. Not a chance. I told them that any fool knows that when the power fails during a night athletic event, the race in progress is automatically canceled and then rerun. They looked at each other and coughed, and I guess they didn’t know their own rules too well. I had just made that up on the spur of the moment. The race was rerun.
And then one day I decided I wanted to be president of my senior class. Only certain people had ever been class president: kids from high-class families who had perfect attendance records, were in the National Honor Society, belonged to the French Club and the Math Club and the service organizations. So I got my own organization. The hoodlums. I went around and talked to all those cats who used to stand outside the proms, all those guys who didn’t have anything going for them and I told them I wanted this thing, that I was their representative. They went and they got it for me, they spread the word that if anybody else won the election he might as well quit. I was class president.
That was another turning point for me. A new feeling of responsibility for others. In track, I was running just for myself. But as president of the graduating class at Sumner High School I knew my shirt had to be clean, my shoes had to be polished, I couldn’t cut class or come late or sit in the toilet and watch crap games or yell out crazy things in class. There were obligations, meetings to go to, a Senior Day speech to write. I had to talk to the white man who came through selling senior class rings for twenty dollars each. I had to work out how he would take his orders and collect his money and then give out the rings. I wasn’t able to afford one myself.
I had never really thought about college until that last semester in high school when scholarship offers began coming in from colleges around the country. Momma had only finished the third grade, and so just finishing high school was a big dream in our family. College was for people with money. After high school you get yourself some kind of a job. There were more than one hundred offers, colleges from California to Massachusetts, but my grades were too low for most of the schools. I was probably the only class president in the country that year who was in the lowest fifth of more than 700 students. I tried to study that year, to read books, but I just didn’t know how. At eight o’clock, after track practice, I’d sit down in the kitchen and try to read. God, I’m going to sit here until midnight if I have to, I’m going to read this book, even if it takes an hour to read every page, I’m going to sit here and read, one word at a time. And then the words started getting fuzzy and my mind started drifting, floating off to a million places.
Didn’t matter, it was still my year. Coach St. James had gone to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and he said he could help me get in. He thought it would be the best school for me, a chance to be a big fish in a little pond. Southern Illinois wanted to give me an entrance exam, but I didn’t even show up for it, I was so sure I would flunk. I talked to the coach down there and told him that if he wanted me to run track for him I wouldn’t take any tests. He sent me to the dean, who made a deal: I could go to college, on an athletic-work scholarship, without taking the entrance exam. But the first quarter I made bad grades I’d have to take the exam and pass it, or leave school. Ironman Gregory won again.
Didn’t have to study, didn’t even have to train for my track meets any more. Wrapped my legs in tape and told the coach I hurt too much to practice. I stayed out late, went to dances, took girls up to the balcony, drank beer. Even bought a pack of cigarettes. I started letting the vice-president of the class go to the student government meetings. When the teachers kept asking me if my Senior Class Day speech was ready yet, I told them I was working on it. Tomorrow. It’ll be ready tomorrow. I guess I thought I’d just go up there and tell jokes. I really thought I was great stuff, bigger than the Gregory family, bigger than the school, right up there with God. I remember the day we walked out to Forest Park for the final meet of my high school career, and all along the way there were papers on the newsstands with headlines that read: “Dick Gregory Closes Out One of Most Brilliant Careers in History of St. Louis H.S. Track.” One headline even read: “Dick Gregory Wins State Meet Second Year in Row.” Somebody must have lost his job on that one, because it rained when we got out to Forest Park and the meet was postponed.
All that week there were stories in the newspapers about how Dick Gregory was going to close out his high school career in style, in a blaze of glory. I believed every word. Didn’t bother to train, stayed up late, made all the senior parties. Then we went out to Forest Park again and the sun was out and the press was there and the bands and the photographers and crowds were waiting for me to close out this brilliant high school career. It was a hell of a close-out all right. I finished seventeenth.
I couldn’t believe it. Neither could anyone else. After the race I just hung around the finish line, waiting for them to disqualify the sixteen runners who finished ahead of me. The coach was mad and the press was disgusted and I was ashamed. The headlines didn’t even mention who won the race, just: “Dick Gregory Finishes Disappointing 17th.” I went back to school, and they started asking me about my speech again, and I just shrugged and walked away. I had gotten so big in my own mind that when I disappointed myself there was nothing left to fall back on. Too big for Momma, too big for the teachers, too big for God. But I was wrong again. The day before the senior ceremony, one of the English teachers handed me a speech.
I walked up on the stage that day and it seemed as though the whole world was holding its breath. When the principal pinned the school colors on me, his hand was shaking so much he stuck the pin right into my chest. I stepped behind the microphone. Suddenly I had that feeling again, the hot water flowing upward, the monster growing to crush the world, and that teacher’s speech felt like it was mine.
“You know, since the beginning of time, man has used symbols . . .”
Suddenly, the whole goddamned auditorium stopped shifting and whispering, everyone froze, spellbound.
“. . . the crude stone tablets, unearthed by archeologists, symbolized the feeble attempt of man to record his thoughts and his history . . .”
The teachers lost their terrified expressions, the students’ mouths dropped open.
“. . . the cross, so familiar in Christian civilization . . . the bald eagle . . . to many a symbol of democratic ideals . . .”
They were leaning toward me now, everybody, as if they wanted to run up and hug me.
“. . . a symbol of man’s efforts to live harmoniously with his fellow man. Today, we have gathered for a great symbolic experience. Colors Day. The maroon and white of Sumner High School, a symbol that for years has caused a little fire to burn in the hearts of many. Now we have joined this multitude. Needless to say, we will wear the maroon and white, this symbol of the years we have spent in learning and thought and growth, with justifiable pride in the years to come.”
I was done and you could hear the breath rush out of hundreds of lungs, and then they started cheering and shouting and the hoodlums nearly tore the auditorium down and the teachers were smiling and shaking each other’s hands and I looked down at Momma, and all I could see was tears in her eyes and she was moving her lips and I knew just what she looked like when she was alone and saying, Thank God, oh, thank God.