I was once interviewed on television and the host asked me, “Richard, how does it feel to make a million dollars?”
I smiled. “Sir, I made a million dollars when I was sixteen.”
He was quite surprised. “You were sixteen and you made a million dollars?”
I said, “I sure did.”
He said, “Man, I thought you grew up in the Deep South.”
“I did,” I agreed.
“Then how did you make a million dollars?”
I laughed. “Hell, I made more than a million. I know it because I worked for white people who kept buying big plantation homes, big fields, big cars. Matter of fact, they bought the whole damn city. Sure, I made millions. They just kept my share.”
Heading back to Shreveport, after my years in Chicago, was a time for deep reflection. Shreveport had been my whole world. I hadn’t been anywhere before I left. Now, I had lived in a big northern city. What had I discovered? The world hadn’t changed. The racial hatred I knew as a child was no different. What had changed was me. I was going back to Shreveport with money I had saved and the pride in myself that it created. The two jobs I had worked for over five years—and a third on weekends—let me save up enough to think about starting a business of my own.
The other important change came from college. Education changed the way I thought and acted. Besides a knowledge of business and books, I learned a greater degree of self-control. I learned how to stay out of fights. Instead of talking back to people, I learned to turn my back. I had a more mature understanding of people and their ways. I could still best them, but by turning the table on their arguments rather than by hitting them with the table.
I am a thinker. I try to understand everything. As I approached Shreveport, I realized I had had no respect for anyone as a child, including myself. My pain and hatred were so great I was willing to die. I think I wanted to die. Now, I wanted to live. I was still at war, but I could see my situation without the rage I used to carry. The one thing that never did change was my quick temper. To this day, I am quick to flare up and slow to cool down.
I understood myself better. I listened better. I left Shreveport a frightened boy. Coming back, was I a man? I should have been able to consider myself a man. I was over twenty-one. I had made money. I had sent money to my family. Yet, those things were true from the time I was seven. The truth was I never felt like I was a man in America, then or now. I felt like what the white people called me, an insult I still feel the pain of today. I felt like a nigger. I still do.
Heading back to Shreveport in 1965, lulled by the rhythm of the rails in that old boxcar, I knew I hadn’t lost my anger despite all I had learned. How could I? From the day I left my mother’s womb, I got the pounding of psychotic names like nigger and boy, and got beat up, and saw my father run in cowardice from an angry white mob, leaving me behind to be beaten. Despite my achievements, a racist America defined me then and now.
People claimed the first wind of hope for Negroes was blowing across the nation.
I didn’t trust it.
The only thing I was going back for was the opportunity to tell Mama I was sorry for leaving without her permission, to apologize for not taking her advice about Chicago, and to ask for her blessing before I left again. I had to tell my family and friends the truth. Don’t go to Chicago. It’s not as bad as Shreveport—it’s worse. It was pointless to worry about the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were everywhere. It was not a theory, it was a way of life. It often seemed to me that the only freedom to be found in life lay within the chilly hands of death.
It was a grand homecoming when I walked into our house. My mom was overjoyed to see me and threw her arms around me and cried. I told stories to her and my sisters, and ate with them, and slept. But by the next morning, I was restless. I wasn’t going to leave without shaking things up. I felt a mission stir within me. I wanted to get black people in Shreveport to change their way of thinking, to acknowledge they were more than worthless niggers.
In a small neighborhood like Cedar Grove, news of my arrival traveled fast. People came over to wish me well, but the more I talked about civil rights, the more my renewed reputation as a troublemaker spread. I was in a dangerous position. I was alone and vulnerable. I heard there had been a black dentist on the other side of town who talked the same way I did. The Klan burned down his office and ran him out of town. My mom told me I had an uncle about fifty miles away who was also talking civil rights, but we never did get together.
I started stopping white people in the street and asking them questions about black people. “Do you think that blacks will ever go with white people to the same church, the same school? Can you ever see a black man marrying a white girl? Do you see a white girl ever marrying a black man?”
They looked at me like I was out of my mind. Even black people wondered why I asked those questions. My mom told me that Mr. Macey, the usually friendly manager of the A&P market, came up to her with a very worried expression.
“You know how much he likes you and loves you, babe,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. I do.”
“Well, he told me that you asked him, do you think that a white girl one day will openly be having babies with black men and nothing will be done about it?”
“I did ask him that,” I said.
“Well, he said you gotta stop asking questions like that. It’s too dangerous. Why, they won’t even let me shop at the market now.”
“But why?”
“He was afraid you gonna end up raping a white girl. He said that if you don’t get outta here you gonna not only get killed, you gonna end up kidnapping a white girl, raping her, and killing her, and definitely be hung in the middle of town.”
Was it crazy? Not to him. Within the realm of his expectations, a black man talking about having sex with a white girl could only end in rape. One white man came up to me when I was asking those questions and told me, “Son, it’s gonna happen someday, but I won’t be alive to see it, and neither will you.”
I caused trouble on all sides. The white community despised me because I refused to accept inferiority. The Negro community resented me because they feared my fight would cause them problems. As if I were a magnet, trouble followed. As I stood in line in People’s Market on East Seventieth Street, an ugly white man wearing a Confederate T-shirt held up a box of pancake mix with a picture of Aunt Jemima on it and said, “Hey, Sambo, instead of teaching them niggers how to be self-sufficient, you need to teach them how to work for us.” He walked to the counter and continued, “Y’all ain’t gon’ never do nothing but work them goddamn fields, where you belong.”
Instead of getting angry, I tried talking. “Do you believe one day there won’t be any more prejudice?” I asked calmly.
He became extremely angry. “Why do you think a clean race like ours would contaminate ourselves with you dirty bastards?”
“Do you think a day will come when blacks and whites will go peacefully to the same school, together?”
“Over my dead body. I would never let my children go to school with a coon.”
Persistent, I followed him outside. “Do you think blacks and whites will go to church together?”
He answered angrily, “I don’t serve a nigger’s God. I don’t even like living in the same city with you niggers. I don’t know one white person that wants to live on the same street ’cause you stink and you’re good for nothing.”
I had not failed to see his four friends, who had hunting knives strapped to their belts, begin to circle me. I was no match for them. I was back in Shreveport, in danger again. So I did what I had learned to do so many years before.
I ran.
I heard them yell, “Catch him ’fore he get away. Let’s make an example out of that little Chicago nigger.”
I turned the corner of Seventieth and headed onto St. Vincent going south. I went in the back door of the drugstore, the official Negro entrance. After ten minutes, I saw their truck go by. Across from the drugstore was a bicycle store. Three beautifully painted brand-new bicycles with FOR SALE signs on them were parked on the sidewalk. I got on one and rode away.
As I rode home, I realized it wasn’t safe for my mother and sisters for me to spend even one more day in Shreveport. White people hated me for trying to organize my race. Black people hated me for trying to organize my race. I endangered the hateful peace. Both sides thought the same, and I couldn’t change their minds.
Before I could set one foot in the house, Mama was at the door.
“Richard, I heard you were running. Are you okay?”
After I shared the details, and apologized for worrying her, she said, “I wasn’t worried at all. I knew if you got a head start, it would be impossible to catch you. No one can catch you when you running.”
“I know, Mama.”
She tried to choke back her tears, but they flowed from her eyes. She hugged me and said in a very gentle voice, “You can’t change these people, ’cause they been down so long they don’t recognize up. This place is no longer your home. I think it’s best you leave ’fore you end up getting killed. I want you to get out of Shreveport. I’m gon’ pack some food for you tonight and you’ll leave right after dinner while it’s still dark.”
She was right. You cannot help people who do not want help. This time I would listen. I had her permission to leave, her blessing, understanding, love, and kindness. That night after dinner, we all prayed. As I collected my belongings, my sisters begged me to stay but Mama assured them it was best for me to leave. We all walked to the back porch. I picked up my clothes sack and Mama’s box of food and strapped them to the bicycle.
“Where do you think you’re going with that bike?” Mama asked.
I said, “I’m going to California, and the way I feel I think I can ride this bike all the way.”
Mama smiled. “Maybe you should take a bus, Sonny.”
She said good-bye and hugged me and cried, and my sisters did the same. I left them and rode down the dirt roads on the outskirts of town. My heart ached because I was leaving my family, but I was glad to be leaving Shreveport. As I rode, I tried to store a vivid picture of Shreveport in my mind. Three old black men sat on the front porch of a jook joint drinking wine like water. Intoxication was their refuge in a crazy world. I turned down a dirt road lined with old wooden houses with oilcloth shades and tin roofs. Fallen planks left gaping holes in the walls. Some slanted as if ready to fall over.
Tattered sheets hung outside windows and flapped in the night breeze. Curiosity got the best of me and I stopped by a window and peeped in. A man, three women, and five children lay asleep on the floor. A foot-tub full of dirty dishes sat in a corner with bugs floating on top. A dirty pot on the stove was filled with maggots. As I walked by, the breeze spread the rotten smell seeping from the outhouse.
I had wanted a lasting vision of Shreveport.
I got one.
My mother had told me to take a bus, but I headed straight for the freight yard and dug up my money, buried there in case I had to get out of town fast. I looked over the trains that were ready to head out of the yard. All trains have markings that tell you their origin and destination. Quietly, I found one heading north. There was danger. If the freight-yard detectives arrested you, they imposed harsh punishments. They took your food and money and belittled you every way known to man. Then they took you to the sheriff, who made you work on a road gang for several days until you were released.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading the fight on a national level, but in the face of the violence against black people, I found it difficult to embrace his views on nonviolence. I saw the dogs and the water hoses on television news. I saw the marchers keep on coming. Could I be knocked down repeatedly without retaliating? I was never good at it, but for once, I decided to try.
I decided to postpone heading west and go instead to Mississippi. I knew a man who was working on civil rights projects there and I wanted to join him. A series of freights led me to my friend and I joined his group working to register blacks to vote. Every day we faced threats and acts of violence. When a group of us went into a black neighborhood to talk to people about voting, a small crowd of whites intercepted us. They had bats, bottles, sticks, and bricks and kept calling us niggers.
I remember kneeling and praying to God for strength to get us out of there. While I was kneeling, a white boy pulled out his penis to urinate on me. I carried a homemade zip gun in my pocket. As I pulled the gun out of my pocket, one of our youth leaders rushed to my side and told me to put the gun away.
I said, through gritted teeth, “I’ll shoot him if he pisses on me.”
Fortunately, we were able to escape without injury, but I was asked to leave because I promoted violence. I knew it was true. I could not embrace a turn-the-other-cheek philosophy. I wasn’t running anymore. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was my motto, and I insisted on living by it. I could not, and would not, be a victim again, not of my own free will. King and Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael and other leaders of the civil rights movement had brought a new way of walking, talking, and thinking. It was time to be proud of our blackness. We had something to give to our community, to our city, state, and country, to the world. White people had better get ready for those of us willing to stand up for ourselves.
All around me, people claimed the wind of hope for Negroes was blowing across the nation.
I still didn’t trust it.
No matter how much I would have liked things to be different, I believed the greatest civil rights victory I could achieve would be my own success.
It was time to live free, be free, and go into business.
Realizing no one could stop me except me, I hopped the first freight I could find and headed for California.