But simply being poor was not so bad; there were poor whites too. It was the treatment and attitudes toward blacks that hurt. We were barred from white schools, white restaurants, white rest rooms, or even from using the same drinking fountains as whites. And there were the signs, “COLORED AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED.”

In those days in the South, public places, such as bus stations, were sectioned off, and we had to sit in the back of the bus. When it appeared that we had forgotten our place, there were the belittling drawls: “Now, you-all know no niggers belong here. Now git on to the back.”

I remember when fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was killed​—it was big news nationally, but to my parents and most Southern blacks, it was an old story—​another black killed by whites​—the unusual factor being his age. He was fished out of the Tallahatchie River dead​—whites had viciously beaten him to death for reportedly whistling at a white girl. But do you murder for that?

This helped me to appreciate the fearful, pleading tones of grandma instructing us to remember always to look at our toes when speaking to white persons, and to say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” and, above all, to play the part by smiling. But why, I asked myself, did whites want to keep us down? What was wrong with being black?

When I was still quite young my sister had an asthmatic attack, and the white landowner we worked for refused to be bothered with taking her to the doctor. My father, normally a mild man, in desperation held a gun on the man and forced him to drive for medical help. Of course, dad could never come back home or he would have been lynched. He fled north, and we moved to my grandmother’s in another county. Eventually, father sent for us to join him in New York city.

My father’s work as a house painter and caretaker resulted in our moving into an all-white residential area in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, where I was the only black in class. My teacher seemed to assume that I would be stupid, but I was determined to prove otherwise.

In the sixth grade, I was reading at the second-year college level, and so I was put in special classes for exceptional students. The following year I was chosen to join an experimental program called “Project Talent.” I had an avid interest in many things, and boundless energy. I studied singing, ballet, journalism and nursing, and I went to a modeling school.

After leaving high school, I became a recording artist, working at one time with Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkle. This gave me opportunity to travel to other cities for television and other appearances. I also pursued a college education.

MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

In time I realized, though, that I was a victim of deception, largely self-deception. I was unrealistic to think that perhaps the color of one’s skin did not matter. It was a lie that racism existed only in the South; it was bad, too, in the North, only neatly camouflaged. I had tried to push from my memory the image of the little nigger girl being shuttled to the back of the bus, unwelcome in white homes, in white schools, in white restaurants. But now I was forced to remember.

I had to fight to get an apartment in white neighborhoods, being forced to go to the New York State Commission on Human Rights. Also, as I pursued my education with certain careers in mind, I found doors closing and barriers rising. When I applied for one job, I remember being offered an unusually high salary, not for my skills but just to give the company the appearance of being integrated. I was outraged and told them to keep the job.

CRYSTALLIZING VIEWS AND OPINIONS

Headlines were exploding with shocking episodes, one right after another in the 1960’s. One September morning in 1963, a bomb blast shattered a Birmingham, Alabama, church during Sunday-school classes. Scores of terrified black children ran out screaming; others were bleeding and moaning. Four did not utter a sound. They were dead​—murdered by whites. The following summer, three civil-rights workers, Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, were murdered in Mississippi.

By now I had become involved in the fight for equal rights. I worked for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). I listened to more moderate black leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King. I even did a feature article about him for the Harlem Valley Times. When he, too, was killed by a white man, I had to ask myself, as did many other blacks, “What did the non-violence he advocated accomplish?”

I began reading extensively about the history of blacks. I read about the cruel slave trade and the treatment of blacks as property, and how black families would be broken up and sold to different masters, without regard to human feeling. It angered me to learn that certain slave owners would use a well-built, powerful man to breed his slave women and thus produce offspring for the slave market or for work in the fields.

Such terrible injustices are best forgotten, some persons may say. But I could not forget, because it seemed to me that, though slavery was over, the attitudes were still very much alive.

OUTRAGED BY INJUSTICES

Everywhere I looked, I saw the same thing: black people clustered in ghettos suffering from discrimination, economic depression, injustice, bad housing, overcrowding, hopelessness. I began to see these places as colonies of oppressed people, people who needed to be freed.

The way I saw it then, we blacks were no different from the American colonialists who had rebelled against the British yoke in 1776; we also were a people denied certain “inalienable rights,” just as they had been. As the colonialists had rebelled, now it was our turn to do the same. That’s how I saw it, and I was not alone in this.

Then something happened that pushed me over the edge into action.

My own father was murdered. The police and clerks at the morgue said that no one knew who he was, that he was an unknown person. So they went ahead and cut out the organs they wanted. But it was not true that they did not know who he was, for they had contacted us by means of the identification he had on him!

To me it was as if he had been killed twice, first knifed on the street and then cut up at the morgue. When they finally showed dad to us, he was a mess. They had not even wiped the blood from his teeth or from his eyes. I was bitterly convinced that he was treated with such contempt because he was black and poor. I refused to cry. Instead, in my heart, I made a vow. I was going to do something about the injustices I saw my people suffering.

I felt that whites had grown accustomed to living a lie. They tried to get us to believe that it was our own inherent inferiority that was responsible for our oppressed condition. I saw that their racism held us oppressed. By nonviolent means, blacks had tried to point this out to whites. Now, I for one had to stop dealing with the white man’s attitude and deal solely and directly with the oppression itself.

Before leaving Cuba in April of 1970, I was asked by a revolutionary group to work with them. I was to camouflage myself by getting a respectable job, and when the time was right I would be contacted. In time I was. My assignment was to subvert the military, to use “any means necessary” to find and bring over to the revolutionary side black military men who had technical skills that could be used.

We learned, for example, of a black Air Force captain, a karate and munitions expert, who had been denied a promotion because of his color.