Posted: Monday, 18 January 2010 10:30AM
What Color Is Your Conscience?
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, January 18, 2010
Tall, lean and black, Clem hailed from West Philadelphia.
In September, 1969, he found himself as one of two black students on the fourth floor of Beaver Hall at Penn State, where he played basketball and his Philly room-mate had enrolled on a football scholarship.
At 18, I never had a black friend and the experience of learning about and from each other appealed to me.
In the race game, we were all pretty much novices. We weren’t really sure how to handle the twists and turns of the challenge. But we wanted to try.
After lunch, Clem and I would sometimes stand outside the dining hall and watch the white sorority girls go by. Eventually I’d approach one of them. Holding out a fudge brownie I carried from the dining hall and cradled in a paper napkin, I’d address the usually naïve and always unsuspecting female.
“Would you like to take a nice brownie back to your dorm room with you?” I’d ask.
Sometimes one of the young women would bite. But when she’d reach for the offering, Clem would step forward and say, “I’m all yours.”
The young woman would look mortified and Clem and I would collapse in fits of immature laughter.
Right on, brother, right on. Clem and I were breaking down barriers – even if it was at somebody else’s expense. Clem and I got along.
One night in my room I noticed Clem paging through my high school yearbook. He spotted an inscription written by one of my buddies who had grown up with me in a rugged, rural part of Central Pennsylvania and who, like me, also knew no black people.
Clem seemed stunned by what he read.
The inscription written under my high school pal’s senior photo was similar to others – crass, ominous and recklessly immature. One buddy wrote that he hoped I got drafted and killed in Vietnam.
But the words Clem read seemed even more absurd and hurtful. My friend at home had written that he hoped I was attacked sometime in the future by a n- - - - - with a knife who would cut me.
I tried to explain but realized that Clem and I came from two drastically different worlds.
All I could do was try to learn something from the damage done and move forward.
I thought back to just the year before when I had been attacked by a young black teenager at a dance. The sucker punch had come out of nowhere and from behind as I stood listening to a black band in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
As soon as I got hit, I spun and came up ready to fight. But when I spotted six or seven other young black guys waiting for my next move, I decided to retreat. I read the situation for what it was and stepped away, escaping to look for a pay telephone where I called my father who was working at the nearby Pennsylvania State Police barracks.
“Get here as soon as you can because somebody’s going to get killed,” I said.
When the police arrived, other white people had been beaten. A couple had been dragged from their car. The only equality I wanted was revenge.
I didn’t tell Clem that story, though. Instead I tried to cover my embarrassment at the way a word can hit harder than the punch that caught me hard on the side of my head. Alone in my room later that night, I took a pen and scribbled over the n-word. If you look at my year book today, you can still see the results of my attempt to erase the past.
Of course the past is history.
The future is a mystery.
How we handle our lives today is what matters most. So as we celebrate King’s birthday, I can only try to continue to draw solid lessons from yesterday that will help heal today’s still open wounds of racism, discrimination and violence.
One day not long after Clem stared long and hard at my yearbook, I was walking across campus and spotted a familiar face. The black guy from Harrisburg who had sucker-punched me at the dance was coming the other way.
I stopped and smiled. You’re all mine, I thought. But as he drew closer I realized that I had a long road to travel and that carrying grudges and resolving them with more violence would only hamper my progress along the way.
It’s been a long haul trek over the years on which I sometimes stumbled.
I’m still learning.
For everybody’s sake, I hope you join me on the journey.
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Corbett
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