“Now, I’m going to speak the language of the time,” Shipman recalled, with some measure of regret. “We’d go ‘nigger-knocking.’ You know, get in the back of a pickup truck with a broom, go down to the black section of town, and ride around, just swatting them with a broom. And go down by the railroad tracks and pick up stones and throw at them. It was a game.”
For whites who lived in the Henry Laurens Homes, playing that game was as easy as crossing over Spring Street. On one such afternoon, when David was perhaps six or seven years old, a group of white teenagers crested the hill, each with a hand tucked in the fly of his trousers.
“They were coming down the road with their penises out,” he said. “Just laughing, telling us, ‘Come and get it. I got this for ya.’ So of course the black kids were all upset. And I said, ‘I’m going to tell my grandfather!’ My powerful grandfather.”
Back at the house, he waited patiently as his grandfather pulled on his overalls, shuffled out onto the front porch, and leveled an icy stare in the boys’ direction. David, however, had been expecting a little more fire and brimstone. After a few moments of steely silence, he tugged on the leg of his grandfather’s pants. “Pop? What ya gonna do?”
The answer, of course, was nothing. David was too young to understand that if you were black, challenging the color line was mortally dangerous. Only a year or two earlier, in the summer of 1957, a Laurens County sharecropper had been shot to death by his landlord for refusing to work on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. (The landlord, despite admitting to the murder, was promptly acquitted.) So David was left with a profound sense of disappointment. And at the dinner table that night, while everyone else bowed their heads in prayer, he came to a crushing realization: his grandfather was just a man—a black man, at that—and not nearly as powerful as he’d imagined.
* * *
—
By the early 1960s, David’s family had moved out of the projects and into a modest home in Jersey, a little house they heated with wood and coal in the wintertime, with a yard full of peach and pear trees—a step-up attributable to the hours his parents spent performing backbreaking labor. Frankie bounced from one factory job to the next, while David’s father, John, worked the third shift at Laurens Glass (midnight to 8:00 a.m.) before heading out to various construction sites to lay brick for another eight hours. Amid their busy work schedules, they found time to have three more children: two girls, Belinda and Pamela, and a boy, Ralph (which in the Kennedy drawl sounds more like “Rav”), named for a prominent local businessman with an office over on the Back Street.
David had always been a serious, independent child. Ralph, on the other hand, was rambunctious and silly and effusive with his affection. According to family lore, he once reached out and plucked a bird from the air in midflight, a feat the Kennedys considered practically biblical. Elders in the community, evidently charmed by his gentle nature, routinely gifted Ralph with jam and biscuits and cookies, often enough that David sometimes wondered, Why for him and not for me? The year the boys were given matching suits—church clothes—Ralph modeled his to great fanfare; all the aunts and uncles went crazy talking about how sharp he looked, making such a fuss that David eventually turned to his mother and quietly asked, “Don’t we have the same kinda suit?”
Despite Ralph’s special place within the family, there was no rivalry between the boys. David was extremely protective of his brother and sisters, which may just have been his nature, perhaps bolstered by his religious upbringing. David’s grandfather was a deacon, his grandmother taught Sunday school, and though his parents often worked on Sundays, David attended services at Springfield Baptist each and every week, without exception. “I wanted to go,” he said later. “I was raised in the church. And I loved hearing the Bible stories. I can still remember my grandmother teachin ‘bout Moses. I loved hearing about the little baby in the basket.”
The story had particular resonance for David. Moses’s people, the Israelites, were enslaved and oppressed by the ruler of Egypt. Concerned that his subjects might one day rise up against him—“Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we…let us deal with them, lest they multiply” (Exodus 1:9–10)—Pharaoh commanded that all male Hebrew children be killed at birth. But Moses’s mother could not bear the death of her infant son, so she placed him in a basket and concealed him in the bushes along the banks of the Nile.
“I was just fascinated by that,” Kennedy said. “I think it bothered me that a baby was in trouble, that someone wanted to kill an innocent baby. Of all the stories and all the Sunday school lessons, that’s the one I remember most vividly. And when I think about it now, most of my fights have been for people who been in trouble.”
The move to Jersey may have offered David a bit of a reprieve from the prowling teens in the Henry Laurens Homes, but in the early 1960s there was no escaping his otherness. David was reminded of it constantly: when he whistled at a pretty young white girl and his mother slapped him so hard that he can still recall the sting of her hand on his thigh. It was there every time he was made to use a side door or a back entrance, every time someone shouted at him or called him a “nigger.” He took refuge in the love of his family. The church, meanwhile, provided a sense of order, not to mention something of a safe haven. But in the spring of 1963, everything changed.
David was in the fourth grade, walking across the campus of his elementary school, when a friend rushed to his side. “Dave! Your brother—he got hit by a car. He’s dead.”
David was so profoundly disoriented by the news that his natural response was to attack. He dropped his books and took off in a full sprint, rearing back his right arm to deliver a mighty punch. “I really got delirious in the head. I was running at him to fight him, for telling me that. For talking about my brother like that. And he kept trying to calm me down, saying, ‘Don’t fight me, Dave.’ ”
It wasn’t until hours later, after being reunited with his family, that David began to piece together the details of his brother’s death. That morning, Ralph and his mother had taken a cab uptown to visit with the boys’ uncle, and Ralph had been so characteristically excited and exuberant that as soon as the taxi pulled to the curb, he leapt out the back door and dashed around the rear of the vehicle, into the street. Seconds later, while Frankie was busy paying the fare, Ralph was struck broadside by a 1956 Pontiac. He died three hours later at Laurens District Hospital.
He had been six years old. David was nine.
Frankie was so overcome with grief she had to be hospitalized. The day of the funeral, David’s grandmother and grandfather and aunts huddled around her bed, trying to calm her down enough so that she might attend her son’s burial. She was inconsolable, however, and at some point she cried out, “Lord, have mercy on me.”
David, crouched at his mother’s bedside, reached for her hand. “He will, Mama, if you let him.”
“I shall never forget that,” Frankie said later. “I shall never forget him telling me that.”
* * *
—
Maybe it was losing his brother so young, maybe it was what happened with his grandfather that day in the projects, maybe it was just the way David Kennedy was wired, but as he grew into adolescence, he became incapable of standing idly by in the face of injustice. When confronted with unfair treatment or immoral behavior, David simply refused to keep his mouth shut.
By high school he had earned the nickname “Vamp”—as in vampire, a cruel reference to the oddity of his smile. (Rather than treat an abscess, David’s dentist had opted to pull several of the boy’s front teeth instead.) Before long, however, that nickname evolved to “Revolutionary Vamp.” It was by then the late 1960s, the height of the black power movement; James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” had just rocketed to the top of the charts, and for perhaps the first time, David and his friends were starting to feel a rea
l sense of pride in their heritage. “You just an invisible guy around here, Dave,” one of his friends once told him. “But when a problem comes up, you come full glory.”
Indeed, David had plenty of opportunities to shine, because in Laurens there was no shortage of things to protest. Though Brown v. Board of Education had outlawed “separate but equal” education back in 1954, the high court failed to provide specific instructions or guidelines, mandating only that school districts around the country begin the process of desegregating with “all deliberate speed.” The ambiguity of that language left the door wide open for misapplication. Fifteen years later, most schools across the South were still practicing de facto segregation. In Laurens, a handful of black students had matriculated at the otherwise all-white high school, but the majority of African Americans attended Sanders High, which, like most Negro schools, was chronically underfunded. David and his friends studied using hand-me-down books, outdated editions cast off by the white schools. The Sanders marching band performed in hand-me-down uniforms. The football team played in hand-me-down gear, which was so woefully inadequate that the boys resorted to shoving socks under their shoulder pads and wrapping dishrags around their knees.
“We were tired of hand-me-downs,” David says. “We wanted something new.”
To make up for the lack of official funding, soon-to-be graduates raised money for a senior class gift, leaving behind the means to buy a scoreboard for the basketball gym, new football jerseys, or whatever else might be in high demand. And that worked fine for a while, until some ambiguity sprang up about where, exactly, the bulk of the money was going. Because right around the same time each and every year, the principal at Sanders would suddenly be driving a brand-new car. “We knew what was going on,” Kennedy said. “But no one would say anything. No one would challenge him.”
No one, that is, except David. Sometime during his junior year, he walked right up to the principal during a break between classes and very calmly expressed his concerns straight to the man’s face: “I think we have a right to know what you do with the money we raise.”
“And that was the beginning of my end,” he said later.
David had always been too slight and too small for athletics, but his position as head trainer of the football program earned him a leadership role and a sense of camaraderie, not to mention a ticket to get out of town every other week. At practice on the afternoon after he confronted the principal, however, one of the coaches pulled him aside. David had been fired. “It shattered my whole world,” he said. “I was very depressed.”
His depression was short-lived, thankfully. At the insistence of another coach—a white coach—David was soon reinstated. But the run-in with the principal had two lasting effects: it bolstered his willingness to speak out, and it earned him one heck of a reputation among his peers. Everyone at Sanders came to understand that “Revolutionary Vamp” was feisty and fearless, a person you could rely on in times of trouble.
David was no less outspoken in the fall of 1971, the start of his senior year, when it was announced that the Laurens County School District would finally undergo mandatory integration. Instead of graduating from Sanders, a more-than-fifty-year-old pillar of the black community, he would be forced to matriculate at Laurens High. And though integration in Laurens proved less violent than in other areas of the state—a hundred miles to the east, for example, rioters in Lamar pelted three school buses carrying black students with rocks and bricks, shattered the windows with ax handles, and overturned two buses before succumbing to teargas—for David and his classmates, losing the school they had called their own still proved traumatic. “We lost our mascot,” Kennedy said. “We lost our colors. We lost our alma mater. Black teachers lost their jobs. Black administrators were demoted or fired. They tried to take the Sanders name from us, too.” (Indeed, the county’s original plan was to transform Sanders High, named after the first black principal of the town’s first Negro school, into Laurens Middle. The plan was abandoned only after loud and sustained protests by the black community.)
All that year, David and his friends endured everything from minor slights in the classroom—David hated that one of his new teachers insisted on referring to her black students, pejoratively, as “y’all”—to more consequential forms of discrimination. And in response, David continued to earn his nickname: organizing walkouts, storming the principal’s office every few weeks with some new list of complaints. “It was not popular here, for anybody in Laurens—a town that’s named after an eighteenth-century slave trader—to speak out. But I didn’t understand the fear. I became angry at the fear. I always thought the white guys should be challenged. If people don’t talk, this kinda thing will keep going on and on.”
By the time he graduated, David had made quite a name for himself. Yet he had no intention of furthering his education or his activism. Instead, his father got him a job at Laurens Glass, and he supplemented his meager income by raking leaves or painting houses or hopping cars at the Carolina drive-in. And he likely would’ve continued on like that, working as a low-wage laborer for decades, had he not attended a meeting with the formidable new president of Benedict College, in the fall of 1971, that changed his life.
Benjamin Payton had grown up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, one of nine children born to an impoverished rural minister and farmer, before embarking on an improbably illustrious career. In 1955, he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from South Carolina State University, and then took a veritable tour of the Ivy League, earning a second bachelor’s (in divinity) from Harvard, a master’s in philosophy from Columbia, and a doctorate in ethics from Yale. He later became a major figure in the civil rights movement, helping to organize the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 march in Selma. Then, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, he became president of Benedict, a historically black, Baptist-affiliated liberal arts college in Columbia. Payton was a tireless advocate for African Americans and a gifted public speaker, so when he showed up in Laurens—to address a public meeting of the local NAACP at New Grove Baptist Church—he arrived to a packed house. And young David, perhaps recognizing something of himself in Payton, was electrified. “He spellbound me,” Kennedy said. “He spellbound my best friend. You see somebody with courage, who tells it like it is? I said, ‘Man! I am going to Benedict!’ ”
Which is exactly what he did. Though he hadn’t told many people, by then Kennedy had had a religious experience—a calling to ministry. After receiving his family’s blessing, he enrolled at Benedict in the fall of 1972 to study religion and philosophy.
David thrived at Benedict. In fact, in some ways it was as if the school had been founded with exactly him in mind: its original mission, before expanding into a four-year college with a variety of degree programs, was to train African American “teachers and preachers” and to prepare young men and women to become “forces for good” in society. By the time he graduated—magna cum laude—David had served as a member of the school’s Judiciary Board and Religious Planning Committee, president of the Pre-Theological Society, and treasurer of the Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Society. He’d also managed to meet a pretty young schoolteacher from Laurens, Janice Pressley, and before heading off to pursue a graduate degree from the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, David married her at Springfield Baptist, surrounded in love by an enormous wedding party: fifteen bridesmaids and fifteen groomsmen.
Two months later, David and his new wife arrived in Nashville to find a campus shaped, scalded, and in many ways made wiser by the civil rights movement. Back in 1960, an African American divinity student, James Lawson, had been expelled for organizing local lunch counter sit-ins and teaching forms of nonviolent resistance to segregation; most of the Divinity School faculty resigned in protest, and the “Lawson Affair” quickly mushroomed into a PR disaster, spawning nationwide demonstrations, tarnishing the school’s reputation, and jeopardizing the university’s funding.
“It was a defining event, and still is,” Eugene TeSelle, a retired Divinity School professor, explained to Vanderbilt Magazine in 2002. “In a sense, Vanderbilt was lucky to have had this crisis at this period in history—the University learned how to deal with conflict—and it was lucky to have weathered it.”
By the time David arrived in the fall of 1976, the Divinity School had adopted a decidedly liberal tone, attracted new high-profile professors, and published a series of commitments to racial equality and social justice in the annual catalog—all direct results of the Lawson Affair. In class and around campus, David was very much in his element, studying and debating and preaching about the intersection of race, religion, and faith. Jan, meanwhile, bore the first of the couple’s three children while pursuing a master’s from Georgia Peabody College for Teachers. The couple gave their daughter—and later their sons—African names: ‘Lola, meaning “wealth and abundance”; Adedeji, “our joy has doubled”; and Akil Andwele, “God has brought me.” In his spare time, David worked as a youth coordinator at Edgehill United Methodist Church, a progressive mixed-race congregation led by pastor Bill Barnes, an affordable-housing advocate. He carved out a place for himself within a vibrant spiritual community.
But then Jan’s grandparents, who had raised her from infancy, fell ill.
“I didn’t want to come back home,” Kennedy said. “I told Jan, ‘If I go back, I won’t have peace.’ ”
And yet he realized just how much being away from Laurens had taken a toll on his wife. Jan desperately missed her family, her aunts and uncles and cousins. Her grandparents were dying. And so the Kennedys returned to South Carolina. “It’s one of the regrets of my life,” he said.
* * *
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