Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  My own cultural heritage had been around me all this time, but I hadn’t really noticed it. Now I looked for it everywhere and was constantly rewarded.

  The inside of the YMCA had various murals by famous black artists such as William E. Scott and Aaron Douglas, whose work appears in the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Douglas’s mural Evolution of Negro Dance filled one archway with its dark silhouettes of black people going through stages of social development from crouching in enslavement in dark shadows to celebrating freedom by dancing in the light. Looking at that beautiful mural, I instantly felt connected to the evolution portrayed. Like them, I had started in the dark about who I was, being the person everyone expected me to be without really knowing who I wanted to be. Then, through the physical rigors of basketball and the mental discipline of reading, I had stood tall and stepped out of the shadows into the bright sunlight of finding myself.

  Unfortunately, that bright sunlight was mostly symbolic because our actual office was located way down in the gloomy, windowless basement of the building. Our “sunlight” was provided by buzzing fluorescent lights; our “dancing” was rushing back and forth on squeaky linoleum floors, yellow and brittle with age. Despite the relentless summer heat on the streets above, we were always in a humid coolness that felt like a damp cave. I would not have been surprised to arrive one morning and find bats hanging from the ceiling.

  The room itself was about forty feet square, equipped with ancient black metal typewriters that required a lot of pressure to force the keys to impact the paper. These typewriters were always in use, so the room continually echoed with a loud clickety-clack. We often had to raise our voices to hear one another. The room also housed a typesetting machine that seemed so old that Benjamin Franklin might have used it to print Poor Richard’s Almanack.

  But we were all filled with youthful passion and energy, ready to bring our fresh ideas and enthusiasm to the Harlem community.

  The man in charge of our young group of fired-up journalists was Al Calloway. However, the head of the Heritage Teaching Program was Dr. John Henrik Clarke. He was about fifty years old and had kind eyes that never stopped analyzing, yet never seemed to be judging. His smile was warm and he spoke softly, but with the precision and forcefulness of an academic, which he was. Dr. Clarke was a well-known historian who had published various notable articles, had cofounded the Harlem Quarterly, had been an editor of the Negro History Bulletin, had taught at the New School for Social Research, and was a prominent leader in the black political community. He had been born to sharecroppers in Alabama and traveled alone by freight train to Harlem when he was only eighteen. After putting himself through school, he changed his name from John Henry Clark to John Henrik (after the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen) Clarke (adding an “e”). It was weird how many people I was running across who had changed their names: the jazz drummer Art Blakey to Abdullah Ibn Buhaina; Malcolm Little to Malcolm X; a few months earlier, in March, the world heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay had changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Now Dr. Clarke. It seemed as if people were all reinventing themselves to be who they wanted rather than what others said they had to be.

  I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be spending my summer with a man like Dr. Clarke. I had always loved history, and here I was in the presence of a black man who was also a writer, a historian, a teacher, and an activist. He showed me I didn’t have to be defined by just doing one thing. I also realized that he and I had gone through similar awakening experiences in terms of what we had been taught—or rather, not taught—about African American history. When Dr. Clarke had been a young Sunday school teacher, he had been disturbed about never seeing any images of dark-skinned people in the Bible. “I began to suspect that something had gone wrong in history,” he once said. “I see Moses going down to Ethiopia, where he marries Zipporah, Moses’ wife, and she turns white. I see people going to the land of Kush, which is the present day Sudan, and they got white. I see people going to Punt, which is present day Somalia, and they got white. What are all these white people doing in Afrika? There were no Afrikans in Afrika in the Sunday School lesson.”

  I had wondered the same thing, but my cover of keeping a low profile meant I kept my questions to myself.

  But Dr. Clarke didn’t stop digging. He read a copy of The New Negro, an anthology of essays, fiction, art, and poetry compiled by Alain Locke. The book was famous for helping to define the goals of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary, artistic, musical, and political movement in the 1920s and 1930s that made Harlem one of the most influential centers of cultural influence in America. The awakening that was churning in Harlem sent ripples throughout the country that had an effect on American culture ever since.

  Dr. Clarke shared his passion for African American history with all of us, but I felt as if his message were directly aimed at me.

  Everything started to make sense to me. Coach Donahue had taught me how to play basketball, how to win games, but Dr. Clarke was teaching me how to find my place within my own community, within my own history. In a way, it was appropriate that my cultural awakening came as a result of being called the N-word. I had been a little too comfortable being the young basketball star, a little out of reach of the kind of dangerous racism that others faced on a daily basis. Ironically, it was Coach Donahue who, by immersing me in basketball, kept me insulated from that real world—and it was Coach Donahue who reminded me that such insulation was a fantasy that could be shattered whenever he wanted to.

  That was all over now. Dr. Clarke encouraged us to explore our own past as well as what was going on in the streets around us. Coach Donahue wanted us to become great basketball players, to achieve personal success; Dr. Clarke wanted us to become great African Americans, to enlighten ourselves and others. He hoped that by training Harlem’s youth in areas such as art, music, social work, photography, and journalism, those trainees would be able to make Harlem a better place when they became adults.

  Al Calloway was our boss. He taught us journalism. Our job as journalists was to produce a weekly paper for the Harlem community that featured the accomplishments of the other HARYOU workshops, in dance, music, and community action, and reported on Harlem life in general. We arrived at ten o’clock in the morning eager for our assignments, then scattered to do research. Some of that was done on the streets by interviewing people, but a lot took place at what is now called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Once merely a collection at a branch of the city library, the Schomburg became one of the world’s richest sources for learning about black history, thanks to the Puerto Rican–born black scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who donated his enormous collection of books on black history.

  Walking into that building for the first time was like walking across the burning desert and being handed a glass of ice water. I hadn’t even known how thirsty I was until I saw all the books on black history.

  The Schomburg became a peaceful place that inspired self-examination. I returned again and again to wander up and down the stacks, pulling every book of interest and plopping myself down at a table to read everything I could. I pored over every sacred scrap of information I could find about the legends of the Harlem Renaissance: the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, black revolutionary W. E. B. Du Bois, poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, fiction writers Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman. All these talented and earnest young men and women were posing all the same questions that had been bothering me all my life, but I’d never found anyone I could ask. Now I didn’t have to. I could just read their insightful words and feel myself filling up, not just with knowledge but also with pride. How could I be a senior in high school and not even have heard of the Harlem Renaissance?

  Now I studied everything I could about it. At the Schomburg, I was learning about the past just as history was in the process of happening right in front of me. It was clear that Big Changes were happening all around me. The more I read about t
he past, the more I understood about the present conflicts. Now I just had to figure out what I wanted from the future.

  After a long session at the Schomburg, I would walk out onto the streets and notice some of the similarities between the Harlem of the Renaissance era and the Harlem now. Unrest, frustration, and distrust were as thick as the humid summer air. Black militants such as Malcolm X preached about injustice from the same soapboxes that Marcus Garvey had used. Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam, which advocated an aggressive “by any means necessary” approach to achieving racial equality, was at odds with the strict nonviolence advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At one speech in Harlem that month, some Black Muslims from the Nation of Islam actually threw stones at Dr. King because they felt his message of nonviolence was holding back black equality. Racial tensions had gone far beyond just black versus white; now they were also black versus black.

  I was still trying to decide where I stood. Dr. King had been chosen as Time magazine’s Man of the Year at the beginning of 1964 and was a beloved leader of many black people. He was a kind, gentle man but a forceful and passionate speaker. He was convinced that the nonviolence preached by Jesus and practiced by Gandhi would be effective in the civil rights movement. While I admired his courage, dedication, ability to inspire, and even his optimism, I wasn’t convinced that nonviolence was realistic. Especially after the news in June that James Chaney, a black activist from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, white New Yorkers seeking to help register black voters in the area as part of the Freedom Summer project, had gone missing. After a desperate search by hundreds of volunteers, their bodies were discovered about six weeks later. Eventually, some twenty men, including police officers who had handed the civil rights workers over to their murderers in the middle of the night, would be indicted. How could nonviolently marching and singing “We Shall Overcome” combat this kind of violence? I had no answers, but I knew that when Dr. King spoke, all things did indeed seem possible, even “a community where men can live together without fear.”

  Despite my newfound intellectual curiosity, I still had to maintain my physical fitness for basketball. Since we were already headquartered in a YMCA, I took advantage of the gym facilities. When I walked into the workout room, I was surprised to see jazz great Miles Davis punching the speed bag and Wilt Chamberlain hefting weights.

  Wilt recognized me from our previous meeting. At six foot eleven, I was hard to forget.

  “Still makin’ a name for yourself, huh, kid?” he said as he curled dumbbells larger than my head.

  “Trying,” I said.

  “You’re going to need to pack on some meat if you want to bang with the big boys.” He grinned and plopped the dumbbells onto the ground with a loud clank. Then he picked up a barbell with even bigger weights. “You need muscle if you’re going to jump up with three guys climbing on your back.”

  I looked at his thick muscles with envy. I felt like a pencil standing next to a mailbox.

  “I’ll work on it,” I promised, then grabbed a barbell that was too heavy for me, struggling to raise it. If he noticed, he didn’t let on, which I appreciated more than the advice.

  After that encounter, our run-ins at the gym weren’t always accidental. I knew when Wilt was around because I only had to look across the street from the YMCA to see his black limo or fuchsia Bentley parked outside. I started shooting baskets at break time whenever he was there, and one time he actually came and started shooting around with me.

  “Wanna try a little one-on-one?” he asked with a grin.

  “Nope.” I wasn’t even tempted. If he ran into me, I’d be nothing but a long stain on the floor. “How about H-O-R-S-E?”

  “H-O-R-S-E it is,” he said and spun around to sink a ten-foot fadeaway.

  I matched his shot.

  He laughed. “This is going to be fun.”

  It was fun. We tossed in hooks, reverse lay-ups, long bombs—anything we could think of. He won the game, but I won, too, because now we had a speaking relationship.

  When I wasn’t plotting to accidentally run into Wilt, I focused on my job as a journalist. Much of what we wrote was fairly routine promotion for local history and events. But one day, we received unexpected good news. That June, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a favor to Dr. Clarke, agreed to address participants in the HARYOU program. And I was chosen to attend the press conference after his talk.

  I showed my press credentials to gain admittance to the conference. They made me feel so adult and powerful, like guys on TV who flipped open a wallet to flash an FBI badge. Once in the room, I saw Dr. King sitting at the small table in front of a half-dozen microphones, two men on either side of him. He looked calm and happy, with a round face like a black cherub. He looked like a man you could confide anything to and he would smile, pat you on the back, and say, “How can I help?”

  I felt a little light-headed, realizing suddenly that I was not just observing history but actually participating. I stood among the crowd of seasoned reporters, a tall, skinny, seventeen-year-old kid holding a battered tape recorder to capture Dr. King’s every word. I towered about a foot over the other reporters, yet they were doing all the talking while I just stood there, my hands shaking as I tried to work up the courage to ask a question. I had played basketball in front of crowds of hundreds of people without a second thought, but just standing here in the presence of such a man of vision and purpose made me as nervous as a child about to receive a booster shot. I didn’t want this once-in-a-lifetime chance to pass me by, but there were so many serious professionals in their dark suits and ties, and I was just a shy kid in casual street clothes working out of a basement in Harlem.

  I don’t know where the courage came from, but I finally croaked out a question of my own: “Dr. King, what do you think the significance of Dr. Clarke’s program is to the people of Harlem?” Dr. King leaned toward the microphone and said, “I have no doubt that the program will be a great success.” He said more about the importance of such programs in guiding the youth of Harlem, but it was hard to hear his words over the thundering thumping of my heart against my ribs.

  When I left the conference, I knew that Dr. King was right about the program being a success because it had already transformed me. I felt like a serious person with serious goals. I now understood what I wanted to do with my life. Maybe not the exact details, but I knew that like Dr. King, I had to do something that affected the African American community in a positive way.

  16.

  Harlem Explodes!

  During my many hours at the Schomburg, I discovered the poetry of Langston Hughes, an especially influential writer during the Harlem Renaissance. One poem in particular, called “Harlem,” affected me greatly because it asks the same question many African Americans were asking: If the people in power continued to deny black people their shot at the American Dream, would the frustration lead to violence? The poem captured everything I’d been thinking about for a long time. The fact that it was written in 1951 and that we were still asking the same questions in 1964 explained the frustration fueling black leaders like Malcolm X, who urged us to take more aggressive and confrontational actions to obtain our dream of equal rights and opportunities. Black communities were tired of waiting, tired of the same old political promises that those rights and opportunities would eventually come if they would just be “good Negroes” and be patient. Many were tired of being patient, watching white children thrive while their children didn’t.

  On July 18, 1964, that festering frustration exploded on the streets of Harlem.

  It was a hot, muggy Saturday. The dense humidity soaked people’s clothes with sweat and irritability. Everything felt heavier, thicker. Every small task seemed to take longer, like we were wading through a swamp. I was returning home from a lazy day reading at the beach, hoping this would be my last summer in New York City before going off to college. I decided to get off the train at 125th Street to stop in a jazz record store and check out
the new releases. Since I was already in the area, I thought I’d also use the opportunity to walk over to the CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) rally a few blocks away to see if there was anything newsworthy I could write about for our journal. The rally was taking place to protest the shooting death of a fifteen-year-old African American, James Powell, by a white off-duty police officer, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan. The shooting had occurred two days before, and there’d been protests throughout the city since.

  When I climbed the stairs from the subway to the street, I felt as if I were stepping into a war movie.

  Except this wasn’t a movie. Real gunshots cracked the air. Real glass windows shattered. Real people screamed in terror as they ran past me looking for cover.

  I ducked behind a lamppost, looking around to see where the shots were coming from so I could run in the opposite direction. I saw a couple of men across the street throw a chunk of concrete through a storefront window. Every loud sound spurred the people to run even faster.

  I found out later that the riot had started outside the 123rd Street police station, a couple of blocks from where I was huddling in fear. A thousand people had gathered to protest the death of James Powell. Then rocks, bricks, and bottles had been hurled, garbage cans set on fire, and retail stores looted, including those selling guns. A police officer with a megaphone had tried to calm the situation by shouting, “Go home! Go home!” Someone in the crowd had shouted back, “We are home, baby!”