In tenth grade, when I was fourteen, I had a friend who played chess a lot. I thought, I’m better at games than all the rest of the kids, so I’m going to play this guy and beat him. He crushed me. It was ugly. Then one day when I was at the library, I came across a book on chess. I was stunned. It was like, what? There’s a book? There are strategies? It was love at first sight. I pored over the games and reveled in the majesty of the pieces. I remember my excitement one afternoon as I read about a famous game of Paul Morphy’s, who was a top-grade American chess player in the nineteenth century. I was hooked.
It turns out, of course, that my friend was also reading books, and that’s why he was crushing me. To beat him, you couldn’t be just a chapter ahead of him; you had to be books ahead of him. That’s when I discovered that reading could open your mind to the wonders of everything you wanted to know. For the first time I understood the power of books, because after I started reading them, I began crushing players I couldn’t beat before.
When the American Chess Foundation, now the Chess-in-the-Schools program, asked me to coach kids in Harlem and the South Bronx, I was a student at City College and I was playing at the Senior Master level. The top 10 percent of all chess players are at the Expert level. Masters are the top 4 percent. Senior Masters are the top 2 percent, and International Masters are more like a fraction of 1 percent. International Grand Masters are pretty much off the scale. Back in the 1980s, to be a black chess player and an Expert, five levels down from the highest level, was considered fantastic. We were proud of that. If you were a Master, you were a freak of nature. There were one or two guys who were Senior Masters; we didn’t even think of them as real people. But to me the only level that mattered was International Grand Master. When I broke that barrier in 1999, everybody and their grandmother started talking about being a Master and an International Master. You can’t aspire to be just an Expert or Master anymore because now that’s considered nothing. And that’s what having aspirations is all about.
One group of kids I coached for a year in elementary school moved on in 1989 to the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Junior High School—also known as JHS 43—right in the heart of Harlem, on Amsterdam Avenue. Together these kids had a kind of synergy. There was Kasaun Henry, Charu Robinson, Brian Watson, Michael Johnson, Steven Yow, Jonathan Nock, and others. They may not all have been doing great at school, but they had a passion for chess, and I felt their passion.
I remember Kasaun clearly because he thought he was a chess superstar. When Kasaun arrived for lessons, he would march into the room and say, “World Champion Kasaun Henry.” And the thing is, he backed it up. I can spot a kid with skills, and I said, this kid’s got the attitude and he’s got the mind to back it up. I used Kasaun as motivation for the other kids. They were furious that Kasaun was getting so much attention, and they wanted to beat him. Kasaun would be arrogant with them, the same way he’d been treated back in middle school. It’s easy to motivate the kids to play against one another because they’re so competitive; they all want to be superior and they all want to be the coach’s favorite player. I remember Charu being furious and saying to Kasaun, come on, man, how can you beat us like this?
It was business when we went over games at the school. It was like, come on now, no messing around, no talking; why are you talking? Charu would say, if you start acting up, you gotta leave. We’d have a score sheet where we’d record everyone’s games. If a kid didn’t have all his moves written out properly so we could review his game, we tossed the game in the garbage. We didn’t even want to talk about it. We’d say, what’s the deal? This is your business. How can you conduct your business like that? The kids understood that, and they would get like, oh God, I can’t believe I can’t show this great game. We cultivated the attitude that we were about winning; we were about excellence. Mike used to say, gotta go to work, gotta go to work. This is a job. We’ve got to take care of business.
Some of the kids at first wanted to just grab the pieces, and I would say, uhuh, you can’t touch the board. There are eight of us; we can’t do that. Articulate your ideas. Tell me your ideas first. Slowly, we learned how to talk chess together. We talked without having to move the pieces. They’d come up with an idea and I’d say, have you thought about this? Or this? Finally we’d move the pieces to check out our ideas, and the kids started learning to visualize the game. That gave them a bit of confidence and power. I coached the kids twice a week, but they played every day at lunchtime and they played at home. I guess my love for the game was infectious. I’d tell them about the competitions I played in and how intense the battles were, and they’d start on me like, yeah, man, that sounds like fun, who can we go crush? I felt like the Pied Piper. They loved what they saw and what I was doing. And so we started a team. Someone came up with the name Raging Rooks, and we were like, yeah, we gotta call ourselves that.
We knew we wanted to compete in the 1990 National Junior High School Chess Championship in Salt Lake City. We wanted to participate against the best. So we traveled to tournaments on the weekends to practice competing. We’d go in totally confident, and we dominated the games. The other kids didn’t want to see these kids coming. As a team the kids didn’t do as well as they had hoped to at the 1990 Nationals, although Kasaun Henry won the top unrated title in the varsity section. After we lost, I walked to the park with the kids and said, you want to win the National next year? We’re going to start working right now, and we’re going to win next year. They jumped on my back; they were really into it. They said, come and teach us; we’ve got nothing to do in the summertime. I was on school break, so we hung out and I showed them ideas and they practiced and they read books. We spent the next year going to tournaments and playing and practicing. By the time we got to the National Championship in Dearborn, Michigan, in April of 1991, we were the most honed and practiced team there. We’d won a lot of tournaments in the city, and for us, the Nationals were just an extension of all we had prepared for. It was a tough fight, but in the end we tied for first. We weren’t surprised.
On April 26, 1991, the Raging Rooks made the cover of the New York Times. The headline read “Harlem Teenagers Checkmate a Stereotype.” It happens that on our team we had six African-American boys, one Latino, and one Asian boy. The mother of one of our boys put the New York Times photo in a store, and a black man walked in and looked at the photo. He saw Stephen, the Asian boy, and said, “So this is why they won. Now I know why they won.” The mother who had put up the picture was mortified. What was curious was that Stephen wasn’t on the first-string team; he was on our second-string team. It was the first-string team that won the championship. Stephen’s team came in seventh, and did a very good job, because seventh in the nation was fantastic. But still, he was on our second-string team. So we could look at our own black faces, see black accomplishment, and still reinterpret it a different way, because we’ve been taught a horrible, horrible thing about ourselves: that we are not that bright, we are not that smart, we are not that capable.
I think it’s a message we send to our kids. And it bothers me that we’re still letting other people tell us what to think. We’re long past that, in my opinion. One phenomenon I’ve noticed, and it’s something that deeply disturbs me, is that my story is often first told by the white media and then told by the black media. I see that happen quite a bit, as if we need to be validated first by white people. When will we validate our own? We need to tell ourselves the truth. Lots of times people ask me, how did you get kids to believe they could be great at chess? I just told them they’re going to be great. That’s it. We didn’t go to tournaments and think we were not going to win. We knew we were the best-prepared team there.
The ghetto of the mind is in some degree optional. The kids’ attitude going into competition was, we’re a group of finely tuned chess champions; deal with us. They knew my expectations for them were way up. Like, you’re going to win the whole thing. We’re not trying to come in second; we’re trying to win. Letting
kids know that all we’re accepting are As is the message I’m talking about. We’re not B and B minus. We’re not accepting passing; we’re not accepting Cs; we’re looking at As. If you get a B, all right; you were striving for an A.
Kids can start learning chess at six years old. They can start at two. The older kids get, the more challenges they face. All kinds of influences start to seep in, particularly in high school. One person who struggled with these challenges was a brother named Kenny. As a teenager, he was an extremely talented chess player. At age sixteen or seventeen, he was considered the champion chess player of Harlem. He was also a drug dealer. Kenny was admired in the community both for his skill in chess and for his personal success in the game of drugs. He introduced Kasaun to chess in a park in Harlem. Kenny was a very important person in Kasaun’s life.
After I began coaching the Raging Rooks, there was heavy tension between Kenny and me. Kenny was in his mid-twenties then, and he seemed to want control over the future of Kasaun’s chess game. It was as if he felt that Kasaun was his protégé, and he was jealous or protective. But even if his motives were pure in trying to help Kasaun, he wasn’t a good role model, because he was a dealer. I was on a serious chess path, and I was trying to show Kasaun the way to get to where I was.
Kenny was so furious that when he and I played chess he would fight me like a dog. It was almost like a fight for Kasaun’s soul. He could have whacked me in a minute if he wanted to. But that’s not what he was about. He was trying to prove on a chessboard who was better for Kasaun.
I would consistently win and make Kenny furious. Then one time Kenny saw me win at a chess tournament. After the game he came up to me and shook my hand and said, you know, you’re a strong player. And all the tension lifted. He let me have Kasaun. Kenny was trying to turn himself around. Shortly afterward, unfortunately, his brother shot him in the back and killed him. They’d had an argument. The details aren’t clear, but it seems the fight was over when Kenny was shot.
There are so many Kennys, so many guys who have the potential to be leaders of industry, to be doctors and lawyers. Kenny could have been anything he wanted to be. He could have been a businessman; he could have been a leader. He was a natural at so many things. It just happened that he was influenced to go down the path of drugs. There was no superstructure that fed into Kenny’s potential as a human being. He found a structure in chess, and he found one in being a drug dealer.
Sometimes we look at our people and think they’re not striving, or not excelling. They are striving, but sometimes in the wrong way—the way they think is possible for them because they don’t see the alternatives or aren’t able to access those alternatives in their community.
Many of our kids play basketball, for instance, as if their lives depended on it. Basketball is leading some people out of the ghetto, but very few. It’s spawned some really classy players—like Dr. J and Magic Johnson, who are superlative human beings. In that way it’s been beneficial for our community. But most of our kids are not going to be basketball players or football players. That should not be the dream. It’s a wrong message to send. The dream should be that you’re going to use your mind to become successful. We should be passing on the message that it’s cool to be smart. Bill Gates will tell you that. He may be the biggest nerd on the planet, but he could buy out Harlem many times over.
Our people have been hypnotized by the hype of athletics. There’s the lure of the glamour, of the great clothes and the big house. You lived in a small apartment. You were fine. But now you need a mansion with forty rooms and you need a swimming pool. I think about Mike Tyson, who came out of my neighborhood, and he needs seven cars, one for every day of the week. I mean, come on, what is that about? And then you get guys who have a $100,000 gold chain around their neck and you say, for what? What are we trying to prove? That we have money too? And is the money going to fill the hole inside that tells you you’re not as good as they are? It’s not. The point is to be as good as you can be, and not to judge yourself by other people’s standards.
I can appreciate that deferring gratification is a problem for a large segment of our community. But I think the problem goes beyond feeling trapped and beyond reaching for the most obvious option. There are professional athletes who make millions of dollars and then five or ten years later are flat broke. Bankrupt. And no one can say these guys were without opportunity or hope. They were full of opportunity and hope. It’s true that black America still faces grave economic inequities, but the fact is that even after we get certain opportunities—and this is what saddens me—we seem to defeat ourselves. We seem to go after the appearance of success instead of investing in our abilities for the future.
In life as in chess, you have to take care with everything you have, even if it’s not much. A few wrong moves can end the game almost before it starts. It’s not that all mistakes are irrevocable. It’s not that you make one mistake and you’re dead or you’re in jail. But when you don’t have much to start with and then you take yourself further back from the starting line, you’re setting yourself up for some horrible obstacle that you will have to face later on. Maybe you’re having fun or maybe you’re frustrated, but you’re setting yourself up. The obstacle you started out with was pretty big, but it wasn’t the end of the game. You still had room to grow. But if you refuse to deal with it, the obstacle itself will grow until it’s a wall in your face.
I travel all around the country talking chess. I’m always stunned when I go into a neighborhood and black adults are saying to their kids, look at Maurice Ashley. Look at how great he is. Look what he’s done. And the kids have picked it up. They want my autograph and they want to talk to me and play with me. The point is that they, too, want role models and heroes. They want people to look up to. They want to be like people—like Mike, like Tiger, like Serena and Venus, and, God willing, like Maurice. That’s why the black elite has to be visible. You have to see it to know it’s possible. Look how many lawyers, how many cultured African Americans, came out for the Clarence Thomas hearings. I had never known that that many intelligent black people existed. They just kept rolling them out. That had an amazing effect on everybody, despite all the divisiveness caused by the hearings. Everyone was like, these cats and sisters in suits and so eloquent, where they come from?
People need to see an empowered community of African Americans. It’s true that successful white people aren’t expected to be a role model for every white person alive. And sure, African Americans who are successful should be able to do their thing and be respected for it. But I think African Americans have the additional burden of recognizing that their success rests in part on the sacrifices of those who fought for freedom and civil rights. In some way you have to try to give back.
My main obligation is to be a Grand Master. That is first and foremost. I can’t be a role model unless I’m the man. That’s a full-time job. People can’t be expected to do everything. But they can also become complacent. They can believe it’s enough just to do their job, without an eye to injustice or to those who don’t have the same opportunities or talent.
Willie “Pop” Johnson was a huge influence on me when I was coming up as a chess player. Pop sustained me on many occasions both emotionally and financially. He helped me learn how to stay focused when I’d lose to guys who were better than me, and he made it financially possible for me to buy chess books and enter tournaments when I wouldn’t have been able to do these things on my own. I also remember looking to Arthur Ashe and Jackie Robinson for inspiration. Althea Gibson and Zina Harrison and Debbie Thomas—women who led the charge in white-dominated fields—inspired me. I remember looking at a guy younger than me, Tiger Woods, who won at the Masters in April of 1997 and helped convince me to take my dream of becoming a Grand Master off hold and pursue it in earnest.
I can’t assert that what’s good for Maurice Ashley is good for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Ken Chenault or Tiger Woods or Venus Williams. All of us face challenges. But
there are some who will say, it’s downtime between tournaments. I can go check out some kids and see if there’s any talent. For me, it’s not a burden. It’s selfish. I’m not helping kids because I ought to; I’m helping them because I want to. It cleans out my soul, keeps me fresh and young. I love seeing a new face, a black face that’s going to be the next star, and deciding that this is a kid I could hang with. He gives me power. Hanging with him makes me feel stronger.
Kids survive in the schools. Survival is nothing. You lay low and try to duck the radar. You hope you’re not one of the kids who gets beat up on. And you hold on to a set of strong values. People survive more horrific conditions than drugs and metal detectors and police officers. The question is, how do you thrive? How do you excel?
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the small factors that lead to dramatic change. All you need is incremental advances; not everybody has to change all at once. At some point, things tip, and then suddenly there’s an epidemic of change. I think we’re approaching a time when kids’ aspirations will be much, much higher than they were. We have a long way to go to put the structures in place that can finally bring about progress race-wide, but we’re closing in on the effort psychologically. People can sit back now and say, we have Tiger Woods, we have Maurice Ashley, we have the Williams sisters, we have Ken Chenault and Vernon Jordan. We have people striving in all walks of life.
We were a strong people coming out of Africa. We need to revisit what we had. Egyptian kings and pharaohs played games like chess. The dark-skinned Moors brought chess to Spain in the early 700s a.d. and taught it to the Spaniards—along with mathematics, medicine, and architecture. This legacy was lost in their conquest and in our subsequent conquest. Much as we’ve become accustomed to thinking that we’re less intelligent than other people, my dream is that we will shake off this delusion and recognize that we’re as smart as anyone else.
America Behind the Color Line Page 11