From Prisoner to PhD

In a significant 1964 Cold War development, China exploded its first nuclear bomb, becoming the world's fifth nuclear power and raising the threat of nuclear annihilation. With nuclear proliferation looming in the background, after pleading guilty to burglary, I was given a 23 month suspended sentence, placed on probation, and prohibited from drinking. Promptly violating my probation by continuing to drink, I was ordered to undergo alcohol rehabilitation or return to prison. I completed the 30 day rehab program, and shortly afterward, I relapsed and violated my probation by leaving the state without permission. Upon my return, the Court revoked my suspended sentence and remanded me to prison to complete the remainder of my 23 month sentence. As I began serving my sentence, the 10 week “Freedom Summer Project,” got underway in Mississippi. Including a drive to register disenfranchised black voters, “Freedom Schools,” and the founding of an alternate Democratic Party, turning point events in the Civil Rights Movement began to unfold. Although the violence perpetrated by white supremacists against voter rights volunteers and local black voters was ongoing, the participation of law enforcement and members of the KKK in the murders of three college student voter-registration volunteers in Philadelphia, Mississippi shocked the nation, inspiring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed segregation in the U.S. In prison I spent my time working in the weave shop, learning to operate a loom to make rugs. When not working, I play basketball, checkers, and pinochle, read, and listen to music. My activity puts me in touch with the prison elite, the literati who read and write. Mostly alcoholics and junkies, the literati and I share a love for books. We would frequently discuss the books that we read and exchange them. One intellectual, Dickey, a junkie and jazz aficionado introduced me to WHAT, the radio station where I would tune in every Wednesday from 10-12 and listen to various artists. Louie, Ray, Wes, Sarah, Frank, Tony, Ella, Diana, Joe we talked about them as if we knew them personally. As a 19 year-old prisoner, I developed an appreciation for jazz which remains with me to this day. I also started a business, writing letters for inmates in exchange for commissary chits or cigarettes. Meanwhile, suspended from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X announced his founding of a Black Nationalist Party after returning from his Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In the first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War, 1,000 students march through Times Square, 700 in San Francisco, while smaller marches also occur in Boston, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin. A sign of the massive student unrest to come, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is born at UC Berkeley as 3,000 students confront police attempting to arrest a CORE volunteer and remove him for violating a ban on campus activism. In his speech at the University of Michigan, President Johnson shares his vision of the “Great Society,” a strategy for overcoming the effects of endemic poverty and injustice. Later, winning 60% of the popular vote, he defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. During his State of the Union address in January of 1965, President Johnson issues his proclamation for the implementation of his “Great Society” program, a set of initiatives aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice. Malcom X was assassinated after disavowing himself of the teachings of the Black Muslims while embracing the more traditional Sunni form of Islam. As a young black male coming of age on the mean streets of a disadvantaged urban American community, I identified with Malcolm and his struggle to define himself separate from the press of both the “white man's” and the Black Muslim definitions. Like the orators of ancient Greece, I saw Malcolm as a modern day Cicero, a great speaker. Malcolm was my hero then and remains so today; I saw myself in him then, and I see myself in him now. In prison his assassination dealt a blow to those of us who watched him evolve to become his own person and teach us the meaning of black manhood. Looking out from my emerging intellectualism, I saw Malcolm as literate, a great social critic and threat to the status quo of both white and black societies. I drew strength from Malcolm; as a former prisoner, he provided a model of black manhood with which I could identify, teaching us to love ourselves and struggle fearlessly with dignity, grace, and knowledge. I found a friend in Malcolm; he was someone who understood my plight, acknowledging my sense that the identity options which U.S. society had reserved for me, a stereotypic menacing and deficient human being, were unacceptably debilitating and pathological. Malcolm knew what it means to be black in America; it means being defined by white people. “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock,” Malcolm declared; “Plymouth rock landed on us!” Malcolm's orations provided a context for my opposition and defiance, helping me understand the socio-historical events that were impinging on my emerging identity. Shortly after Malcolm's assassination, in February 1965, his autobiography (with Alex Haley) was published. Showing his desistance from crime and addiction, the turning points and transitions that led to his transformation, Malcolm's life was a classic struggle of the man who overcomes powerful extrinsic forces that sought to define and silence him. Meanwhile, in March, at Selma, AL on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, in an event that was broadcasts around the world, peaceful Civil Rights marchers were brutally beaten by white police officers who sought to turn them around on their protest march from Selma to Montgomery. I was beginning to see the world through Malcolm's eyes, believing that we, black people needed to take control of our own destiny “by any means necessary!”