The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka

Fisk and Tuskegee. And based on these startling credentials he could ask me what was proper, “Negro” or “Colored.” I said “Negro” and Van Ness told the students, “Remember, there’s a right and a wrong way of saying that.” You bet!
    In the eighth grade we had a race riot. Not in the eighth grade but in Newark. And in them days race riot meant that black and white “citizens” fought each other. And that’s exactly what happened in Newark. It was supposed to have jumped off when two white boys stopped a guy in my class named Haley (big for his age, one of the Southern blacks put back in school when he reached “Norf”) and asked him if he was one of the niggers who’d won the races. He answered yes and they shot him. They were sixteen, Haley about the same age even though he was only in 8B and most of us in our earlier teens — I was about twelve.
    The races they’d talked about were part of the citywide elementary school track meet. The black-majority schools had won most of those races and this was the apparent payoff. So rumbles raged for a couple weeks on and off. Especially in my neighborhood, which confronted the Italian section. The Black Stompers confronted the Romans — a black girl was stripped naked and made to walk home through Branch Brook Park (rumor had it). A white girl got the same treatment (the same playground rumor said). But two loud stone and bottle throwing groups of Americans did meet on the bridge overpassing the railroad tracks near Orange Street. The RR tracks separating the sho-nuff Italian streets from the last thrust of then black Newark. The big boys said preachers tried to break it up and got run off with stones. It was the battle of the bridge.
    Beneath that fabric of rumor and movement, the bright lights of adventure flashing in my young eyes and the actual tension I could see, the same tensions had rose up cross this land now the war was over and blacks expected the wartime gains to be maintained and this was resisted. Probably what came up on the streets of Newark was merely a reflection of the Dixiecrats who declared that year for the separation of the races. But whatever, New Jersey became the first state to declare that year a statute against all discrimination — (I just found that out a few seconds ago, you see a cold vector from out my past illuminating itself and the present where I sit) so maybe it was connected and it’s all connected to me. I to it.
    But the whys of any life propel it, the hows it forms and means. We want to know why we got to here, why we was where we was (our parents), why we thought and think the way we did and do now. Why we changed our thinking, if we did. When we did.
    As a child the world was mysterious, wondrous, terrible, dangerous, sweet in so many ways. I loved to run. Short bursts, medium cruises, even long stretched-out rhythm-smooth trips. I’d get it in my head to run somewhere — a few blocks, a mile or so, a few miles through the city streets. Maybe I’d be going somewhere, I wouldn’t take the bus, I’d just suddenly get it in my head and take off. And I dug that, the way running made you feel. And it was a prestigious activity around my way, if you was fast you had some note. The street consensus.
    I only knew what was in my parents’ minds through their practice. And children can’t ever sufficiently “sum that up,” that’s why or because they’re children. You deal with them on a perceptual level — later you know what they’ll do in given situations (but many of their constant activities you know absolutely nothing about). Later, maybe, deadhead intellectuals will try to look back and sum their parents up, sometimes pay them back for them having been that, one’s parents. Now that we are old we know so much. But we never know what it was like to have ourselves to put up with.
    My family, as I’ve