live in such a nice part of town. We intend to be good neighbors, and I want you to know if there’s anything that we can do for you, all you have to do is ask. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
The neighbors were disarmed. Dad’s kindness would unnerve the unkindest person around. The threats and the ugly calls stopped, but that didn’t mean that we were given welcome baskets and warm apple pies. We hardly heard a “good morning.” Rarely did we see a friendly smile. The vibe was cold as ice.
“Don’t matter,” said Dad. “We’re here to stay. Let the people react however they react.”
One man, though, reacted with love. His name was Tom Hobday. He was a white brother—I call him the John Brown of our neighborhood—who immediately saw that the West family was up to good. He befriended Dad. When it was time for the Golden West Track Meet, Mr. Hobday extended us a personal invitation.
“I wasn’t good enough to enter,” Cliff recently remembered. “In my junior year, my best time in the mile was only 4.37. But not only did Hobday insist that you and I go to the meet, Corn, he used his position as head of the sponsoring organization to introduce us to the Grand Marshal, Jesse Owens. After the meet, Jesse came to our house for dinner. Man, that was the thrill of thrills! When he asked me about my time in the mile and I told him, he said, ‘Son, I see something in you that makes me think next year you’ll be in this meet and win it. I see a champion in you.’ His words were so strong and his heart so sincere I couldn’t help but believe him. And sure enough, next year I won the national and state championship. I ran a 4.09 .” It is still a Kennedy High School record forty-two years later.
Having Jesse at our dining room table was really something. I asked him about Germany in 1936. That’s when he won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics and, in the process, undercut Hitler’s hateful nonsense about a superior Aryan race. In the course of our conversation, though, I learned something else: It wasn’t the fact that Hitler didn’t shake his hand that bothered Jesse. It was how he had been ignored once he got back home. For all his record-breaking honors, for all the glory he brought to the United States, Jesse Owens was not acknowledged by the president or invited to the White House. Roosevelt ignored him, and so did Truman.
“I never even got a congratulatory telegram,” he said.
C LIFF ATTAINED FAME HIS SENIOR YEAR in high school by winning practically every meet he entered, and setting new records to boot. His victories were so spectacular that he was on the front page of the daily paper. California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, took note and invited Cliff and his family to the State Capitol for a congratulatory luncheon.
I need to put this in context.
It was 1968. Only a year earlier, the Black Panther Party, formed in nearby Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, had marched to this same State Capitol to protest a bill that would prevent a citizen from carrying a loaded weapon in public. The Panthers showed up armed, their weapons in full display. They wore black leather jackets and black berets. The police arrested Seale and some two dozen others. That was May. In October, Huey Newton was charged in conjunction with the slaying of a police officer in Oakland.
The party newspaper, The Black Panther , had a profound influence on me. Their articles on social and political history opened my eyes and triggered my curiosity. They dealt with issues that other publications flat-out ignored.
As Dad drove us down to meet the governor, I was thinking of another issue: Reagan had backed the 1966 bill that would have killed open housing. Open housing allowed us to make this recent move up to South Land Park. Reagan had supported all sorts of Jim Crow measures that would have, in the minds of some, kept us in our place.
But Reagan was a charmer, an ah-shucks-so-great-to-have-you-here
The neighbors were disarmed. Dad’s kindness would unnerve the unkindest person around. The threats and the ugly calls stopped, but that didn’t mean that we were given welcome baskets and warm apple pies. We hardly heard a “good morning.” Rarely did we see a friendly smile. The vibe was cold as ice.
“Don’t matter,” said Dad. “We’re here to stay. Let the people react however they react.”
One man, though, reacted with love. His name was Tom Hobday. He was a white brother—I call him the John Brown of our neighborhood—who immediately saw that the West family was up to good. He befriended Dad. When it was time for the Golden West Track Meet, Mr. Hobday extended us a personal invitation.
“I wasn’t good enough to enter,” Cliff recently remembered. “In my junior year, my best time in the mile was only 4.37. But not only did Hobday insist that you and I go to the meet, Corn, he used his position as head of the sponsoring organization to introduce us to the Grand Marshal, Jesse Owens. After the meet, Jesse came to our house for dinner. Man, that was the thrill of thrills! When he asked me about my time in the mile and I told him, he said, ‘Son, I see something in you that makes me think next year you’ll be in this meet and win it. I see a champion in you.’ His words were so strong and his heart so sincere I couldn’t help but believe him. And sure enough, next year I won the national and state championship. I ran a 4.09 .” It is still a Kennedy High School record forty-two years later.
Having Jesse at our dining room table was really something. I asked him about Germany in 1936. That’s when he won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics and, in the process, undercut Hitler’s hateful nonsense about a superior Aryan race. In the course of our conversation, though, I learned something else: It wasn’t the fact that Hitler didn’t shake his hand that bothered Jesse. It was how he had been ignored once he got back home. For all his record-breaking honors, for all the glory he brought to the United States, Jesse Owens was not acknowledged by the president or invited to the White House. Roosevelt ignored him, and so did Truman.
“I never even got a congratulatory telegram,” he said.
C LIFF ATTAINED FAME HIS SENIOR YEAR in high school by winning practically every meet he entered, and setting new records to boot. His victories were so spectacular that he was on the front page of the daily paper. California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, took note and invited Cliff and his family to the State Capitol for a congratulatory luncheon.
I need to put this in context.
It was 1968. Only a year earlier, the Black Panther Party, formed in nearby Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, had marched to this same State Capitol to protest a bill that would prevent a citizen from carrying a loaded weapon in public. The Panthers showed up armed, their weapons in full display. They wore black leather jackets and black berets. The police arrested Seale and some two dozen others. That was May. In October, Huey Newton was charged in conjunction with the slaying of a police officer in Oakland.
The party newspaper, The Black Panther , had a profound influence on me. Their articles on social and political history opened my eyes and triggered my curiosity. They dealt with issues that other publications flat-out ignored.
As Dad drove us down to meet the governor, I was thinking of another issue: Reagan had backed the 1966 bill that would have killed open housing. Open housing allowed us to make this recent move up to South Land Park. Reagan had supported all sorts of Jim Crow measures that would have, in the minds of some, kept us in our place.
But Reagan was a charmer, an ah-shucks-so-great-to-have-you-here
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