Ray’s best friend, Lester, would wait for him, somewhere out of sight so that he wouldn’t attract attention, and they’d make the long trip home together-they were like brothers, and stuck together like glue even though Ray was older by two years. And if you were a Black child, you didn’t risk walking home alone.
When you played sports after school, there was no bus to take you home. It felt like a matter of life and death, and in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1974, it was.
And when the teachers talk to you, be polite and follow the rules.
After four years of being bused to a white school, he knew his mom’s words by heart. He was no stranger to hostile stares and hearing the n-word muttered in disgust when he walked by. So even though the May Alabama sun felt like it was burning a hole in his helmet, even though Ray knew this pitcher was a sore loser who would throw his glove, his hat, even kick the fence in the kind of display of poor sportsmanship that Ray couldn’t even let himself think of-even though this guy had just thrown an out-of-control curveball that just barely landed into the catcher’s glove far outside of the plate, and the umpire had had the nerve to call it a strike, his laughter daring Ray to lose his cool … even with all of that, Ray just stared the pitcher down and let the catcher’s and umpire’s snide whispers roll off his back.īecause Ray was more afraid to let his mom down than he was of these white boys, or the sea of white faces in the stands. And I didn’t raise no child to have a tantrum in the middle of a baseball field or anywhere.” You don’t change who you are and how you was raised for anyone. They may beat you now and then,” Ray’s mom used to tell him, “but that don’t mean they have to break you. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail Its ugly record of brutality is widely known.” “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here … Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. In the North, one lives in ghettos and in the South, the situation is so intolerable as to become sinister not only for Mississippi or Alabama or Florida but for the whole future of this country.” “The situation in Alabama and Mississippi which is spectacular and surprises the country is nationwide … Because until today, all the Negroes in this country in one way or another, in different fashions, North and South, are kept in what is, in effect, prison.
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