One Final Word on Racism in America

After stating my intention to drop the subject, I received a letter from a close friend who implied that I am out of touch with the reality of racism in America. He seemed to suggest that talk of critical race theory and woke culture in general are devices with which to distract us from confronting the problem of racism head-on. “I think we should at least have the balls to give a more accurate history,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more—as long we examine the complete history: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

Here’s some of what I had written before deciding to move on to fiction.

The Bad and the Ugly

In an essay published in 1941, four years before I was born, E.B. White, a lifelong New Yorker, described his vacation in the Florida Keys. “I love Florida as much for the remains of her unfinished cities as for the bright cabanas on her beaches," he wrote. There was one aspect of the place he loathed—namely, its Jim Crow laws:

 "There are two moving picture theaters in the town to which my key is attached by a bridge. In one of them colored people are allowed in the balcony. In the other, colored people are not allowed at all. I saw a patriotic newsreel there the other day which ended with a picture of the American flag blowing in the breeze, and the words: one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Everyone clapped, but I decided I could not clap for liberty and justice (for all) while I was in a theater from which Negroes had been barred. And I felt there were too many people in the world who think liberty and justice for all means liberty and justice for themselves and their friends. I sat there wondering what would happen to me if I were to jump up and say in a loud voice: 'If you folks like liberty and justice so much, why do you keep Negroes from this theater?' I am sure it would have surprised everybody very much and it is the kind of thing I dream about doing but never do. If I had done it, I suppose the management would have taken me by the arm and marched me out of the theater, on the grounds that it is disturbing the peace to speak up for liberty just as the feature is coming on. When a man is in the South he must do as the Southerners do; but although I am willing to call my wife "sugar" I am not willing to call a colored person a nigger."

Racial justice in America had not improved much when I entered high school in 1960. My family had recently moved to Springfield, Missouri from Kansas City. Since no one spoke of it, I went through high school ignorant of Springfield’s racist history. I never knew about the lynching in 1906 of three young black men on the public square, two of whom had already declared innocent by law officials.

I was even ignorant of current racist practices. For instance, that blacks were denied admission to all but one movie theater in town; that the one opened to them required that they sit in the balcony which racists called, “Nigger Heaven.”

My ignorance regarding racism in America extended beyond life in the Ozarks. My favorite basketball team was, and is, the Boston Celtics. I was amazed by the teamwork they displayed. What I was unaware of until decades later, was that there were cities where the Celts played road games in which Bill Russell and the other black players were not allowed to stay at the same hotels with their white teammates.

Like President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, I was an athlete in high school. Unlike Biden, who avoided military service by receiving five draft deferments and a medical exemption for asthma; and his predecessor, Donald Trump, who received four student deferments and a medical exemption for a bone spur, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, serving two tours of duty in Vietnam. The experience permanently transformed my worldview, including how I perceived racial differences.

In his open letter, “Dear White America,” published in the New York Times, philosophy professor George Yancy asked, “White America, are you prepared to be at war with yourself, your white identity, your white power, your white privilege? Are you prepared to show me a white self that love has unmasked?” The answer is yes, Professor Yancy, I am prepared to reveal an unmasked white self. As a matter of fact, the unmasking was the result of a war—not in the metaphorical sense you speak of, involving introspection, white guilt, and self-loathing, but an actual war, involving death, lost limbs, and sucking chest wounds.

I was born in America. I was made in Vietnam. Two months after high school graduation I went to Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. I had joined the Marine reserves: six months active duty followed by six years of a weekend drill a month and two weeks summer camp a year. After completing eight months as a weekend warrior, I read about Operation Starlite, the Marines’ first big battle in Vietnam. The next day, I visited the local recruiter and signed up for an enlistment in the regular Marine Corps and volunteered for duty in Vietnam. I won’t deny that I, like many millions of Americans during the early stage of the Vietnam War, accepted the U.S. government’s explanation for intervening in a country 10,000 miles away. But my choice to volunteer for combat was not motivated by a sense of patriotic duty. My reasons were personal. I was willing to risk my life in hopes of becoming someone whose existence would no longer be defined by fear and insecurity.  

Instead of being deployed directly to the war zone, I received orders to join Lima Company, Third Battalion First Marines in Okinawa where we completed two months of jungle and raider training before boarding a ship for Vietnam. The battalion made an amphibious landing—the largest one since the Korean War. The first month was exhausting. We covered over 500 square miles on foot. There were sporadic firefights with Viet Cong guerillas. During the second week we suffered our first death, Sergeant James Thompson, a black squad leader from Trenton, New Jersey.

On our 37th day we boarded helicopters for a new operation, code-named Operation Utah. It was the first (of many) battles between the U.S. Marines and the North Vietnamese Army. The operation resulted in the deaths of 98 Marines and 278 wounded. Lima company suffered thirty casualties in a 3 ½ hour battle on Hill 50.  

In the weeks that followed, we received replacements fresh from the States. One of them was Charlie Alexander, whom I described in my book, Always Faithful: Returning to Vietnam:

“Alex was a black teenager. He turned 19 a month or two after joining our outfit. In the ensuing months he became far and away the most likable person in the platoon. Not because he was funny and entertaining. We had plenty of guys like that. Alex's impact went much deeper. Alex stood out as a source of light in a dark world. His very existence served as a reminder of our humanity. Unlike most of us, he never treated the civilians harshly, which was saying a lot given the area in which we operated, Quang Nam Province, an especially nasty place that, as Guenter Lewy rightly observed, “defied meaningful pacification,” and where over 6,000 Marines were killed in less than four years. 

“For his friends, the day Alex was killed by a sniper's bullet was the first day of a lifetime of grieving.” 

As I indicated, the combat experience transformed my racial awareness. “The combat zone,” I wrote in my book, “was the only environment I've ever known in which one's status in the group had nothing to do with one's socioeconomic background, level of education or skin color. It was a group comprised of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, the numbers of which were proportionately the same as the demographics back home. There was only one membership requirement: the willingness of each man to risk his life for the others… Five Black Marines earned the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. All five were killed shielding fellow Marines from exploding grenades. We did not need diversity training. We lived diversity. We fought and died for diversity.”

The concept of white privilege was not relevant in the combat zone. It did, however, surface one day when my best friend, Jose Perez, Jr., from San Antonio, said to me, “Gary, if we get out of here alive, things will be a lot better for you. When I get home, I’ll be seen as just another worthless Mexican.” The idea of that man receiving anything short of total respect made me sick. We were both squad leaders the night I was wounded. We were engaged in a firefight when his radioman informed him that I had been hit. Perez ran at least sixty meters through heavy fire to reach my position, just to check on me.

In her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo writes, “When somebody asks you to ‘check your privilege’ they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing and may in fact be contributing to those struggles.”

Those were precisely my thoughts when I returned home from the war, with one important difference: I did not have white privilege in mind. I was thinking about American privilege. It took me years to begin to feel at home in my own homeland. I once heard someone say, “The least among us here in America are better off than 75% of the rest of the world.” My flashbacks are not limited to memories of the fighting. I think of all those poor, desperate peasants just trying to stay alive. I am still haunted by the image of a baby I saw one day whose face was completely covered with flies feasting on open sores. Yes, Ms. Oluo, I will check my white privilege. You might want to take a moment to check your own American privilege.

The Good: Bob Moses and Mario Savio

The antiwar movement was not only about ending the war in Vietnam. It was also about ending racial injustice. In his book, Making Peace with the Sixties, David Burner writes: “The more immediate predecessor to the resistance to the war was, of course, the civil rights movement…By the mid-sixties the rights movement was stymied by the economic realities of the black urban ghetto. As the search for racial justice at home became more tangled, the killing in Vietnam began to press its immediate claim for redress. And the early civil rights movement offered, for those opponents of the war who had the self-discipline for it, an appropriate tactic: non-violent civil disobedience. Nonviolence was a symbolic opposite to war as well as to the violence of segregation, and a means of witness against the conventional wisdom about the inevitability of force and retaliation. Such principled disobedience made a statement about all the behavior that amounted to passive complicity in racism and war.”

A half century after James Baldwin wrote of liberals that they “could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man,” Joe Biden, on the eve of his 100th day in office, said, “We won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined – the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.”

Representing the Republican response to Biden’s address, Tim Scott, a black United States senator from South Carolina, contradicted the president’s view of racial relations in America, stating “America is not a racist country.”

American citizens are morally obligated to determine where they stand on this issue. We can support one side or the other in a knee-jerk manner, informed by our beliefs and prejudices; or we can approach the subject with an open mind, which requires us to examine the history of race in America to determine how much, or how little, progress has been made in the 156 years since the end of black enslavement.

“Hate can have no safe harbor in America,” Joe Biden told the nation. It should have no safe harbor anywhere in the world. We must join together to make it stop.” Like all of his speeches on the subject, Biden speaks as if the phenomenon of racism in America has been a well-kept ugly secret that he alone has just exposed. It is hardly surprising that he would ignore our history of combating racism considering he played no active part in it. Acknowledging his own history would mean acknowledging his undying support for Senator Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klansman who led a KKK chapter in West Virginia, who was an outspoken opponent of desegregation who participated in the 83-day filibuster of the Civil Rights bill in 1964, and who voted No on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“We must change the laws that enable discrimination in our country, and we must change our hearts,” Biden stated in his March 2021 speech. One of those laws is doubtless the 1994 crime law he authored that resulted in the mass incarceration of Blacks and Hispanics. As for the assertion that we must change our hearts, speak for yourself, Joe. For your information, the campaign of changing hearts and minds over the issue of race heated up sixty years before your speech, when hundreds of northern students, white and black, boarded buses and headed to the Deep South to fight segregation and voter suppression of blacks in Mississippi. Perhaps you have heard of it. Sponsored by CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), it was known as the Freedom Ride.  

Another group, SNNC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, pronounced snick), focused its efforts on registering black voters in Mississippi. One of the leaders of the Voter Registration Movement was Bob Moses

Robert Parris Moses was born and raised in upper Harlem, where he went to school until high school, at which time he passed a city-wide entrance examination to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, ranked among the top schools in the nation. Out of the several thousand students in the graduation class of 1952, Bob was one of only a handful of black graduates. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1956, he attended Harvard where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy. Bob planned to earn a doctorate degree but was forced to drop out when his mother died, and his father was hospitalized. He got a job at Horace Mann where he taught for three years. Bob had never been a civil rights activist. That changed when he read about the sit-ins taking place in the South in 1960. He saw activism as a way of working through a personal problem he perceived as an affront to his sense of dignity as a thinker and as a man. Bob articulated this feeling in an interview with Robert Penn Warren:

“There was a continual build-up and frustration—back I guess as early as high school. And then in the teaching—confronting at every point the fact that as a Negro—I mean, first that you had to be treated as a Negro and you couldn’t really be accepted as an individual yet—even at any level of society you happened to penetrate.”  

Moses was also unimpressed with the white liberals he encountered at the university, admitting that he was “deeply bitter about some of the realities of the campus and of the white attitude,” which he summed up as, “Well, we have to do our part—the society has the overall problem, and our part as an educational institution is to try and open a door for two or three Negroes, and let’s see what happens.”  One thing was certain: Bob Moses did not get any of that patronizing nonsense from the white folk in Mississippi. On the contrary, he was jailed repeatedly and beat up repeatedly. He nearly lost his life once when the car he was driving was fired upon by someone with an automatic weapon, seriously wounding one of the passengers.

Bob Moses never gave up on his mission. He displayed the level of courage I witnessed as a Marine in Vietnam. By 1964, the racial violence had gotten much worse. Concerned that the survival of the Mississippi freedom movement was in jeopardy, he came up with a plan. He called it the Freedom Summer Project. College students across the country were invited to come to Mississippi in 1964 to assist in the voter registration drive. He hoped that bringing in a large number of white students would generate media attention on the situation, possibly reducing the violence and sparking a reaction from the American public.  

Without anyone shaming them with accusations of white privilege; without any of them attending a single mandatory diversity training session; and without the benefit of some frail white lady yammering about white fragility, more than a thousand students, most of them whites from elite universities, answered the call, joining forces with thousands of black activists from Mississippi. Many of the northerners were motivated by the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President Kennedy.

Charles Evers and his younger brother, Medgar served in the U.S. Army during World War Two. Medgar participated in the Normandy invasion. After the war, they returned to Mississippi and enrolled in Alcorn College. They also organized NAACP chapters, which resulted in threats to themselves and their family. When they came home for a visit, their father told them he had been threatened. “Well, Dad,” Charles told him, “I was involved in New Guinea and I fought in the Philippines, and I want to fight here in Mississippi and have the same things we fought for there.”

On June 12, 1963, President Kennedy delivered a nationally televised speech in support of civil rights. Just hours after that address, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway after an NAACP meeting. As he walked toward his house carrying NAACP T-shirts that read, “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was shot in the back. He died in the hospital 50 minutes later and buried a week later in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

After some initial training in Ohio, the white Freedom Summer volunteers, most of whom came from affluent families, went on to encounter, in the words of David Burner, “a world far outside their upbringing: the grinding poverty of tarpaper and wood shacks where a people poorly fed, clothed, and educated clung to existence.” They also encountered a level of violence and hatred they could never have imagined.

When word of the impending Freedom Summer Project reached officials in Mississippi, Jackson mayor Allen Thompson assured his constituents that the voter registration and other civil rights workers would be strictly controlled: “We’ve got a larger than usual police force," the mayor explained. “It is as big as any city our size. "We're going to be ready for them. They won't have a chance." The rural police and sheriff departments may not have been as large and well-equipped as the Jackson PD, but they were just as brutal, if not more so. And besides, it was not necessary to have a large number of police officers and deputies when allies in the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council were prepared to step in.  

During the ten-week project, three white and six rights workers were killed; 1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals); 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten; 37 churches were bombed or burned; and 30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned. A horrendous attack receiving nationwide media attention occurred on June 24, 1964 when James Chaney, a black CORE activist from Mississippi, and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both from New York City, were arrested by Cecil Price, a Neshoba County depute and KKK member. The three were held in jail and released that night. They were ambushed and abducted by Klansmen. Goodman and Schwerner were shot and killed at point blank range. Chaney was shot three times, but his body was so badly mutilated it was unclear whether he had already been beaten to death. 

One of the Summer Freedom Project volunteers was Mario Savio. Unlike his affluent counterparts, Mario grew up in a working-class household in Queens, New York. He passed away in 1996. Had Mario been around recently, I suspect he would have been amused by Joe Biden’s criticism of Georgia’s new election law, the Election Integrity Act of 2021 which Biden characterized as Jim Crow in 2021. "What I'm worried about,” Biden said, “is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. Deciding that you're going to end voting at five o'clock when working people are just getting off work." Biden got that wrong. As was the case before the new law, the polls are open in Georgia between 7am and 7pm.  

Another issue was drop boxes. Prior to Covid, Georgia had no drop boxes. They were installed during the last election because of Covid rules, not by legislation. Although the new law reduces the number of drop boxes across Georgia compared with the last election cycle, it does make them a permanent feature in future elections.

There was also the issue of Sunday voting. The Republicans were going to disallow Sunday voting until there was a strong backlash from Georgians who insisted that it be allowed given the practice of churchgoers who are encouraged to vote after Sunday service, a practice known as “souls to the polls.” The final bill allows two days of early Sunday voting, which is now formally signed into law. An additional day of Saturday early voting has also been added.

Biden claimed that the law made it unlawful for anyone to hand out food or water to voters within a certain distance from the polling site: "They pass a law saying you can't provide water for people standing in line ... This is nothing but punitive, designed to keep people from voting." The law prevents campaign workers from soliciting votes by means of the “giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector.” Poll workers are permitted to provide water to voters in line.

Finally, the restriction that seemed to rattle opponents the most is the requirement that voters must provide an ID to vote. Those who sided with Biden’s claim that this measure would prevent poor people from voting failed to investigate the details. Any one of six different forms of ID, including a driver’s license, even if it is expired, are acceptable. Georgia voters have been informed that anyone requiring an ID can get a Georgia Voter Identification Card free of charge at their county registrar’s office or any Department of Driver Services Office.  

The Washington Post gave Biden “Four Pinnochios” for his speech, the fact-checker admitting that the Georgia law expanded early voting for Georgians. The fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, added that not a single expert he consulted who studied the law understood why Biden made the claim that the polls closed early so as to deprive working class voters the chance to vote. This was an odd thing to say considering Biden himself revealed his party’s agenda:

“This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience. This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century. It must end. We have a moral and Constitutional obligation to act.” He went on say what that action entailed—to put into law HR1, the bill submitted by the house, which would “reform ballot access and campaign finance. It would require states to offer same-day voting registration as well as two weeks of early voting, among other things. The House passed the bill earlier this month but it faces an uphill battle in the Senate amid heavy Republican criticism of the bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the bill is about “rigging the system.”  Biden did not mention that along with the Republicans, the ACLU also opposed HR1 on the basis that it threatens free speech.

Even though a poll revealed that the vast majority of Georgia voters did not regard the state’s voting law as voter suppression; and despite Biden’s claims about the new Georgia voting law being proven false, he doubled down on his attack. In an interview with ESPN, Biden stated that the 2021 Major League Baseball All Star Game should be moved out of Atlanta in protest. Two days later, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred did just that. "Major League Baseball,” Manfred said, “fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Four days later, Manfred announced the game would be played on Coors Field in Denver, Colorado. The move was made, said ESPN, “in response to a new Georgia law that has civil rights groups concerned about its potential to restrict voting access for people of color.” A more likely reason, David Harsanyi asserted, was that “MLB commissioner Rob Manfred moved the game because he is concerned about Rob Manfred.”  A comparison of the voting restrictions of Georgia and Colorado supported that assertion. Voting in Colorado also requires a photo ID. Colorado also prevents campaign workers from handing out food or water to voters near a polling place.

As for the claim that moving the game from Atlanta to Denver was in support of people of color, Harsyani pointed out that Atlanta is 51% black while Denver’s black population is 9%. Many of the Atlanta businesses that would have profited from the game were minority-owned.  Local Atlanta officials estimated that relocating the All Star Game out of Georgia cost local businesses $100 million. “But Manfred,” Harsyani wrote, “obviously doesn’t care about the lies. He doesn’t care about the fans. He doesn’t care to know anything about the law. He doesn’t care about the black community. If he did, he wouldn’t have moved the game. Rob Manfred, like so many others who wilt at the first sign of left-wing hysterics, is there to protect Rob Manfred.” The same can be said for Joe Biden. Things haven’t changed much since Malcolm X wrote, “The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”

In order to provide context to Joe Biden’s assertion that the new Georgia voting law amounted to “Jim Crow on steroids,” let us reflect on the actual reality of the Jim Crow era as it applied to black voters in the south. That can be done by recalling the Freedom Summer experience of Mario Savio. As he told an interviewer in 1985, “We saw ourselves as going down [south] to make the Fourteenth Amendment mean something…Finish the business of the Civil War, not in a violent way, but rather to prevent violence, to overturn a violent order.” Though this would be difficult for a self-serving politician like Joe Biden to comprehend, Mario Savio’s motivation had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. It involved right and wrong. For Mario Savio, Freedom Summer was a moral crusade.

Savio was about to complete his training in Ohio when word came of the disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. Their bodies were not found until later that summer. The news underscored the reminders the volunteers received of the dangers they would face, and instructions on how to respond to attacks. Bob Moses showed up at the staging area from which Mario’s group would head down south. He suggested that the volunteers reconsider their decision to join the effort. “People have been killed,” Moses told them. “You can decide to go back home, and no one will look down on you for doing it.”  

Mario was deeply impressed with Moses’s leadership style. So were the other Freedom Summer volunteers, including Robert Osman who was with Mario in Ohio:

“When Bob Moses spoke…everyone understood that this was a man speaking from the heart…and being very careful about what he said. That moment that we all remember, of Bob talking to us about the likelihood that the three were dead and the importance that we not kid ourselves about it and feel free to make a genuine choice about it [spending the summer in Mississippi] as opposed to feeling a lot of group pressure.”

After Moses’s speech, Mario stayed up late that night with Marshall Ganz, a fellow volunteer, discussing the dangers they were about to face in the worst Klan-infested areas in Mississippi and the possibility they could be killed. As he told an interviewer years later, Moses’s words carried a lot of weight because “he had been horribly beaten…close to death. This was courage and…patience, and love and determination to come to real terms with the lives of people who had been economic outcasts.” It could have cost him his life, but Bob Moses found an environment in which people accepted him as an individual first.

After their conversation, Mario and Ganz decided to stay with the Freedom Summer Project, even volunteering to go to McComb, the most violent area. Mario reflected on his motives in a letter to Cheryl Stevenson written shortly after he volunteered:

“Dammit I can’t bear to sit safe at home while others are risking their lives. But I don’t know why I feel this way. And I think that might be the reason for the hesitation I felt—the fact that I don’t really understand why I have to take part. I know why one should take part and I can’t stand to be safe while others are involved, but…we might die…I might die!”

In Holmes County, where Mario was sent, only 41 black residents out of a black population of 19,488 had registered to vote in the four years prior to Freedom Summer. Attempting to vote was dangerous and difficult. Registering required black citizens to go to the courthouse in Lexington, a city that was patrolled by racist police and administered by segregationists. Despite all the racist violence he experienced in Mississippi, Mario’s letters home were full of hope and idealism. In a letter to Cheryl, he wrote, “It’s wonderful to be part of such a change for good that’s sweeping across our country…The history of the world is pivoting on the internal changes that are going on today in America—and we are in part the agent of that change. A breath of freedom.”  Nevertheless, Mario’s efforts were frequently disappointing. Many black residents refused to make the effort to resister out of fear they would lose their jobs. “You can’t even say they will become registered voters,” he wrote to Cheryl, “because Negroes are not permitted to pass the literacy test no matter how well they can read or write.”

The situation was exacerbated by the local police. “While we were canvassing Negro homes in Tchula [a nearby town] the Deputy Sheriff and Citizens’ Council radio trucks rode up and down the ‘streets’ past where we were working. The people at once clammed up for fear of being identified as ‘uppity’ Negroes.” In another letter, Mario described what would frequently happen when he approached a black household and asked if they were registered or wanted to register: “Quite typically the head of the household would say in a very thick dialect, ‘I work on this plantation,’ or ‘I’m a sharecropper.’ He was working directly or indirectly for the boss. He would say ‘if I go down and register to vote I’m gonna lose my work’…’They’ll kick me off this land’…I’m not going to be able to feed my family. May get beaten up.” 

Mario described one event so powerful it became permanently etched in his memory. He was “bringing an old man down to the courthouse in Lexington to attempt to register to vote.” The man was “wearing a hat and was a bit stooped.” As the man walked up to the desk, Mario was required by law to wait by the door. “The farmer took his hat off very politely, with a kind of shuffling quality, held his hat and then stood there.” Later, Mario could not describe the experience without choking up. The registrar, who was the sheriff’s wife, started in on him:

“’What do you want, boy?’ He was a man of sixty or seventy. We were just standing there. ‘What do you want, boy?’

“’I want to redish, ma’m.’ It’s part of the dialect. They say ‘redish.’ They turned register into a two-syllable word, ‘redish.’ You get used to it. ‘I want to redish, ma’m.’ But in a very small voice.

“’What’s that you say, boy?’

“’I want to redish, ma’m.’

“’What’s redish? What are you talking about, boy?’ We don’t got no redish around here.’ And on and on and on about the fact that he couldn’t say register, and she knew perfectly well, he knew perfectly well what he was there for…to register to vote…He never gave up. She finally had to give him the form. But she made him eat shit for it. She humiliated him. She tried to. I was watching this…Here’s somebody, who because of something I had done, was maybe risking his life and his family’s, facing that kind of humiliation. He must have been afraid. I know I was afraid. Yet he stood his ground.”

Savio described how excruciating it was to stand there, forbidden to say anything, watching as the black man was “treated like a dog—worse than a dog…And you’re powerless to do anything. It tears your insides.”

Mario later disclosed that because of that experience he felt like he had become an adult with the determination to stand up for freedom. “That man’s courage changed my life.”

Mario became an adult in Mississippi. I became an adult in Vietnam. Both our lives were changed by the courage of black men, one of whom, in my case, was Freddie Carradine. Freddie and I reported for duty the same day, both of us holding the rank of private first class. Four months later, Carradine, Perez and I we were corporals leading the platoon’s three squads.  After surviving the war without a scratch, Freddie was shot and killed in the streets of his hometown of Compton, California.