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April 21,
2003
Time
to Confront and Overcome the Past
Why
Michigan Needs Affirmative Action
by
ROGER WITHERSPOON
In one of its most significant decisions affecting
race in America in modern times, the U.S. Supreme Court will
soon decide the fate of the affirmative action program developed
at the University of Michigan.
To many of its critics, most notably
President George W. Bush, the Michigan plan is a misguided exercise
in social engineering, an institutional effort to redress a social
ill.
That perception is wrong. Michigan's
affirmative action plan grew out of an honest, searing appraisal
of the vicious physical, psychological and racist practices and
customs that flourished on the Michigan campus for years. What
makes the school unique is its willingness to change the nature
of its campus environment rather than paper over systemic racist
flaws.
Michigan's extensive legal defense of
its program delves deeply into its past, with case studies of
events and trends that spurred the school's need for introspection
and change. I am familiar with one case leading to the Supreme
Court. It is my own.
I was 17 and barely topped 100 pounds
when my parents drove me from New Jersey to Ann Arbor, Mich.,
in 1966, to enter the university's School of Engineering with
a major in aeronautical engineering. For the past decade, Michigan
has been one of the nation's top 10 producers of black engineers.
But that was not the case in 1966. There
was no affirmative action then; the university was hesitantly
relaxing the quota that previously kept us out.
I was one of 60 blacks in the freshman
class at a university with about 32,000 students. I was alone
in the engineering school, located across campus from Markley
Hall, the new dormitory about a block from the highly regarded
University Hospital. I was one of the first students in the new
building, passing rows of huge bay windows to get to the entrance
in the middle of the block.
It wasn't quite noon when I walked to
the corner, watched my parents' car disappear from sight, and
set out to explore the campus. I stepped past the centerline
in the middle of the street when a man on a Harley Davidson gunned
his cycle and aimed it for the middle of my back.
I was struck off center, thrown the rest
of the way across the street, striking my hip against the curb
in front of the girls' dorm as the cycle roared away. The sharp
pain told me I'd cracked it, and I lay there waiting for help
or the strength to move. Moments later the ambulance appeared,
and the attendant looked at me and said, brusquely, "I don't
pick up niggers."
The ambulance drove off. The small crowd
walked away. I dragged myself to a nearby tree, pulled myself
up and waited for the shooting pains to stop. I took a step.
The pain was dizzying, and I crashed
to the ground and lay there a moment, panting. People stepped
around me, avoiding me as if I were diseased. Cars drove by.
No one stopped. I was alone.
Ii took what felt like an eternity to
crawl and hop the block to the hospital, where a row of wheelchairs
waited in the entrance. I pulled myself into one and rested.
"Get out of the chair, boy,"
said the hospital guard.
"I was hit by a guy on a motorcycle,"
I said. "I think my hip is broken."
He stood in front of me, glaring, and
slowly put his hand on his gun.
"Those chairs are not for you, nigger.
Get out now."
Unlike a lot of black Americans, I know
my family history. Walker Elliot Smith, my Grandpop, told stories
every time he visited. We weren't freed by Abraham Lincoln and
Yankee troops.
Walker Elliot Randolph used an ax to
take his overseer's head and then his horse and, in 1856, he
fled the Virginia plantation started by John Randolph and Pocahontas
and went to Michigan. There, he joined the cavalry and spent
the next nine years shoeing horses and killing Confederates.
After the war, he returned to Virginia to reclaim his family
and set up a forge. He changed his last name to Smith, denoting
his new profession.
In 1896, with Reconstruction dead, the
Ku Klux Klan went around the South settling old scores. Six of
them rode up to the Smith home one Sunday and blew him away at
his dining room table. The eldest son killed two of them a week
later but died in the shootout. The second son killed two more
the following month, then fled to Detroit. His grandson was also
named Walker Elliot Smith, but he later changed it to the ring
name of Sugar Ray Robinson.
The Klan burned down the homestead, and
Walker's widow and four remaining children made their way to
New York. In 1905, the youngest, Dewey Smith, went back to Virginia
to finish the two remaining Klansmen. Taking abuse from racists
cut against the family heritage.
But neither Grandpop nor Dad were there
in the hospital entrance with me. I would not shame my family
name by crawling away.
I got up and slowly walked to the admissions
counter. I told them what happened, and they told me to find
my way to X-ray, at the other end of the hospital. I leaned against
the wall and walked, thinking of home and trying to ignore the
feeling in my hip.
I had to stand for the X-ray _ the table
patients normally lie on was for whites. Then I was directed
to a room on another floor and told to wait for a physician.
I waited there three hours.
I left the room and walked over to a
group of doctors and asked when someone would come to talk to
me about my injury.
"You're still here?" said one
of the doctors. "You have a broken hip. Stay off of it.
Now get the hell out of here."
I went to a pay phone in the lobby and
called my dorm room to see if my roommate had arrived. Tom, a
Jewish student from a Detroit suburb who had never met any blacks,
ran to the hospital and helped me back to the dorm. He found
a medical supply store in town and bought a pair of crutches.
Then the phone rang, and a male voice
said, "We're going to kill you, nigger."
And he said there were far more students
in the KKK than there were blacks on campus, and they firmly
intended to drive us out. It was too bad I didn't die that afternoon,
he said. But if I didn't leave the campus, I would die soon,
painfully.
I hung up. The phone rang 15 minutes
later. Another male voice repeated the refrain, "Leave or
die." And he went into graphic detail about how they intended
to torture and kill me.
I hung up. But they took turns, calling
every 15 minutes, round the clock, telling me where I had been,
whom I had sat next to, letting me know how vulnerable I was.
Letting me know they were all around, always watching, always
waiting for a chance to kill me. Different voices. Same message.
Tom and I went to the dorm director,
but he refused to get involved. Neither the phone company nor
the police would trace the calls. We were on our own.
I told Tom to take back the crutches.
Tom, a pre-med student who is now a child psychiatrist in San
Francisco, warned that if I tried to walk on the hip the way
it was it would never heal properly; I'd always be in pain and
it would disintegrate over time. I didn't dispute his prognosis.
But I couldn't let them know I was hurt,
for then I'd be a walking target. They had to believe I was capable
of defending myself. In the dorm, I didn't use the shower on
the floor unless Tom or Paul, a Jewish student across the hall
who is now a New York City attorney, came with me.
The presence of hate groups was not a
secret on campus. One of the dorm windows that everyone had to
pass to enter Markley was obscured by two large flags: one contained
a swastika, the other the stars and bars of the Confederacy.
The university saw nothing wrong with this.
By the third day, our nerves were raw.
At some point that evening, Tom grabbed the ringing phone and
shouted, "Why don't you leave him alone!"
And then I watched as his face turned
ashen, and he slammed down the phone.
"What did they say to you?"
Tom took a long time to answer. "They
said, 'We weren't going to bother you yet, kike, but since you're
a nigger-lover . . ." And they told him what they and the
Nazis would do to the Jewish students once the niggers were gone.
I had two hunting knives. I gave one
to Tom and we each took half the dorm. We tried every doorknob.
If it was unlocked, we opened it. If anyone was on the phone,
we cut his cord. If they balked, we threatened to cut them and
were prepared to do so.
I entered the room with the student with
the flags and made him take down the Confederate battle flag.
I cut it up.
Tom later asked why I hadn't cut down
the Nazi flag as well.
"That's not my issue, Tom. I'll
deal with the Klan, you deal with the Nazis."
Tom called one of the Jewish fraternities
on campus and a few minutes later, two of their larger members
arrived and accompanied Tom to the room with the offending flag.
It, too, came down.
The dorm director was livid and threatened
to try to have us expelled for vandalism. We dared him to publicly
place the university on the side of Nazis and Klansmen and told
him if he kept the racists in check, there would be no problems.
If there were violence, we would not be the only victims.
The phone calls stopped.
I would never lose touch with Tom and
Paul.
I would never be able to run again.
I would never lose hope that the university
would one day confront and overcome its past.
Roger Witherspoon is a Journal News reporter.
(c) 2003 Journal News
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