By
CLEVELAND, Ohio — What would you, as an American, be willing to give up for racial harmony?
Not just for yourself, but for all the people in this country now and for those who’ll live in it as you use the last grain of sand in your hourglass.
DaBaby empowers youth at West Charlotte High School for World Mental Health DayDaBaby empowers youth at West Charlotte High School for World Mental Health Day
Would you swap your Tesla, your bungalow in Tremont, your best friend, your spouse or an NBA championship for the right to live in an America where skin color didn’t hurt anybody?
I suppose such an America would be Nirvana, Oz or somebody else’s Never-Never Land.
I’ve dared to dream of such a place, although I’m doubtful I’ll ever get to see it in my lifetime. I have, however, seen enough of America at its worst, and my memories of where I, a Black man, fit into it were shaped not by myths but harsh realities.
One stuck out more than most.
Heading into my first day in seventh grade, I rode the No. 1 bus, crowded with Black teenagers from Cleveland’s East Side, to Collinwood Junior/Senior High School. I didn’t look forward to Collinwood.
The choice to go there wasn’t mine. My father decided. He had his reasons. He wanted a better education for his children, so he ordered us to lie about where we stayed to escape the overcrowded, underperforming, all-Black neighborhood schools.
Yet, Collinwood, a first-rate public school with a white enrollment of more than 5,000, carried a reputation for two things: academic excellence and racism.
I needed just a moment to realize the latter was nonfiction.
As I stepped off the bus, I saw where I stood among the students whom I would soon walk the corridors with, day after day. For painted in gigantic, white letters on the building’s facade were three words:
N—–S GO HOME
The words lacked ambiguity; their message was clear. Whites who attended Collinwood or lived in houses that surrounded the school didn’t want me — or any of the other 700 Black teenagers — to get overly comfortable.
I would have had to put my Blackness in a musty attic — or not known how to read — to walk into the building and feel welcomed. Someone — most likely many “someones” — had bought cans of paint, leaned a ladder against the front of the school and let graffiti speak for them and the community.
Looking back, I don’t recall having expectations of a welcome-to-a-warm-and-fuzzy-first-day-at-Collinwood assembly.
Nor did I think the hatred of me at the school, its reputation for racism notwithstanding, would be butt-naked, stripped to its essence so I wouldn’t get confused. I didn’t.
I had faced the first acknowledgement that I, a 13-year-old Black boy, wasn’t wanted in this great American society. I’d have to navigate a world with problems aplenty ahead of me.
I don’t want Blacks who stick around after I’m dead to face similar hurdles. They have a chance, having won some white allies along the way, to change America — to make it the egalitarian republic it tells the free world it is.
What America claims has been a half-truth. It was a half-truth in my youth; it remains one now.
So I’ll ask afresh: What would you be willing to give up to ensure that no other American sees hatred like what I saw spelled out in white paint all those years ago?
Justice B. Hill grew up and still lives in the Glenville neighborhood. He wrote and edited for several newspapers in his more than 25 years in daily journalism before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.
