In early 1960s the nightly news brought reports of freedom rides, sit ins, boycotts, marches, and voter registration. In high school I thought if I had been a year or two older, it would have been wonderful to spend the summer in the South registering black voters in 1964 or 1965. Of course, in a small town in the Northwest I was then quite unaware of the danger, the cost, or the heat – or the culture. Our town had only one black family. The only black person I’d ever talked to was a member of another basketball team. It seemed important to me to be able to do something for social justice and about racial injustice as I entered college. When I started at Stanford, it was only slightly less white than my hometown. However, I did get to meet several black teammates on the freshman football team and got to know a basketball player who lived in the room next to mine in the freshman dorm. But knowing people is not the same as righting the wrongs of the cultures we came from.
Three years before I enrolled at Stanford one of its fraternities tried to get its national affiliate to amend its racial exclusion policy. In the summer of 1962 at their national meeting of Sigma Nu fraternities the Beta Chi chapter from Stanford tried to change this policy but got little support from other chapters, most of which were part of universities in the South. (The person led the supporters of the racist policy for Sigma Nu was Trent Lott who later became a senator from Mississippi. Some of the Beta Chis who tried to change that policy also went on to public service careers, the most well known being Jim Woolsey who became CIA Director. That group of Beta Chis also challenged Harvard to see which group could have the most Rhodes and Maxwell scholars – it was a 5-5 tie.) So in 1962 the Stanford fraternity disaffiliated itself from the national Sigma Nu organization and became a local fraternity called Beta Chi. For the next 3 years no member of a racial minority applied to join, but in 1966 two African Americans and an Asian American were members of Beta Chi’s largest pledge class (20+) in some years.
I was also part of that group. I lived in the fraternity basement and worked as a kitchen helper and server to defray some my living expenses. A few weeks into that school year I became the head kitchen helper when one of the seniors left the position. But I didn’t run the kitchen. That job belonged to the person who planned the meals, bought the food, and cooked it. Janie Lee Dorsey was the fraternity cook. She was the first black person I got to know reasonably well. She had a heart of gold person who seemed to be able to take time to talk to all of us. She was a large person at six feet two. She also had a real gold heart in one of her front teeth. She grew up in Louisiana and played high school basketball there in the late 1940s. It was unusual then for any high school or college to sponsor sports for women then. In the 1970s when high school and collegiate sports for women began to happen everywhere, I noticed there were always several teams from Louisiana that were ranked among the best in the nation. Janie said that the high point of her week was singing in her church choir, but she would only sing occasionally when working in the kitchen. She was always very accommodating when a few extra guests would show up for dinner.
During the year I lived at Beta Chi (1966-67) interesting people from outside and within the Stanford community would be invited by someone to come to our table for dinner or other activities. Jazz saxophonist John Coltrane played in the living room and stayed for dinner in the fall of 1966. Blues guitarist Buddy Guy and his band gave two concerts in the dining room, one in February and one in May. Holy Hubert who preached hell fire on college campuses all over the country also shared a meal with us. Faculty members and grad students would occasionally show up at Beta Chi. The Beta Chi founding class that got the fraternity out the racist national organization started the tradition of a faculty cocktail party. Janie Lee made some food for the faculty cocktail party, but she didn’t stay for the festivities. She was surprised the next morning when Buddy Guy and his band mates showed up for breakfast. The food for the party didn’t last long as many on the Stanford campus heard about the evening’s entertainment. I was only tangentially involved in party preparations, but I did witness some punch being made with wine that a friend brought from the Modesto winery where his dad worked and with purified alcohol that our grad student advisor obtained from the chemistry department. Some of the guests, invited or not, also brought stimulants of their own, and it seemed that the party never ran out of those ingredients.
The visitor that I got to know best from what was Beta Chi’s last faculty cocktail party was Louis “Lefty” Bryant, a civil rights activist who worked in South Carolina and in Milwaukee with the NAACP and Father James Groppi. Lefty showed up just before the first Buddy Guy concert. He said Fr. Groppi had sent him to the West Coast to raise funds for the NAACP, but from what he told us about demonstrations and getting beat up by police, I think Lefty probably sustained a concussion. Fr. Groppi probably sent him away to recover. Lefty told us about demonstration tactics used by the NAACP marchers in Milwaukee. (These proved to be useful when I later marched in Oakland and Seattle.) He really liked the Buddy Guy concert and the trip we made to the beach the next day. He deputized me to be his chief fund raiser on campus. We held out a coffee can and held a sign that said “Contribute to the NAACP” between classes on the Stanford campus. We raised only $10-20 in two days. With the $10 I gave him Lefty had enough for a bus ticket to return to Milwaukee. I never got a Freedom Summer, but a brief Freedom Winter came to me. And Lefty took the bus to his next adventure. I wondered where it would be.
One of the graduation requirements at Stanford was to take two colloquia. These were small 2-credit seminars. The first one I took during my junior year had a faculty sponsor, but a pair of basketball players – one black and one white – actually ran the seminar. They had gone to rival high schools across the bay in Oakland and were in their third year as the starting backcourt for Stanford. The friendship of Art Harris and Gary Petersmeyer was very apparent. We read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Manchild in the Promised Land and discussed these in class. It was especially good to get Art’s perspective on these two autobiographies about growing up in the Oakland ghetto. Art was drafted by the Seattle Supersonics and played a few years of professional basketball. I think Gary went on to law school.
That winter my friend Richard Slavich told me that there was an intramural team representing the Black Student Union at was playing interesting basketball, even dunking during games. This first BSU at Stanford was organized in part by one of our fraternity members from Beta Chi. He was also on their basketball team. We found out when their next game was and went one February afternoon to watch. We got there just as the previous game was finishing. The referee – there was only one – was getting badgered by both teams. When that game was over, he continued to get harassed by the losers. He was supposed to continue refereeing the game between the BSU and a good fraternity team from Sigma Alpha Epsilon. I think the referee wanted no part of the next contest and left only his whistle for whoever might be foolish enough to follow in his footsteps. Richard and I recognized that there were many scholarship athletes from other sports on both teams. When the teams realized that the referee had left, they along with the clock operator asked the crowd of about 25-30 spectators if anyone wanted the job. Although Richard quietly tried to discourage me from volunteering, I said I would do the job until someone official showed up.
I tossed the ball high enough and straight enough for a fair tip off, and the game was underway. The fraternity team from Sigma Alpha Epsilon got out to an early lead that was as much as 10 points. The BSU narrowed the gap a little by halftime but did not shoot well from the outside in the first half. In the second half like the SAEs, the BSU started driving to the basket and making a greater attempt to stop their opponents from doing so. For me that meant more decisions as to whether fouls were blocks or charges. I think fouls evened out and the players on the court really decided the outcome. In the final minutes the BSU got their first lead. The SAEs made a basket to retake the lead, but I called a charge on the player who made the basket and waved off the goal. The BSU scored the next time down increasing their lead to three. Again the SAEs scored on a baseline drive to the basket, but I saw the player step out of bounds on the way. No basket. The SAEs never got any closer. I knew some of the players on both teams by name or reputation. The three Carrigan brothers from the SAEs followed me out of the gym. Andy or Mike Carrigan, both football players, asked me how I could make an out of bounds call from 30 feet away on their brother Casey. (Casey was at Stanford on a track scholarship, having set the national high school record in the pole vault.) I said it was easy because he was almost a foot out. At this point all 3 brothers said they wanted to fight me, but they would leave the fighting to Casey because he was more nearly my size. At this point my friend Richard caught up with me and said he thought fighting was not a good idea. (This was the first known incidence of a Jedi mind trick.) We walked away, and the brothers didn’t follow. I developed a new respect for referees but didn’t referee any more while at Stanford.
In the mid 1960s the movement for civil rights and voting rights broadened to include economic justice and an end to police brutality. Calls for integration changed to calls for black power. The centers of activity moved from the rural South to the cities of the North and West. New leaders of the movement emerged. We all saw changes in big ways and small. When Buddy Guy gave his winter concert at Beta Chi, he had a conk, a process that straightened his curly hair that had been especially popular among black entertainers. When he was back in the spring, he had his natural curly hair. By 1967, no self-respecting black musician would want to have “white” hair. When Richard and I went to the intramural game in 1968 we knew several of the black players, and one or two nodded to our smiling white faces, but none smiled back. When Martin Luther King was assassinated two months later, black communities around the country erupted in violence. Perhaps nonviolence would not be the only path to social change.
In Oakland, California in late 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party. Their parents’ generation had migrated from the South, moving to the cities of the North and West only to find new forms of urban poverty and racism. After a young black man had been killed by police across the Bay in San Francisco, the founding Panthers wanted to do something about the racist policemen who patrolled their community. They bought copies of Chairman Mao’s Red Book and sold them to people in Berkeley at three times the price. With the proceeds they bought guns. With the guns they patrolled the streets of their neighborhood in Oakland in parallel with the police, offering protection from the police for any mothers or brothers or sisters in need. Carrying guns like this was legal. They got other young men to join them. Eldridge Cleaver joined the Panthers and became their Minister of Information. He ran their community newspaper. His book Soul on Ice was published just a week before King was assassinated. It became a national best seller. In the course of separate shootouts with police both Newton and Cleaver were wounded. A policeman was killed in the shootout where Newton had been wounded, and he was sent to jail for manslaughter. A “Free Huey” campaign ensued. Cleaver spent some time in jail over his incident, but there was not enough evidence to charge him with anything. The local authorities and the FBI tried to return Cleaver to prison on his previous conviction of rape (Read about that crime and Cleaver’s trial and appeal in Soul on Ice), but before they could do that, Cleaver left the country for first Cuba and then Algeria. Upon his return to the country someone in student government at Stanford got him to come to Stanford to speak.
My Shakespeare professor, who had been my favorite teacher at Stanford, was offering a senior seminar on autobiography. We were to read a book a week and be ready for a two hour discussion. There were about 15 students in the class. Even though the schedule was already full, a couple of my classmates wanted the class to read Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. I hadn’t heard of Cleaver before but I agreed with my classmates suggestion that we have a extra session to squeeze in the extra book. We had just finished the extra session on Soul on Ice when I found out that Cleaver was going to speak on campus, the next day in fact.
I got to Memorial Auditorium, the largest venue on campus, about ten minutes before the scheduled talk. The doors to MemAud were closed and locked. Some students were setting up speakers so that those outside could listen to the speech. Rich Fields, a friend who I hadn’t seen a while, was there. We realized were both dressed alike, jeans, blue work shirts, and denim jackets – the standard costume for white student radicals – except Rich was wearing a “Free Huey” button. We both agreed that it was a disappointment not to be able to get in. I suggested that we try to go around the back of the auditorium and see if a door was open. When we got there, three cars were pulling up and 5 or 6 people were coming out of one of the rear doors of the auditorium. Half a dozen large black men got out of the cars. They were all dressed black leather jackets and black berets. In the confusion and tenseness of the moment each group must have thought that we belonged to the other. We all went into MemAud through a back door. Three of the Panthers immediately stationed themselves at the back of the stage, assuming the military “at ease” stance. I was hoping to sneak down to find a chair in the auditorium but there were none. I found myself at the right wing of the stage and assumed the “at ease” stance. I motioned for Rich to do the same on the opposite side. Eldridge Cleaver now had five body guards. He spoke for an hour, starting with black power and power to the people. He told us, “You’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution.” He spoke about freeing Huey Newton from prison – his conviction was eventually overturned. He spoke about the Panther’s ten point program for land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and freedom for captive black men and an end to police brutality and murder. He spoke about how white men could support the program. He also spoke about how white women – in the manner of their Ancient Greek counterparts in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata – should withhold their sexual favors from any men who did not support the Panthers’ program. Cleaver and the other Panthers were gone very quickly after the speech finished. I didn’t know it then, but Cleaver was probably still on the lam and needed to be gone to stay a step ahead of the authorities.
Rich and I caught up with each other outside the auditorium. We had a good laugh, but I told him that I didn’t like the guns and violence. He thought it might be necessary to at least have the threat. He became a civil rights lawyer and eventually a politician in Memphis. I didn’t think about the Panthers again until I’d moved to Seattle and was beginning my alternative service for being a conscientious objector. Along with two VISTA volunteers I was starting an alternative school for the kids in a housing project that were dropping out or getting kicked out of the regular high schools. (The West Seattle Street Academy is another story.) One sunny morning there were two Panthers on the Ave in the University District who were hollering, “Free breakfasts for kids.” They were holding out the same kind of coffee can that I had held out for Lefty Bryant. I contributed but wondered not about what had happened to Cleaver but what had happened to Lefty.
I put a form of this story on a blog in early 2018. Lefty’s daughter, Comesha Johnson, found it and emailed me to set up a conversation by phone. Later when we had that phone call I found out about what happened to Lefty, and she found out a few more things about her father. I didn’t know that Lefty had been a subject of a PBS documentary series We’ll Meet Again, Season 1, Episode 3. A woman from California who had worked with Lefty in South Carolina during Freedom Summer, registering voters and demonstrating at restaurants that were supposed to be desegregated, was looking for Lefty to thank him for the difference he had made in her life. Watching the documentary, I saw photos of Lefty demonstating in front of a restaurant in the small town of Pineville, South Carolina, of Lefty with other civil rights workers, and of Lefty face down in a ditch. Young white men had followed the civil rights workers out of town and held the others at gun point while they beat Lefty into unconsciousness. Lefty was always nonviolent but often confrontational. Before he left South Carolina, he sued the Charleston YMCA for their discriminary practices.
I told Comesha about her father’s time with me at Stanford and promised to send her some photos that a friend had taken of Lefty and me. She also hadn’t known about her father’s time with Father Groppi in Milwaukee protesting discriminatory housing practices and the redlining practices of banks. She told me that her father was involved in similar protests in Southern California in 1970. Those protests got out of hand when someone fire bombed the Bank of America in Isla Vista. The police and prosecutor in Santa Barbara County did try to blame Lefty for the fire, but they subsequently discovered that they had Lefty in jail from a previous demonstration when the fire occurred. Lefty eventually moved to Ventura where he married and raised two daughters. Lefty’s wife was usually the one who worked for pay while he stayed home with the girls. He introduced his daughters to tennis and basketball and encouraged them to pursue sports as a way to get support for college. He also spent a lot of time volunteering in schools and often spoke to high school classes about the civil rights movement.
Both the civil rights volunteer from California and I were too late to see Lefty again. He died in 2008. But we did get to meet his daughters and find out about the rest of a wonderful life. As the result of investigations for the documentary people found out that Lefty carried one lie for most of his life never even telling his family. Lefty told people he was an only child, but he was actually the youngest of 15 siblings and had a different birth name. Because of something he’d done as a teenager, Lefty’s grandmother told him he needed to leave town and never come back or he would be killed. No one knows any more of the story. But Comesha and her sister Davonta (who now live in the Denver area) probably have a lot of relatives they can find in South Carolina.
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