Opinion: Remembering Black people who left mark on me

This year’s Black History Month got me to thinking about Black people who have influenced me personally.

On occasion, I write about L.T. Williams, my favorite professor at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. He took a multidimensional approach to America’s history, and his insights into our great American heritage had a profound and expanding impact on my eager young mind.

I grew up straddling a segregated and a desegregating South; I went to an all-white elementary school and a fully integrated high school. Well, not fully integrated — while Blacks made up about 40% of my high school’s student body at that time, there were only a couple of Black teachers — one of whom was my senior-year English teacher.

A cooler teacher I had never had. Mr. Johnson had an unorthodox, magnetic teaching style that drew us restless seniors in like Sweathogs in “Welcome Back, Kotter,” a hit television show just a couple years later. Mr. Johnson’s teaching style must have inspired the fictional Mr. Kotter, because it sure inspired me.

For those too young to remember that sitcom reference, you won’t likely get another reference to television in the late 1970s, which I’m also going to relate to my real life: “The White Shadows,” starring Ken Howard as a white coach for an all-Black basketball team.

In real life, for one amateurish season, I was Coach Howard — in an intercity Nashville basketball league. My team, a bunch of Black teenagers from the projects, even named themselves “The Shadows.”

Here’s how it came to be: The church I was attending at the time wanted to sponsor a team in the youth league and I was recruited to be the coach. They loaned me a van to drive, which I’d take through a South Nashville housing project, picking up about eight Black kids, the Shadows.

We’d all go to a community gym on another side of town, where an all-Black league — there wasn’t a single white, but for me — played their games once a week.

Needless to say, I was out of my element, and it showed in our win-loss record.

Nevertheless, the Shadows loved it! Despite our dismal record, they became a team. They laughed with each other, horsing around whenever I let them, and willingly practiced anytime I could borrow a gym and the van.

More than anything else, I think they just liked getting out of their neighborhood. It was a tough place to be growing up.

I remember one of our players above all the other. From the moment he joined the team, he was a leader. We all knew him as JC.

After the season ended, I wandered away and lost touch with those guys. Years later, however, I heard that JC was gunned down. I heard he was taking up for someone else when he was shot and killed.

Sounds like the JC I knew.

Nowadays, when I hear, “All men are created equal,” in my mind I hear Dr. Williams’ voice, telling us about the “ideal” those words set in motion for this country, and for the world. And when I think back to my formative high school years, I remember Mr. Johnson inspiring my imagination and sending me out with hopes and dreams for a better world ahead.

But when I think about JC, I think about the waste. Wasted talent, wasted leadership. If only we could stop the violence, the kind that grows from oppressive circumstances, maybe then fewer promising young lives would be lost.

I remember how JC seemed older than the other kids, though he too was just a teenager when I knew him.

His life, as short as it was, really did matter. He left his mark, as part of America’s multidimensional history.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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