Read Common Ground for Free Online Page A

listen when he spoke; hemade people on the street straighten up and look as he whipped by in his long black limousine. Arnold was impressed by all that. And he had to admit the man was a powerful speaker; he knew how to grab these people, how to get them fired up.
    But Arnold didn’t care for
what
the man was saying. He’d never been that hot for non-violence. A few months before, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been recruiting people to go down South for the sit-ins. Arnold had gone for an interview, but he’d been rejected because they didn’t think he was non-violent enough. And they were right. Arnold would prefer to be the person doing the crackin’ rather than the one taking the crackin’. He wouldn’t let people beat him with a hose, and prod him with sticks, and hit him over the head with a Georgia toothpick while he just sat there singing “We Shall Overcome.”
    But then King was a Christian preacher man, and Arnold had always had his doubts about them. His mother was a real Christian lady, a pillar of Union Methodist Church who went to church every chance she got, and so did his sister, Rachel. But Arnold’s father had regarded preachers as Father Divines who robbed their own people blind. Growing up in rural Georgia, he’d seen poor sharecroppers giving preachers the choice morsels off their tables while their own kids went hungry. When he married his pious Methodist wife in Boston, he’d laid down the law: He didn’t want no ministers with their feet under his table. And he wasn’t sticking his feet in any minister’s pew.
    Arnold respected his mother as he respected many Christians who used the church to get ahead in the white man’s world. But he saw how two-faced some of those Christians were—preaching piously about “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” then looking out for themselves at the expense of everybody else. The Christians had never done much for him. Gradually, he began slacking off in attendance at Union Methodist—hittin’ and missin’, as he put it, but doing more missin’ than hittin’.
    Instead, he began drifting over to Muhammad’s Temple #11 on Intervale Street for the Sunday-afternoon services. Although he could never quite bring himself to become a Muslim, he was getting a lot more out of temple in the afternoon than he got out of his mother’s church in the morning.
    After all, he knew the minister over there as well as he knew Mike Haynes. Louis X, or Louis Farrakhan as he was later known, was actually Gene Walcott, who had grown up on Sterling Street, right around the corner from the Walkers’. As early as Arnold could remember, Gene had been a star. People said he was prettier than Cassius Clay, a better singer than Harry Belafonte, a better actor than Sidney Poitier, a better talker than Martin Luther King.
    But then Gene went to Winston-Salem State Teachers College in North Carolina and two things happened. First, this slick, self-confident son of West Indian parents encountered Southern Jim Crow, which was unlike anything he’d experienced in Boston. He started fighting it, using the “white” toilets in Wool worth’s and drinking from the “white” fountains at the bus station, challenging any white man to say him nay. But all that might not have mattered somuch had he not been turned down for Belafonte’s spot at a New York nightclub. When white folks rejected him for the New York gig, he quit Winston-Salem and joined the Black Muslims. Putting his talents to the service of his new faith, he composed its most popular song, “White Man’s Heaven Is Black Man’s Hell.”
    Soon he became a disciple of Malcolm X, who had also grown up on Boston’s streets. Malcolm “Red” Little had worked for a time as a rest-room attendant at the Roseland State Ballroom and a busboy at the Parker House before operating a burglary ring out of Harvard Square. Sentenced to the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, he paced his