Morgan State University, located on Perring Parkway in Northeast Baltimore — formerly known as Morgan State College —   had no white students when screenwriter and novelist-to-be Stephen H. Foreman matriculated there in the mid-1960s.

In the mid-1960s there were virtually no white students at Morgan State College, a traditionally black university located on Perring Parkway in Northeast Baltimore.

 Northwest Baltimore native Stephen Foreman was one of the first whites to at-  tend and graduate from Morgan.  His memoir-in-progress influenced this story.
 
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   Stephen Foreman signs copies of his 2009 novel Watching    Gideon at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Lower Manhattan.

WHITE STUDENT BREAKS MOLD
BY ATTENDING TRADITIONALLY
BLACK MARYLAND COLLEGE

KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN AT YALE
 
By Stephen H. Foreman
 
Nearly 51 years ago I graduated from Morgan State College.  I was the only white boy in my graduating class, the only one in the school.

My story is a long one, better read in detail in the memoir I am writing, “The Education of a White Boy.” I have been immersed in writing this as the situation in Baltimore has played out.

With the military in the streets of the city of my birth, and white America’s complete misunder- standing of the situation, I feel compelled to say something now.

As a young man I served honorably in the United States Marine Corps. I’m not sure where that puts me on the liberal spectrum, but of this I am sure: my beloved country is, in great part, overt or subtle, a nation of bigots.

After Morgan and before graduate school at Yale, for which my undergraduate education beautifully prepared me, I worked as a social worker in Charm City.

I worked and walked those same streets currently shown on television, wearing suit and tie. I felt no fear, and the people treated me well.

I was there to help, albeit insufficiently, and it distresses me terribly that those neighborhoods are still suffering from the disease of racism just as they were 51 years ago: the decrepit living conditions; the almost total lack of economic opportunity; miserable, badly stocked grocery stores.

Once, at Yale, I got a hankering for Kentucky Fried Chicken. There were no outlets around campus so I took a bus to one I found in the black community.

I was shocked to discover a bucket full of the cheapest parts of the chicken. They were inedible. Even with my tiny grad school budget, I threw them away.

I tossed them in a garbage can and, you know what, a man took them out, ate one, and carried the rest of the bucket up the street.

Of course, I feel tremendous anger at all the bigotry I still encounter; fury when white America lets a Cliven Bundy get away with assault rifles pointed at federal marshals; absolute disgust when people use the word nigger; true disdain for all the politicians who just don’t get it.

   Stephen H. Foreman was one of Morgan State College’s first white graduates.

I wouldn’t watch Fox News even if you held one of those assault rifles against my skull because my blood pressure would rocket into the danger zone.

I am as angry as the bigots are, and yet there is a part of me that feels sorry for them.

What must it be like to live with that much hatred in your system? What must it feel like to imagine you are being replaced in this world by aliens with different skin, baggy pants, and music you find intolerable?

People do work hard for their dollars only to have their resentments stoked and fed by the bigots in power: pastors, politicians, rapacious business- men.

I would not want to feel such fear and bile. What a miserable way to spend the day!
 
shf@wildblue.net
 
EDITOR’S NOTE:

Stephen Foreman is a novelist and screenwriter born and raised in Baltimore. His script for “The Jazz Singer” starred Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic of 1927.

Foreman’s novels Toehold and Watching Gideon were published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

He is a graduate of Baltimore City College and Morgan State University and obtained a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the prestigious Yale School of Drama.

He is currently at work on his memoir, “The Education of A White Boy.”

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Cliven Bundy, a 68-year-old patriarch of a large Mormon family, who has more than 50 grandchil- dren, is a Nevada cattle rancher involved in a 22-year legal dispute with the U.S Bureau of Land Management.

After being labeled a conservative folk hero he publicly “wondered” if African-Americans were “better off as slaves, picking cotton” than they are “under government subsidy?” thereby causing Conservative Republicans who had initially supported him to distance themselves.

The United States Government claims Bundy owes more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and penalties for allowing his cattle to roam free on land near Bunkerville, Nev. (80 miles northeast of Las Vegas) even after the government established the area as a protected habitat for the endangered desert tortoise in 1993 and cut Bundy’s cattle allotment.

In public speeches he has repeatedly said he does not recognize the federal government and has been labeled, along with his supporters, by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as a “domestic terrorist.”
 

Protesters march in Baltimore during city’s most violent week since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. The downtown demonstration shown here was peaceful. (VoB file photo/Bill Hughes)

 Maryland National Guard deploys at Camden Yards during  week of Baltimore riots, which began Mon., April 27, 2015.  (VoB Staff photo)