THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601260185
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Ida Kay's Portsmouth
SOURCE: Ida Kay's Portsmouth
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
Listening to Nate McCall speak last week, I understood even more fully the connection between the Face to Face with Race discussions and the future of young people in this city.
At one point, he mentioned how much a young black man hurts when he feels he is despised and feared by others, no matter what he really is. That hurt turns to anger, he said, and ultimately the anger is turned back on the community. From there, it's downhill all the way.
Nate is the first to say this doesn't make crime and violence OK. But the reasons are very real, all the same.
I think the concept of Face to Face could help change some of that perception for young black men in the future. We should try to include a broad spectrum of residents - most particularly young people, even reaching down into the lower grades of school.
Back in 1980, when Nate came to work for The Ledger-Star, I had been here only a short while. The crew of reporters in the newsroom on the fifth floor of the Citizens Trust (now Signet) Bank Building covered Portsmouth and Chesapeake for the Ledger and put out Currents six days a week with news from both cities.
Nate was the only black among nine or 10 reporters when he was here, but there had been several African-Americans working here before him. The staff included some old-timers like Owen Easley, Ron Speer and me - all veterans of the civil rights movement. The rest were an assortment: several young reporters with Jewish backgrounds from the Northeast; an Italian from South Philly; a couple of debutante-types, who beneath their facades were tough newswomen.
Their points of view, many formed from childhood experiences and honed in a spectrum of universities, were varied. It was a good, competitive staff and Nate's arrival added to its diversity.
In his book, ``Makes Me Wanna Holler,'' Nate's memory of those days is quite different from mine. And it's his description of his feelings then and his comments about being ``feared and despised'' that make me want to gather up all the little children - black and white - to get them talking face-to-face about those feelings.
Nate remembers people in the office looking at him as he walked across the room, ``polite stares by curious white reporters, secretaries and editors.''
``I resigned myself to the reality that someone always seemed to be watching, zeroing in on my every move,'' he wrote.
Actually, I don't remember anyone paying undue attention to Nate - except maybe to wonder why he never joined us for our after-work gatherings at the old Seawall.
Nate wrote of declining the invitations, describing his colleagues as ``civil'' and ``over polite.'' He admitted that he would not let them know how he really thought and felt.
In fact, what I remembered most about Nate was his distance and maybe that's the reason some of us may have looked askance at him occasionally. Since I was older and spending most of my time covering Chesapeake, I actually spent very little time socializing or, for that matter, thinking about Nate.
Fact is, I wish I had known him better then. He could have helped me understand where this city and this nation were going over the ensuing 15 years.
I might have started sooner to think more about the very different perceptions of life each of us brings to work - or to school or to the streets. I might have tried to organize something like Face to Face encounters.
I believe we could eliminate some of the paranoid feelings among black youth that turn them into angry, violent people, as explained by Nate.
Maybe if the kids grew up talking to each other about real feelings, we could head off the misunderstandings. But we have to start a long time before the teen years.
Sadly, one of the problems with getting new adult Face to Face groups meeting is a shortage of black people who want to participate. That makes me wonder how we ever can get black children and black youth to sign up as participants.
Maybe we should call on the black churches to host new groups if blacks are not comfortable going elsewhere. If each church in the city would take as a project the formation of one Face to Face group this spring, we then could spin off from those groups some leadership for a broad program to reach down to children and teach them to talk and understand each other.
This would not eliminate violence, but it might save a few lives before they go down the drain. Certainly, learning to talk about real feelings could change one's misperceptions. by CNB