Cultured, Refined and Full of Rage

Sam Fulwood III’s memoir, “Waking from the Dream,” is part of a recent boom in African American autobiographical narratives, many by journalists. Those that come to mind are titles by Jill Nelson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Nathan McCall and Brent Staples. They relate the experiences of the ‘60s and post-civil rights generation, people whose lives were literally shaped by the movement and its gains in integration and affirmative action. They help us understand how racism works without the “whites only” signs.

These educated middle- and upper-class blacks contend in an arena of race politics in which the personal anecdote is the best means of communicating the daily disparagements and sabotage that blacks face in the workplace. Call it the New Racism. To be sure, it does not compare with the daily suffering of America’s disenfranchised underclasses, but the quiet ongoing discrimination of the workplace is part of the picture of inequities running the length and breadth of the society.

Fulwood is a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and has previously held well-paid, prestigious jobs at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Baltimore Sun and the Charlotte News. He is only 40, but the achievement of these positions in journalism seems to have struck him as an acme from which to look back.

His story is not uncommon--a middle-class, well-educated African American climbs to the heights of a profession and there discovers he is carrying within him rage that most blacks know too well. It took Sam Fulwood a long time to acknowledge that his professional success did not protect him. “Waking From the Dream” does not say as much about the persistence of racism as it does about the will to ignore it.

Fulwood grew up in Charlotte, N. C., the son of a minister and a teacher, who provided a comfortable living for the family. His parents shielded him from contact with the civil rights movement taking place in the South during his youth. Fulwood recalls his family bypassing Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963, the day of the march on Washington, to celebrate his birthday in Baltimore. In this way, a young black man came to be self-regarding in a time of great change and to see his place as apart from the motion of black history going on all around him.

Like all memoirists, Fulwood reveals more from his assumptions than from his assertions and has shown himself in an awkward close-up when a handsome profile was probably the intent. The young Sam, setting out to make his mark, makes up his mind to get ahead, alone if necessary, and never to smell the coffee, even when it is thrown in his face.

Most African American memoirs of this kind relay some early incident in which one becomes aware that race makes one’s road tough. What becomes painful--and difficult to believe here--is that though the racial affronts were there, he ignored them. For the reader who has seen or felt them before, Sam Fulwood’s inability to respond can cause a wince or even a flash of anger.

Fulwood says he realized being black was “special” when he was told at age 11 that he would be integrating a white school. And even though he saw himself as a “trailblazer,” he did not go to white schools so much for their racial makeup as to move ahead. He did well and he did so with a single-minded zeal that is frightening to read even today. While in high school, Fulwood ran into the first of a series of signs that the racial caldron sometimes boils over. I mention this youthful episode only because he seems never to have seen a black protest he thought he could join. He does not tell us what the issues were that caused racial disturbances at the area high schools, so all one can know is that he wanted nothing to do with them. “Mini race wars were not part of my carefully scripted high school agenda. I wanted to get past high school to the productive part of life, where racial tension and antagonism would be forgotten.” When “all hell broke loose,” Fulwood says, he didn’t even see it. “I went directly to my third-period French class.”

At a part-time job in a white-owned men’s clothing store, Fulwood decides to take the boss’ advice to dress conservatively and buys a pair of wingtips that are “the ugliest things I had ever seen.” He decides they are a necessity, “like fake smiles, to be worn daily. . . . Once I understood how to please white people, I had a new set of rules to follow, whether I liked them or not. I could work around the personal, unpleasant feelings.” In this practical, self-effacing way, Fulwood made his way through white America. He took away what he wanted from the high school years: a successful, if solitary experience--proof that indeed he could put the race question behind him.

As he was preparing to enter college, another job, this time at the local newspaper, convinced Fulwood that he wanted to be a reporter. His mother responded with a withering remark, overheard by the young Sam: “Lord have mercy. In all my life, I’ve never seen a boy so eager to be around white men.” Sorry to say, if that was his bent, he picked the right line of work.

Journalism, like Wall Street, is an old-boy business that has resisted giving up its white-male history. One still doesn’t need an abacus to count the numbers of blacks breaking into the ranks of decision-makers in journalism or even the desks covering foreign policy, economics, the arts or labor. This is important to mention because it is the backdrop of many of Fulwood’s personal and career decisions in this book. When he was offered a chance to cover South Africa, for instance, he went because it was an opportunity rare for black reporters. And Fulwood doesn’t always let the reader in on these newsroom facts of life. Instead, he asks us to believe in his ability and ambition--and above all in the earnestness with which he held to the American Dream.

Fulwood learned all his lessons only in hindsight and through personal disappointment, which makes for frustrating reading. The race battles in the news business are held behind glass walls, and they revolve around perceptions, language and gamesmanship. Through most of his years, Fulwood seems to have thought that things were fine and that he was doing well. He did not know when he was being maneuvered and, most baffling, he does not explain this.

When a protest against the Baltimore Sun developed among African Americans after the newspaper ran a series of stories showing that 76% of all black births in Baltimore were to unmarried mothers, Fulwood, a reporter there, attended a community meeting “at the insistence of a ranking editor.” He recalls tiring of an NAACP leader’s complaints, and he publicly took the man to task, dismissing the protest as a bad idea. Then, nervously, he told his editors that they didn’t understand how upset blacks feel seeing themselves portrayed only as “pathological.”

When the next day he was asked to be an editorial writer, he made no connection between the job offer and his remarks, even though the editor began by saying, “I noticed your comments at the meeting last night.” He remembers the NAACP leader accusing him of “grandstanding” to “curry favor” with his editors, but he tells us he was offered the job because a vacancy was coming up. If it were simply that another black writer was departing, why even tell the story of the meeting? Was it kismet? And more important, how often does one hear of a white reporter being offered a job after telling off a packed hall of the paper’s readers?

It’s hard to feel a sense of tragedy for his acceptance of the position when he soon felt uneasy in it: “The words were mine but the ideas belonged to the institution.” Some of this will surely go down hard with black readers, who probably hope that the few selected for such chances to shape opinion will take our issues to heart and plead our cases.

Fulwood’s journey in South Africa may also stick in the craw. He tells us that until he got the call to cover the death throes of apartheid, he’d had no interest in South Africa; he was elated, nevertheless, because it was a good career move. When he got off the plane, he says, “I felt shocking disappointment: South Africa didn’t live up to the level of racial oppression and hostility that I expected.” Someone should have taken his wallet and left him there for a year.

But South Africa did begin his awakening. An awareness of racial anger came after a few insults from Afrikaners (“You have benefited from the experience of 300 years of interaction with whites in America”); after finding himself relieved and maybe even a little proud to be pegged right off as American and not native; after several episodes of integrating restaurants. And there is an episode in Soweto in which Fulwood managed to get tear gas on his penis (you have to read it yourself), an accident that he tries to dignify by saying he “ached in solidarity with the township residents”--a cheap salute to people who suffered the worst violations “civilization” can wield.

Fulwood’s loss of faith in the Dream finally came through when his personal ambitions were thwarted in a way that was harsh perhaps, but not tragic. He was hired as a business editor at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, along with two white males who held the same title. He was unaware, however, that one of the men was his supervisor and so thought nothing of ignoring the man’s direct orders and suggestions. When this same man, to Fulwood’s surprise, became editor-in-chief, he pulled him out of his nice job and consigned him to the much grittier work in the Metro section. He sent him off with the bitter salvo: “You’re a part of the past and I’m looking to the future. Until you move to the other side of the newsroom, I don’t care if you come in to work or not.”

Fulwood regards himself as a man misled in this incident, perhaps purposely not informed that his white “colleague” was his “superior.” He may have felt it proved discrimination, though, for another reason: The section he was sent to is the desk most often worked by blacks, where urban blight, corruption, crime and the weather are the daily fare. Sam Fulwood got a fire like Los Angeles’ in his loins.

“I was a black man in a white, racist society,” Fulwood writes. “I had tried to fit into their world. I had cultivated an image, a personality and a set of career trophies that I assumed would be eagerly embraced by the larger, white society.” His rage is directed not at the persistence of racism but at the failure of his own method for coping, his chosen means to guarantee himself immunity from racism’s sting. His anger is no more measured than his earlier will to avoid it.

“Waking From the Dream” is told by an interesting voice but not by an elegant writer. The last third does benefit from an emotional investment absent from the rest. But that investment is one of anger, another kind of blindness. His anger may be good; it helps many to really try to get through, to try to make a difference. But perhaps I am holding his feet to a fire that has no importance to him. In any case, he will have to find a way to love life, with or without the Dream, while still living with the rage.