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IN THE FALL OF 1948, in the small town of Kinston, North Carolina, a six-year-old Black boy wandered out of a drab project building where he lived with his family, to a schoolyard to play with other neighborhood boys. He was wearing a small brown cap with a chin strap, corduroy trousers with patches his mother had stitched on the knees, and a red flannel jacket with six large black buttons down the front. His brother Ricky had outgrown the red jacket, and his mother did not want to buy another piece of clothing from Sears and Roebuck, even shouting out at times, “No mo' Sears and Roebuck.”
The little boy was excited to get to the schoolyard to play with his friends Sam, Mitch, Kellis, Otha, JD, and Melvin. The yard was part of a mission school for Black children run by the Franciscans of the Catholic Church. In this largely Black Protestant community, the nuns and priests sought to convert Black families, to educate and teach the children the Catholic way. His mother converted to Catholicism the year he was born, and the boy was baptized soon thereafter. His mother knew she wanted her children enrolled in the segregated Catholic school because she believed the education was superior to the public segregated elementary school. Adjacent to the schoolyard was a three-story red brick convent where the nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Blood lived. The priests lived nearby in a two-story brick house. All the nuns and priests who operated Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church and School were white. The schoolyard was a dirt field, and at one corner of the field was a large six-swing apparatus situated over a sand pit.