NBA rookie player Sterling Brown arrest video released by Milwaukee police. A nightmare of intimidation lived over and over by 100’s of 1000’s of Black Men, with some losing their lives’.

Paragraph 4, Chapter 12 of the autobiography “Guidance Against the Odds: the First thirty-nine years,” by Henry Lee Faulkner.

It was after midnight on the morning of August 16, 1981. I was leaving the city of Montgomery, heading north on Interstate 65. My wife at the time had decided that she and the kids would remain behind in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama. She did not want to revisit the housing issues we had suffered years earlier in Jacksonville, Florida. Realizing where I was, driving a late model Chevy Monte Carlo with Maryland tags, I set the cruise control to the posted speed. About three hours into a ten-hour drive, my fears of law enforcement materialized. An officer pulled me over, and I visualized the worst happening. Flashbacks were playing in my mind. Understanding the predicament but hoping it was just a dream, I intuitively handed him my insurance and identification, which included my military ID. I asked, “What’s the problem?” I didn’t give him a chance to speak, which seemed to irritate him. “You know why,” he answered abruptly in a condescending manner. After examining my documents, he inquired, “Where you headed, chief?” “Louisville,” I answered. “Slow it down if you want to get there. I’ll give you a break this time,” Then he handed me my IDs. Feeling like I had just been spit on, but I also wondered how the outcome would have been different if I had not shown him my military ID. He must have been former military assuming he knew the acronym CPO in rank which meant chief petty officer; since he addressed me as Chief.

The incident was disturbing, although the outcome wasn’t disastrous, the awareness of how far I had ventured outside my safety zone hit home. If it were not for the interstate road system, I would have passed through numerous small towns, some of which would have been sundown towns. I had protected my family, but who was protecting me? I had let my guard down, get comfortable within my skin, alone in the middle of nowhere (figuratively speaking), in the heart of the South. It was a full moon, casting eerie shadows off the long-leaf pines, landscaping the reclusive miles of highway in central Alabama. The uncertainty of what Louisville, Kentucky had to offer began to fill my thoughts with apprehension…… for the first time, giving way to serious thoughts of retiring to a reclusive island. Baltimore had given me refuge, but now I had reentered the unknown, the predatory forestry of my own country.

After seven decades and a lifetime of negative experiences, I still capitulate to a mindset of fear rather than safety in the sight of law enforcement.   Now the NFL chooses to fight against those who protest racism, rather than racism itself.