Casualties of Freedom: The True Story of Heroic Young People Who Helped Change America

By Michael Coston

Armed with a knife in one pocket and the Little Red Book in the other, Michael Coston battled his way through the social hierarchies, racial strife, and burgeoning revolutionary movements that defined his adolescence in the sixties and seventies. Beginning from his earliest glimpses of racist violence as a middle-class black child in Philadelphia, his memoir provides an intimate lens into the transformation of Black American consciousness. Whether ‘liberating’ medical supplies for Black Panther social programs under their overcoats, or leading anti-war walkouts at predominantly black Germantown High, Coston and his comrades were at the vanguard of a militant spirit that is so desperately needed today.

While we know the story of the gangster-turned-Panther, Coston’s is an untold tale of a young black leftist and budding journalist who used his social network to build solidarity across the white anti-war movement, black militants, and cultural nationalists. In the tradition of the oldest abolitionist newspapers, Coston helped set the minds of his peers ablaze as a distributor of newspapers, from the progressive Philadelphia Free Press to the Black Panther Newspaper, Temple’s The Black Torch and eventually the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks. As the momentum for liberation crested around him, and then waned into the addiction and violence of the post-Vietnam era, Coston was left as “a revolutionary with no revolution to fight,” and was dangerously close to being a casualty of freedom. Forty years later, the same Germantown High that voted Coston ‘most militant’ for his yearbook is closing its doors forever, while a pro-war black president sits in the White House – Casualties of Freedom is a potent reminder of how much work is yet to be done, and where each one of us can start.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989216609

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Preface

Five thirty in the morning was very early when you got to sleep around one o’clock a.m., but that was the time the whole household who were registered to vote had to wake up. We thought we would be first in line (‘yeah right’) to vote for a serious Black presidential candidate. There were three generations of the household voting that morning; my ex, her mother, daughter, and of course me. My ex’s son Abdur Razzaq voted earlier in the week via absentee ballot and it was her 18 year old daughter’s first time voting. How exciting it was to witness an eighteen year old young lady cast her first vote for a Black presidential candidate.

The area where the family lived was ironically historic in its own rite; Lamott, Pennsylvania was named after an abolitionist named Lucretia Mott. The area was also the training camp for the colored troops in Pennsylvania during the Civil War (Camp Perry). It’s been a predominately African American area since the Camp Perry days, nestled in the solidly White enslave of Montgomery County Pennsylvania.

Getting up early doesn’t always mean you are the first person in a voting booth line. I, the middle aged man, was the first person in the household to arrive in line, approximately 6:05 a.m., and I was number fifty-one in line. The rest of the household who voted at the polling booth were six minutes and fifteen people behind me. The line consisted of 99% African Americans, both men and women, young and old. They were all decidedly middle class and rather aloof from those individuals that they didn’t know personally. How strange is it that Black people voting for what could be the first Black president be so disjointed from each other during that process? Most of them kept their eyes to themselves with the exception of a jealous husband glaring at me. I guess he thought his wife was looking at me (which she was). Hell, my woman was the finest one in the room, maybe he was mad about that.

After about an hour, I finally got my opportunity to vote and then I waited for everyone I came with to finish voting. Afterwards, we all went to breakfast at a local pancake house, which was mobbed with Black voters. The atmosphere was that of a noisy ghetto restaurant, having to listen to people banter about the election as we ate our breakfast. Whatever happened to cooking breakfast at home?

I went to work that day. I was on the 2 p.m. - 10 p.m., shift at the Robert Nix Federal Courthouse (named after a Black congressman in the pre-civil rights years). I work as an armed security officer protecting federal buildings in the Philadelphia area. At this particular post, many of my co-workers are retired police officers, mainly from the Philadelphia Police Department; and, almost all of them are White. Many of the Court Security Officers (CSO), were police officers during the Rizzo years (the irony of this will be evident later) and I have an excellent rapport and working relationship with them. The surprising thing was that all of the CSO’s stated that they were going to vote for Obama. I claimed initially to be a Hillary Clinton supporter (which I was), and then a McCain supporter (which I wasn’t). However, without exception these White retired cops were sick of the Republicans and wanted to give the Democratic Party a chance notwithstanding the fact that the Democratic candidate was Black. I kept telling them Obama couldn’t win and extolling the virtues of McCain, but they were telling me that all of their friends were voting for Obama, very interesting.

I listened to the radio at work when I could but it was so early I only heard a few conclusive voting results. When I got home I immediately turned on CNN and it seemed Obama was in the lead, but I was still an unbeliever. A little after 11 p.m., California reported in and Barack Obama was the projected winner. I was stunned and in total shock. I didn’t shout, I didn’t jump for joy, I didn’t cry, I just sat there quietly. I tried to call my daughter on the phone and didn’t get an answer. Fifteen minutes later after hearing people screaming in the streets of Lamott, car horns blaring, and general merriment outside; my daughter called me crying and saying, Baba, (daddy) thank you and all the Panthers for what you did.

This book is my story but it’s also the story of thousands of civil rights and anti-war activists who sacrificed everything so Black people could have real freedom, unencumbered by Jim Crow and racism. These individuals were also largely responsible for making the United States a country that only forty years after the events in this book could elect a Black president.

1

Genesis

I was born on February 17, 1954 to Arnold Coston and Joan Marie Trusty. Both were very light skin African-Americans of mixed white and black heritage. My mother was born and raised in North Philadelphia, and my father was born and raised in West Philadelphia. My father went to Central high school and my mother went to Gratz high school. They met on the subway coming home from school, fell in love, and soon after high school graduation they got married.

My maternal grandfather Eugene D. Trusty was mixed with a Black father and White mother. His mother was a child of a German butler and an Irish servant girl. When she married my great-grandfather (a Black man) she was disowned by her parents. She then lived with my great-grandfather in the Port Richmond neighborhood in Philadelphia. The neighborhood was a black enclave called Jute Town. Jute Town was an approximate three block radius with the main streets being Tulip and Agate streets, just North of Lehigh Avenue. My maternal grandmother’s family was Black. Although my mother’s grandparents were college educated teachers, my grandmother was raised in poverty because during the early 20th Century her parents couldn’t find teaching jobs in Philadelphia.

When I was an infant, my Aunt Pat baby-sat me at my mother and father’s apartment in West Philadelphia. The apartment was a second story walk up on Larchwood Avenue at 56th street, it was a small one bedroom apartment and according to the neighbors all was normal in the apartment. No one could remember any tragic incidents occurring there, which would make the following events more confusing.

Aunt Pat was a high-school kid at the time and spent the night with us. She saw a shroud that looked like the grim reaper over my crib. My aunt was petrified and told my mother what happened. My aunt would not stay at the apartment another night. The next night, my mother saw the shrouded being and was scared so much she took me to my grandmother’s (her mother) house in North Philadelphia. My grandmother saw the shroud over me that night and the next day called Grahm. Grahm was my paternal great grandmother, German-Irish mix. She said to get the baby christened and they did.

I was christened at my father’s family church, Mount Carmel Baptist church in West Philadelphia. I was baptized with my whole extended family looking on. Everyone was there with the exception of my great grandmother (Grahm), she was sick and could not attend.

I always thought the shroud was a demon spirit, thus the reason the baptism scared it off. No one saw the shroud again.

In the succeeding three to four years, there were two additions to the family, my sister Linda and my brother Erich. My parents soon moved to another West Philadelphia apartment.

The neighborhood we moved in was a working class neighborhood with mainly row houses and some apartment buildings. It had been solely Italian American but Negroes had started moving in. However, there didn’t seem to be any racial problems. Most of the trees were old and there were many of them on all the streets in the area. Corner stores abounded and all kinds of small businesses were in evidence. The teenage Italian American boys would hang on the corner with their ‘wife beater’ T-shirts and tight fitting blue jeans and black pointy toe shoes. In the cold weather they would wear black leather jackets. They would listen to transistor radios or their car radios to groups like the Platters, Frankie Avalon, Rickie Nelson, Elvis Presley, and other singers of that era. They would drink cans of beer out of a paper bag and they would always laugh and talk loudly. They were often whistling and making catcalls at the teenage girls passing by.

My first recollection of West Philadelphia is of course the girls. Two girls I remember in kindergarten were Monica and Joyce. Monica was a cocoa-brown little girl who lived with her grandmother. Her grandmother used to baby-sit me after school and Monica and I used to play together. Joyce was in our class, she was very dark skinned and my mother wondered why I liked her instead of Monica who was lighter (I didn’t realize that being lighter made a difference). I don’t think Joyce liked me though.

The first five years of my life, I remember little else but the above little girls I played with. I do know that my mother was sick and I was shuttled around from one relative to another, mostly on my father’s side of the family. I started first grade at Harrington Elementary School on Kingsessing Avenue. I was a good student and got straight A’s, even though I was a mischievous boy.

Once I was sent to the cloakroom for talking and while there, I took an item out of one student’s book bag and put it in another student’s book bag. Later at the end of the day, the student saw that her item was missing. The teacher immediately searched everybody’s belongings and it was discovered in a little White boy’s book bag named Wayne (most of the class was White). He got in trouble for it and nobody ever knew I did it. I guess this started my career of not getting caught.

We lived at 52nd and Chester Avenue and at that time the neighborhood was racially mixed. I used to watch the Italian teenage boys thumbing rides from cars. I tried to do the same thing one day, but my mother found out and I got yelled at. I caught ringworm from a playmate and my Mom had to brush my hair until I bled. She did this for weeks so my hair would grow back. The ringworm also changed the texture of my hair on my head from straight to curly.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president, but that wasn’t the important thing that happened to our family that year. That year we moved from the apartment in West Philadelphia to a row house in West Mt. Airy. My paternal grandmother had given my father the down payment for the house. Although my dad was making good money working at the U.S. Post Office, he didn’t have the money for the down payment.

We moved into our new home which was at 7036 Cresheim Road. It was one house from the corner house which was inhabited by an older Negro couple who actually had to endure threats and even a cross burning on the lawn when they moved there. Our house was a small two-story row house with three bedrooms. My mother and father were in the front bedroom, my sister was in the middle room and my little brother Erich and I shared the back room. There was a garage and back driveway but no back yard. In the back driveway was a venetian blind business that sat off to the very end of the driveway that formed a dead end. Also there was a hilly wooded area in the back of the house that led up to the train tracks. The Pennsylvania railroad Chestnut Hill local line ran on the tracks. The railroad tracks were an arterial route and a shortcut all through West Mount Airy and many people (adults and children) walked the tracks. The house had coal heat and the coal truck would come by monthly to deliver coal. The large and smelly coal heater was located in the basement, soon it would be my job to take the ash and put it in a bucket and also shovel the new coal into the furnace.

The neighborhood was quieter but it was not racially mixed. It was solid white with the exception of our next-door neighbor. The first week after we moved in, my sister Linda and I were sitting on her bedroom windowsill on the second floor. We both leaned back at the same time and the window was up and the screen was the only item in the window. I caught myself before I fell and Linda could not catch herself and fell backward out of the window. I looked back and saw Linda falling toward the ground, I ran down the steps to catch my little sister. My mom asked me why I was running and I told her Linda fell out the window. Linda was rushed to the hospital. She had a fractured skull. Luckily she fell on her butt first and then hit her head. I’ll never forget the look on her face while she was falling, a look of surprise and horror.

I always felt responsible for my little sister falling. Even though I didn’t do it and the event wasn’t my fault, I felt I should have been able to save her. This mind set seemed ingrained in me even as a little boy, I felt I should be a protector.

The racism in West Mt. Airy at this time was intense. Few White children would speak to me and even fewer would actually play with me. I was six years old, but many times the older White kids would attack me and chase me up the driveway calling me a nigger. Once an older kid, approximately twelve years old, told me to tell my mother she was a black bitch. When I said this to my mother, she asked me who told me to say it. I told her that Tad told me to say it, and she told me not to talk to him again. Interesting enough, Tad’s brother was electrocuted approximately ten years later while playing on the high tension wires on the train station at Allens Lane.

I was called nigger on a daily basis. I asked my mother, What does the word nigger mean? She told me an ignorant person. She said just ignore the people that call you that, they are just poor white trash. Consequently, I had no playmate in the neighborhood. Every weekend my mom would take me to play with my cousin Joey at my grandmother’s house in North Philly. I looked forward to that because that was the only after school playtime I got.

School was another matter altogether. In West Philly I was an ‘A’ student in a non-racist integrated school. Up in Mt. Airy, I was a ‘C’ student. My first grade teacher, Miss Fineman was a miserable middle age woman and no lover of Negroes. Once I was running up the marble steps at school and slipped, severely cutting my chin on the edge of the step. Miss Fineman said, Serves you right, and she gave me no help what so ever. I had to go to the Chestnut Hill hospital emergency room and got three stitches on my chin. However, in first grade I did find some Negro friends; they were being bused to school from out of the immediate area, so school was not too bad. Plus we did have a Negro male teacher in the school (more on that later).

My mother was very light-skinned with straight hair and in those days of racial intolerance and bigotry most White people thought that she was white. She had Western European features. When we first moved to Cresheim Road, the local police officers of the 14th District apparently thought that my mother and father were an interracial couple. During times when my mother walked to the store on Mt. Pleasant Avenue or to the diner on Mt. Pleasant Avenue, she would often get cat calls and stares by the police cruising by in their patrol cars. If this form of disrespect wasn’t enough my dad often got pulled over in his car by the 14th District police for no apparent reason. My father even told me about a death threat against him by a 14th District officer. But all of the sudden this harassment stopped. I think my maternal grandfather who worked in city hall had something to do with the cessation of this harassment.

One thing I remember about being six years old is my mother and father’s constant arguing and fighting. Once they were arguing over who was going to turn on or off the light switch. My mother would tell me to turn it on and my father would tell me to turn it off. I would look from one to the other and not know what to do and I just broke down and started to cry.

I became extremely confused about the nature of marriage. My mother told me that people fell in love, got married and had children. But if you fall in love and love someone shouldn’t you be nice to them? It seemed that my parents didn’t like each other. They were always either arguing or talking bad about each other.

I spent most of my time after school watching television. I made attempts to do homework, but I don’t remember my mother checking it much or ever helping me with it. Television programs were good, Disney cartoons, the Mickey Mouse club, the Three Stooges; Western’s like Bonanza, Johnny Yuma, Bat Masterson, The Rifleman, etc. It seemed I modeled what a man should be by looking at these Western Cowboys and stating, I’m going to be brave like that when I’m a man.

The first movie my father took me to see was The Longest Day, by Cornelius Ryan. It was about The Normandy Invasion (D-Day) in World War II and had an all-star cast (featuring John Wayne). I loved the movie and it started my love affair with soldiering and all things related to the military. After that I began only watching television shows about war like Combat, Twelve O’clock High, and Gallant Men. I also started playing Army all of the time with my cousin Joey