Runner Up

By Sheldon McCormick

A dissolutioned ex-civil rights activist, his car maker friend and ex-autoplant worker and a woman activist lawyer rescue an old discarded 1939 German staff car, christened “Runner Up”, rebuild it and enter the six wheeler in a grueling cross country auto race. They also race against racism, violence, a devisive foe and ridicule in 1979 South Los Angeles and Compton, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664179653

Sheldon McCormick

A Los Angeles, California native, McCormick began his writing career while a student at Foshay Junior High School (now the Foshay Learning Center) in 1971. He was a writer for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Compton Bulletin and several other publications. He was editor of the now-defunct Los Angeles Balance News newspaper in the late 1980s. McCormick received his Associate of Arts degree in journalism from Los Angeles City College May 22, 1986. He is the author of eleven other novels and has written commentaries for his Facebook page.

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Copyright © 2021 by Sheldon McCormick.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/14/2021

Xlibris

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Contents

About The Novel

In Memorium

Tributes

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

ABOUT THE NOVEL

H ARLAN CHANDLER, A disheartened former civil rights and Black community activist, and his friend Marcus Kreyton, a first-rate car maker, mechanic and ex-auto plant worker, along with a woman activist attorney, finds inspiration, purpose and self-worth when they rescue an old, discarded, dispised and worthless 1939 six-wheeled German staff car from an auto junk yard. Christened, Runner Up, the three African-Americans enter the remade car, into a grueling cross country hot rod automobile road race. Harsh challenges arise not only from the race, but also from white supremacist neo-Nazi hostility, violence, controversy from local militants, a bitter, divisive local leadership figure and both opposition and ridicule from fellow Black citizens in 1979 South-Central Los Angeles and Compton, California.

IN MEMORIUM

D EDICATED IN LOVING and honored memory to my dearly beloved parents Ouida McCormick (1930-1982) and Leon McCormick (1924-1991), my dear cousins Dwayne Washington and Arvella Rodgers, Rosemary Almada (1957-2013), Leon Spinks, Elgin Baylor, Marvin Hagler, Hank Aaron, Diane DiPrima, all African-American athletes of the past and George Floyd and other victims of hatred.

TRIBUTES

D EDICATED TO NAILAH Malik, Evelina Barajas, Deborah Lacey, Janet Nairn, Christine Gerstenberger, Armida Bolton, Lula Wallace all civil rights, human rights and women’s rights activists yesterday and today, professional, amateur, budding and wanna-be African-American athletes past, present and future, Tammi Mack, Adai LaMarr, Cameron Greene and Dominique DiPrima. Special Tribute to Mollie Bell, Ms. Giovanni Ferguson and Patricia Moore.

CHAPTER ONE

L ATE SUMMER, MID-1960S. Hysterical, unchained, highly caustic-eyed white supremacist fury. Flared, rasping shouts, profanity and damnation-filled toohy mouths. Finger-pointing, waving, threating, conteming of fingers, hand and fists. Hatred, intolerance, criminality and hellbent destruction ripped up and etched the flushed faces of white men, women, teenagers and some of the police officers who kept the rowdy crowds at bay with readied nightsticks.

Assembled along the city streets, doorways, seated and sometimes standing in and atop hardtop and convertable cars and a few pick-up truck, the enraged anti-civil rights demonstrators waved Confederate and Nazi swastika flags and displayed placards and protest signs, bedecked with swastikas and the Death’s Head (skull and crossbones) symbols that read, White Power!, Go Back To Africa and the Death’s Head-emblazened, Niggers, Beware!

Motorcycle-helmeted, mostly white police officers, stood nearly shoulder to shoulder with African-American civil rights demonstrators and guarded them from the hostile crowd. Some of the black men and women registered fear and uncertainty as the mob grew in ferocity, the way they did in years past in Southern lynch mobs. Some visibly and emotionally contemplated that at any moment a six or seven-coiled noose at the end of a length of rope would be brought out and left any one of the marchers swinging from the closet tree.

There were several within the area of the anti-racist march. Local auto plant foreman and white supremacist community leader Raymond Wilkins, 36, a tall (5-foot-10½-inches), portly and paunched white man with a baseball diamond-shaped workingman-roughewned face and a disheveled-haired balding head, puffed a dark cigar with menace, a snarl bent on violence and destructive contempt at the Black protestors, his iron-hard hirsute-backed fists on his brawny hips.

The same way he looked at Ku Klux Klan meetings in the past, in complete KKK regalia. Freedom and Justice!, the black demonstrators’ picket signs read. Fair and Decent Housing!, End Racism In Schools!, We Negroes are human beings, too! and Stop The Hate!

Some demonstrators wore medals and headgear from their years of service in the United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard during both war and peacetime, in addition to their loyalty to America. But the racist counterprotestors would have none of it and no respect for African Americans whatsoever.

Alan Pender’s medium-spaced brown eyes widened in outrage when he spotted several children within the march. He despised Black kids that way he did snails in his rose garden. To the point he wanted to crush them like he did the pesty gastropods.

Get OUTTA here, niggers!, he roared through his bucket-formed mouth. White people live here! Take your black asses back to your jungles in Africa!

Yeah, you goddamn apes!, a white, angry housewife yelled. Her normally reserved debutante-featured oval face bent by murderous hatred. You show you at MY doorstep, I’ll castrate you and shove your niggerhood down your throat!!

I hate niggers, all of ya!,, a portly, thinning-haired Alabama-born white racist in black horn-rimmed glasses and proudly displaying a Stars and Bars flag, yelled in a nasty Cornpone drawl. Get y’alls ass back down to the cotton fields where you belong! No good darkie trash!"

Harlan Chandler, a fleshy-cresting-lower lipped black proteser, surrendered his previous inner strength and dignity posture to offense at the unhooded and costumed Klansman’s remark. Harlan, a young man, was long-faced, rugged, mature in bearing and bloodhound dew-lapped in casual clothing and a pith helmet. While his left hand held up a picket sign that read, Nonviolence, Not Nazism!, his right curled into a fist. They gettin’ on m’nerves!, he muttered to himself. A porky faced, kindly brown-skinned minister, a veteran of many civil rights marches in the South, overheard Harlan and gave him a reassuring smile that everything and their cause was going to be alright.

A wild-eyed 30-ish white man with an Adolf Hitler crewcut hairdo stuck his tongue out. The mob grew more furious, which scared an eight-year-old Black boy. He clunged to his mother’s left hand, then her forearm. In the kid’s view, the whites resembled Satan at his most threatening through a sheet of flames. His little mouth flapped open and he trembled from head to marching feet.

A black mustachioed white man surged forward and punched the boy’s mother in her lean, lovely face. The assault and battery caught the attention and ire of six other black men, including Harlan. They came to her aid and he punched the attacker in his lantern right jaw. The counterprotestors broke through police lines and several altercations broke out between the white supremacists and the black demonstrators. While a few maintained their non-violent posture, others erupted into fisticuffs and struck their attackers with feet, judo, picket signs and fists. Both ended up with black eyes, bleeding head and facial cuts, abraisions and bruises. Policemen waded into the brawl, clubs swinging.

The little boy was in tears and helplessly wandered amidst the chaos. Mama! MAMA!

The child’s cries moved Harlan to tears.