Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South

By Andrew Maraniss, Derrick E. White and Louis Moore

New York Times Best Seller
2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition
2015 Lillian Smith Book Award
2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title

When Strong Inside was first published ten years ago, no one could have predicted the impact the book would have on Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and communities across the nation. What began as a biography of Perry Wallace—the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference (SEC)—became a catalyst for meaningful change and reconciliation between Wallace and the city that had rejected him. In this tenth-anniversary edition, scholars of race and sports Louis Moore and Derrick E. White provide a new foreword that places the story in the context of the study of sports and society, and author Andrew Maraniss adds a concluding chapter filling readers in on how events unfolded between Strong Inside’s publication in 2014 and Perry Wallace’s death in 2017 and exploring Wallace’s continuing legacy.

Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended “separate but equal.” As a twelve-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville’s lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 19, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee’s first integrated state tournament—the same day Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-Black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game.

The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9780826506931

Andrew Maraniss

Andrew Maraniss is the New York Times–bestselling author of Strong Inside, the only sports-related book ever to win two prestigious civil rights awards—the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Special Recognition Prize. Andrew is a contributor to ESPN's sports and race website, TheUndefeated.com, and helps run Vanderbilt University's Sports & Society Initiative. He also writes nonfiction for young readers.

Book preview

What Perry Wallace accomplished in breaking the color line in the Southeastern Conference has been one of the great untold stories of the last fifty years. Now, thanks to Andrew Maraniss and Professor Wallace, it has become one of the great TOLD stories of the last fifty years with this unforgettable book."

—John Feinstein, author of Foul Trouble and Where Nobody Knows Your Name

With insight into the motivation and maturing of an African American man amid rabid hostility in the age of desegregation, Maraniss presents social and sports historians and interested readers with an engaging tour that exposes the challenges of change in the South and in college sports with the arrival of black athletes center stage in the white world.

—Library Journal

. . . a thoroughly researched and compelling account of Perry Wallace. . . . As much history lesson as biography, Maraniss’s account paints a detailed picture of the civil rights movement on several levels: in gymnasiums, on campuses, in Nashville, and across the nation. . . . The combination of sports and sociopolitical history will appeal to both basketball fans and students of civil rights.

—Booklist

It is at the dawn of a tumultuous era that Andrew Maraniss sets Strong Inside, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

—SLAM Magazine

. . . powerfully told . . .

—New York Times

Strong Inside is superbly written, hard to put down, and fascinating for sports fans and non-sports fans alike.

—BookPage

In Strong Inside, Andrew Maraniss does a fine and thorough job of telling Perry Wallace’s important and compelling story."

—Bill Littlefield, NPR

Brings to life the Civil Rights struggle in gripping, personal detail.

—Sports Illustrated

A richly detailed, intimate account of the experiences of Wallace and the generation of African American students who blazed the trail for integrated higher education.

—The National Memo

It’s not often a writer uncovers a hero all but hidden among us. But Tennessee author Andrew Maraniss manages to lift the all-but-forgotten story of Perry Wallace—a college basketball player in the Lew Alcindor era—into a spotlight just that memorably bright.

—Austin American Statesman

Maraniss shows great compassion and insight with a detailed narrative that is both broad and deep, covering the civil rights movement and college basketball with equal authority. Wallace’s story is powerfully moving and deservedly, beautifully told."

—Shelf Awareness

Nuanced and complex, Strong Inside is an invaluable resource for studying the state of race relations in the US, both past and present. Highly recommended.

—Choice

Strong Inside is both an insightful and entertaining read. It has the pace of a page-turning novel and is a class above the standard sports biography.

—The Huffington Post

Maraniss’s work is fascinating in the confluence of civil rights icons, basketball superstars, educational leaders, and even students who would go on to high-profile careers who populate the pages. Where else can you find Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Adolph Rupp in the same book? The hero of this stunning book, however, is Wallace.

—The Sporting News

STRONG INSIDE

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

STRONG INSIDE

PERRY WALLACE AND THE COLLISION OF RACE AND SPORTS IN THE SOUTH

ANDREW MARANISS

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Copyright 2024 by Andrew Maraniss

Published 2024 by Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First edition published 2014

First paperback edition 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file Library of Congress Control Number: 2024931314

ISBN 978-0-8265-0692-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8265-0695-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8265-0694-8 (PDF)

ISBN 978-0-8265-0693-1 (epub)

Cover photo: Perry Wallace in 1969. Image courtesy of Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives

For Alison, Eliza, and Charlie, my home-court advantage,

and for my parents, David and Linda

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword to the Second Edition

1. Forgiveness

2. Short 26th

3. Woomp Show

4. They Had the Wrong Guy

5. Harvard of the South

6. These Boys Never Faltered

7. Somewhere Like Xanadu

8. Reverse Migration

9. Growing Pains

10. Icicles in Raincoats

11. Articulate Messengers

12. A Hit or Miss Thing

13. Inferno

14. Subversion’s Circuit Rider

15. Trouble in Paradise

16. Season of Loss

17. Ghosts

18. Memorial Magic

19. Deepest Sense of Dread

20. A Long, Hellish Trauma

21. Destiny of Dissent

22. Revolt

23. The Cruel Deception

24. Black Fists

25. Nevermore

26. Bachelor of Ugliness

27. Ticket Out of Town

28. Time and Space

29. Embrace

30. Rising

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Author Biography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Perry Wallace as an elementary school student in Nashville

Reverend James Lawson is arrested after organizing sit-ins at downtown Nashville lunch counters in February 1960

The colorful and reactionary Nashville Banner publisher, Jimmy Stahlman

Vanderbilt basketball coach Roy Skinner with legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp

James Douglas, Perry Wallace, and Walter Fisher pose with a rim they broke in the 1966 Tennessee state tournament

Pearl High Coach Cornelius Ridley in the minutes before the Tigers played in the 1966 Tennessee state championship

Pearl High School fans celebrate after the Tigers won Tennessee’s first-ever integrated state basketball tournament

Pearl’s players receive the championship trophy from Gov. Frank Clement

Vanderbilt custodian Richard Baker hands Perry Wallace a net after the state championship game

Pearl players celebrate their state championship

Wallace meets Louisville stars Butch Beard and Wes Unseld during a senior-year recruiting trip

Wallace officially announces his commitment to Vanderbilt

Godfrey Dillard grew up in the Boston-Edison neighborhood of Detroit

Wallace fights for a rebound in the 1966 freshman-varsity game

Godfrey Dillard’s Detroit style took some Commodore teammates by surprise

Wallace in action against the Kentucky Wildcats

Stokely Carmichael greets Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1967 Impact Symposium

Stokely Carmichael and Vanderbilt chaplain Bev Asbury eat lunch on April 8, 1967

Carmichael speaks at Memorial Gym

Vanderbilt students unfurled a Confederate flag during Carmichael’s remarks

Nashville police took to Jefferson Street and other parts of North Nashville on the night of Carmichael’s Impact speech

Wallace limited his aggressiveness on the court to prevent accidental blows that could ignite fights

In this 1967–68 publicity slick, Godfrey Dillard is still depicted as a member of the varsity

Wallace’s leaping ability and court sense made him one of Vanderbilt’s all-time greatest rebounders

Wallace and teammate Bob Warren listen to Coach Skinner during a game in 1968

Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard listens to a speaker at the 1968 Impact Symposium

National Guardsmen ring the Tennessee State Capitol in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King

Wallace said his interaction with kids—unburdened by racial prejudices—buoyed him during his darkest days

Wallace blocks the shot of Pistol Pete Maravich, the high-scoring LSU sensation

Perry Wallace, Rudy Thacker, and Thorpe Weber celebrate after Vanderbilt’s victory over Kentucky in 1970

Perry Wallace remains the lone Black player in this senior-year team photo

Wallace is now a professor of law at American University in Washington, DC

Wallace was inducted into the Vanderbilt Athletic Hall of Fame as part of the Hall’s inaugural class in 2008

Perry Wallace is flanked by Godfrey Dillard and Bill Ligon at Wallace’s jersey retirement ceremony in 2004

Wallace, his wife, Karen, and their daughter, Gabby, today live in Silver Spring, Maryland

Wallace and his daughter, Gabby, on one of the family’s visits to Paris

Vanderbilt athletic director David Williams presents Perry Wallace and Andrew Maraniss with framed enlargements of the Strong Inside cover

Perry Wallace speaks with Vanderbilt radio announcer Joe Fisher

Perry Wallace visits students at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy

Perry Wallace and Godfrey Dillard reunite at Vanderbilt in September 2016

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey delivers a eulogy at Perry Wallace’s memorial service

Portraits of Perry Wallace, Rev. James Lawson, and Walter Murray at Vanderbilt’s Kirkland Hall

Candice Lee embraces Karen Wallace at the unveiling of Honorary Perry Wallace Way

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

FOREWORD

BY LOU MOORE AND DERRICK WHITE

Derrick White and Lou Moore are historians of African American sports history. Their work explores how Black athletes and African American–led sporting institutions challenge the racial status quo and provide a blueprint for American democracy. While much of their work appears in traditional academic publications, they also have developed a public outlet through their podcast, The Black Athlete. Since 2019, the podcast has tried to provide historical context for contemporary sports stories. Their conversation on Strong Inside follows their podcast format and has been edited for clarity.

DERRICK: Strong Inside is a model for how to write about Black athletes and racial pioneers. The book explains the process of desegregation by capturing the complicated and conflicting history. Moreover, Andrew doesn’t make desegregation an inevitable decision.

LOU: To tell the story of the Black athlete you have to tell the story of the Black community that molded them. And for Andrew, that means giving the reader a heavy dose of North Nashville. In providing the history of Nashville’s Black community, Maraniss shows the reader that Perry Wallace’s strength is not only an individual trait, but one honed and supported by his community.

DERRICK: In emphasizing Nashville’s Black community, Andrew introduces the reader to the dominance of Tennessee State’s basketball program. Too often, the scholarship presents PWIs (predominately white institutions) as somehow superior. What Andrew does by capturing the importance of HBCU basketball, he shows Perry Wallace’s decision-making and I think that’s an important part of the story. Andrew shows Wallace making the choice to be a racial pioneer, and not simply treat the desegregation of SEC basketball as an inevitable decision.

LOU: Right. And that’s what struck me about this book. Maraniss does a tremendous job of developing Black Nashville. Whether it is Pearl High School, or going to Tennessee State or Fisk, the reader gets a taste of what it’s like to be Black in this all-Black section of Nashville, and why people like Perry Wallace were comfortable in this world, while at the same time telling the reader why it was important for Wallace to be a racial pioneer.

LOU: Andrew is really capturing W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois famously writes, It is peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of other, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. Du Bois is asking, What does it mean to be Black in America?, but also, What does it mean to be Black in white America? Wallace goes through that as a teenager, deciding whether he wants to go to a Black school like everyone else did in his neighborhood, or become a racial pioneer. The reactions to Wallace’s decision were not preordained. On the one hand, there was the possibility of celebration. Because race is visual, so Wallace could be a representation of democracy.

On the other hand, the Black community could view Wallace as a sellout. In other words, double consciousness could also be inward looking, from the perspective of the Black community.

DERRICK: As Andrew describes, most folks in Wallace’s neighborhood understood this decision. His classmates, his teammates at Pearl High, the folks at Tennessee State who he played pickup ball with, understood his decision, and they were supportive of it. And I think that one of the things that gets lost is that that was not always the case, right? Andrew very richly shows how Black Nashville nurtured Wallace. This is what I call the sporting congregations in my book Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M and the History of Black College. For me, sporting congregations were the collection of players, coaches, administrators, fans, and sportswriters that championed Black college football and athletics more broadly. But I also feel like the concept is malleable, in the sense that it can support racial pioneers such as Wallace.

It’s all the aspects of the Black community that surround and support sports, and Wallace was brought up in that, and he knew they had his back.

LOU: Beyond Nashville, Andrew connects Wallace to this greater Black freedom struggle of the Black athlete. All of these Black athletes have a decision to make. Is being a racial pioneer enough for my participation in the movement, or do I have to do more? Do I have to protest? Do I have to boycott? And that’s not an easy decision, because whatever he does, or does not do, it will be met with backlash. But Wallace is comfortable with himself, and he knows that unlike what the nation is telling young Black athletes—stuff like this is your only chance—Wallace knows that there’s more out there for him, and others like him, and he’s setting that example.

DERRICK: Yes! Wallace has to deal with these decisions while also struggling with the tough terrain of a pioneer. He’s facing racism on campus, in the dorms, in church, on the court, and on the road.

LOU: He had to go to Mississippi and be the lone Black player, and go through all that trauma just years after civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi and James Meredith was shot? While he’s still trying to win a basketball game.

LOU: And then, while he’s fighting all this, the NCAA comes through and bans the dunk. Most people point right at Lew Alcindor as the reason why the NCAA banned the dunk, but as Andrew suggests, by doing so, they forget about Perry Wallace, who could throw down a mean rim-rattling dunk with the best of them. Wallace might not have been a civil rights activist, but those dunks made a powerful statement. Black power. He’s making a statement when he’s hammering home the ball.

DERRICK: Right. And for Wallace that comes right out of North Nashville. Andrew does a great job of talking about how Pearl High used the dunk as a weapon. They intimidated every opponent. So Perry Wallace understood from his own community the power and intimidation factor that the dunk provided.

DERRICK: So that’s what he brings to the SEC. It’s Black style. But while he’s bringing Black style to the game, Wallace is also the quintessential pioneer. He’s smart. He’s approachable. And that means something.

DERRICK: In many ways he was the embodiment of what many coaches were looking for when they wanted a pioneer. At the same time he brought that Black style to the game, so there’s that kind of tension, that duality, at the core of Wallace and this book.

LOU: He is the Jackie Robinson of Southern basketball. Jackie was the perfect pioneer while also bringing Black style from the Negro Leagues to MLB.

DERRICK: This is a roadmap of how to write a book about a Black athletic pioneer. They get honored at half-time at games, but they all need a book like this. This book tells a story in a way that is truly generous but is also honest.

Louis Moore is a professor of history at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of two books, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880–1915 and We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality, and has an Audible lecture, African American Athletes Who Made History. In addition, he has two Audible Great Courses lectures, African American Athletes Who Made History and A Pastime of Their Own: The Story of Negro League Baseball.

Derrick E. White is a professor of history and African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football and The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s.

1

FORGIVENESS

BOB WARREN SAT alone in the back of a taxi, bound for Massachusetts Avenue and the law school at American University, where he planned to deliver a message nearly forty years in the making.

As his cab sped through the streets of Washington, DC, far from his home in western Kentucky, Warren’s mind raced back to the 1970s, before he became a preacher—when he was a professional basketball player—a crew-cut farm boy passing red, white, and blue basketballs to Ice Man Gervin in the freewheeling American Basketball Association, sharing locker rooms for nine seasons with Afro-coiffed men from places like Tennessee State, North Carolina A&T, and Jackson State University.

It was in those ABA days—in hotels, buses, cabs, restaurants, flights, and conversations with his many Black teammates, in becoming familiar with their perspective on the world—that it dawned on Warren what hell one of his brilliant and hardworking teammates at Vanderbilt University, Perry Wallace, must have been going through in 1968, when Warren was a senior and Wallace, a sophomore, was the first and only African American ballplayer in the entire Southeastern Conference.

Warren’s cab reached its destination, and the basketballer-turned-country-preacher made his way up to the fourth floor of the law school. Standing there to greet him was Professor Wallace; it was the first time these old teammates had seen each other in thirty-eight years.

Forgive me, Perry, Warren said. There is so much more I could have done.

2

SHORT 26TH

LONG BEFORE THE day Bob Warren came to visit, there was the day Perry Wallace was elected captain of the Vanderbilt basketball team, the day when he was voted as the university’s most popular student. There was the day he graduated from Columbia Law School, the day he delivered a lecture on global warming entirely in French, the day when he represented the Federated States of Micronesia before the United Nations. There was the day he watched his jersey hoisted to the rafters at Memorial Gym.

But before any of that, there were days when dorm room doors were slammed in his face, accompanied by cries of N***** on the floor! There were days when grown men dressed in maroon, or orange, or red, white, and blue, threatened to castrate or hang him. There were days when he cried with frustration, days when blood flowed but no referees’ whistles blew, days when so-called friends laughed at his pain.

But before any of this, before Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. even came into this world, there was Short 26th. His story begins in a little shotgun house on a dead-end street on the other side of the tracks.

His parents, Perry Wallace Sr. and Hattie Haynes Wallace, had come to Nashville from rural Rutherford County, Tennessee, not long after their marriage in 1928. Perry Sr. moved to Nashville first, to furnish and decorate the three-room house on Short 26th before his wife arrived. The Wallaces, both twenty-two years old, were eager to enjoy the benefits of city life. The South remained overwhelmingly rural, with only three out of ten people living in cities, but the migration had begun, and while many Black families headed hundreds of miles north to places like Chicago and Detroit, others, like the Wallaces, made the shorter journey to nearby southern cities.

Perry Sr. was just eleven years old when his mother died in childbirth, and his father, Alford Wallace, raised twelve children with a tough-love attitude, and the help of his sisters, on a farm near Murfreesboro, about thirty-five miles southeast of Nashville. It was a typical farm in many ways, full of fruit orchards, corn, cotton, hogs, and chickens; and there was a rock formation that seemed like a vast canyon to the kids, who would run through it barefoot. But the farm was unusual in one important way—Alford, a Black man whose father had fought with the US Colored Troops in the Civil War, owned it. Perry Wallace Jr. wouldn’t be the first pioneer in his family.

Hattie Haynes grew up close to Perry Sr. in the Blackman community near Murfreesboro. As children they played together, went to church together, and walked together across an old wood-and-rope bridge on the way to the one-room schoolhouse they attended through eighth grade. Hattie’s teachers considered her the smartest student in the school, and they often let her do lessons on the chalkboard as an example to the others. Most of all she loved music: a traveling salesman had come through her parents’ neighborhood selling affordable organs, and Hattie’s father bought one for her mother. Hattie learned how to play, and from then on the Haynes house was full of music, her young fingers flying through a fast melody she called Racing Horses.

Hattie was twenty years old when her mother died, and just two years later Perry Sr. came calling on her father to ask for Hattie’s hand in marriage. They were married on April 1, 1928—their children would later joke about the April Fool’s Day wedding—and soon they were on their way to Nashville, a bit apprehensive about the people and the pace of the city but excited about the opportunities. Two of Perry Sr.’s older brothers were already there; Joe and James Wallace helped the young couple get settled. Perry took jobs at a granary, then a chemical company, then with the railroad, then as a bricklayer, while Hattie rode the bus to clean homes and offices. Perry and Hattie were doing the best they could; these were the standard jobs available to Black people in Nashville at the time—and for decades to come. As late as 1940, nearly 80 percent of working Black women in the city were employed as domestic servants or waitresses.

The city where Perry and Hattie began their lives together had been settled after the Revolution, emerging as an important frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century. As the young nation entered an era of Manifest Destiny, Nashville served as a key launching point in the western expansion. Up until the time of the Civil War, most Nashvillians considered their town more western than southern. Located roughly halfway between Chicago and New Orleans, about as close to parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana as to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, Nashville’s crossroads location made the city more open to new people and new ideas than its Deep South peers.

It also made the city a major railroad hub for the occupying Union army during the Civil War, an especially important depot for General William T. Sherman’s march on Atlanta. More than fifty thousand Federal troops occupied the city from 1862 to 1865 (more than three times the size of the city’s 1860 population), what one historian called perhaps the first, continued occupation of a city by any American army. While those troops cleared the city of thousands of trees—needed for firewood—they did leave some things behind: namely themselves. Dozens of Union soldiers married southern belles and remained in Nashville after the war, and one Federal fort was converted into a college for Negroes in 1866: Fisk University, named for Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk.

Ten years later, the first medical school for Black students in the South, the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College of Nashville, was established. The school later became known as Meharry Medical College, and for generations afterward it produced most of the Black doctors in the country. In 1912 another Black college was founded in the city, Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, which later became known as Tennessee A&I State and then simply Tennessee State.

Clustered in what locals call North Nashville but what is more accurately the near-west side of the city, these three institutions gave Nashville a larger concentration of highly educated, upwardly mobile Black professionals than most cities in the South. Still, most Black Nashvillians lived in deep poverty, many in a near shantytown just yards from the state capitol building downtown.

The center of Black life was near those universities, and one road—Jefferson Street—was the place where everything happened. In a segregated society, the Jefferson Street area was where Black Power flourished long before the slogan was invented. Living in the Black cocoon, as Perry Wallace would describe it decades later, meant patronizing Black-owned businesses, entering the front doors of Black movie theaters, eating in Black restaurants. Inside the cocoon, poor as it was, there were no whites-only lunch counters or back-alley entrances. Rather, there were institutions like Isom’s Beauty Shop, Frank White’s Cleaners, Green’s Grocery, and the Ritz Theater. The leading Black entertainers of the mid-twentieth century, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole to Little Richard and Ella Fitzgerald, included Nashville on their itineraries, playing at the Silver Streak and the Del Morocco and staying at the Brown Hotel.

Perry Sr. and Hattie, the laborer and the cleaning lady, made a life in this cocoon. It was humble—this was Short 26th after all, just a stub of a road around the corner from Jefferson Street, not even the real 26th Avenue. Their house was small—living room, bedroom, kitchen, bedroom, porch—but soon enough it filled up with kids. First there was Annie, who became known simply as Sister, and then along came James, known as Brother, and Bessie, Jessie, and Ruby Jean.

While some neighbors succumbed to the temptations born of the marriage between a new urban existence and poverty—moonshine, gambling, and violence among them—Perry Sr. and Hattie lived a straight life, and they were determined, in the face of significant peer pressure, that their children would do the same. Of all the traditions and values in the Wallace home, the two most important were religion and education, and church life was especially important to Hattie. She was a regular at the Jefferson Street Church of Christ, a conservative congregation that forbade drinking, dancing, and instrumental music in the sanctuary.

The children went to Sunday School, read the Bible, and attended services with their mother. Mrs. Wallace brought the lessons of the church back to Short 26th, and the kids experienced what they would later call a home-based religion, a vehicle for motivation and inspiration and healing when that was necessary, said Jessie. Much of that motivation and inspiration was directed at schooling. The Wallaces believed that a strong education was a necessary ingredient if their children were to succeed in a society that was not only becoming more urban and fast paced but also was engineered to restrict the opportunities for Black people. The Wallace kids were smart, so smart that they encountered more than a little jealousy, more than a few strange looks from friends, neighbors, and other parents. Were those really French-, Spanish-, and German-language records you could hear Annie practicing with when you walked past the little shotgun house on Short 26th? What was that all about? That family is different.

On February 19, 1948, this straitlaced family of seven got quite a surprise: Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. was born at Meharry Hospital.

Can a birth really be that much of a surprise?

For some it was quite unexpected, given that the oldest Wallace child, Annie, was a sophomore in college and the youngest, Ruby Jean, had been born ten years earlier.

For Jessie, then thirteen, it was a real shock. She had had no idea that her mother, who wore billowing smocks around the house, was pregnant; when she heard her mother was in the hospital, she thought she must be dying. So traumatized by the thought, Jessie didn’t ask anyone for days what was going on. Just then learning about menstruation in school, she thought about how this baby was made, and she was traumatized all over again. For Perry Sr. the birth of a healthy baby boy was no small pleasant surprise. Jessie’s fear that her mother was dying was closer to the truth than she could have known. For Hattie, then forty-two years old, childbirth was life threatening. She was in the hospital for more than two weeks before Perry was born, and doctors discovered a tumor on her colon, which at the time they believed to be benign. Still, they took special precautions when Hattie gave birth to Perry. Daddy was tickled to death, Jessie recalled, because his wife had survived and he had gotten a little boy.

When mother and son were healthy enough to return home, Perry Sr. drove them back to Short 26th. As they rolled down Jefferson Street and neared the house, a train passed overhead on a railroad trestle. Oh, son, Perry Sr. whispered to his infant boy, before you could even get home you’ve gotten run over by a train. Jessie would later say that she believed her father’s joke foretold the trials and tribulations of life that her baby brother would endure.

The girls gave little Perry baths, brushed his hair, and hauled him around everywhere, using the infant to draw the attention of boys at Hadley Park. The only time they let go of him was when Daddy came home from work. Have to have my boy, have to have my boy, he would say, and then he wouldn’t let his son out of sight all night, putting the miracle baby to sleep in a white bassinet at the foot of his and Hattie’s bed.

Nearly as soon as one boy arrived in the house, the other left. Brother James, realizing that his parents would be struggling to put the girls through college while raising another child, enlisted in the air force as soon as he turned eighteen the November following Perry’s birth. He sacrificed for the family, Jessie recalled. He was gone, and that was devastating.

As his sisters grew older and eventually all moved out of the house, Perry became even closer to his mother. He developed an uncommon sensitivity and was called a mama’s boy; the love and values Hattie passed along to her son began to shape his behavior. In a world of chaos, much of it soon to be directed squarely at him, he would remain above the fray. Some observers would later remark on Perry’s unflappable character when they saw him remain cool under pressure in places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Auburn, Alabama. They should have seen him in kindergarten.

Perry Wallace’s education began in 1954, the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation decision, at a school for Black children named Jewel’s Academy. Every day Perry the kindergartner walked from Short 26th down Howard Street over to the complex of chapels and schoolrooms at the academy, a private school run by the Church of God and Christ. Along the way, he passed by a factory and railroad tracks and, most exotic to him, a retirement home and its constant parade of elderly people with canes, walking by real slow.

Run by a female bishop known as Chief Jewel, whom Perry considered a big, strong, charismatic woman, the school included a mandatory, midday chapel session. Whether it was the imposing figure of Chief Jewel or the lessons on respect he had learned from his parents, Perry was the most even-tempered kid in kindergarten. This didn’t necessarily sit well with his sister Jessie, who occasionally picked up her little brother from school.

Jessie arrived at Perry’s classroom one day, and the teacher, Miss Davis, was nowhere in sight. With free rein, the kids were going berserk, running around screaming, bouncing off walls and windows—total pandemonium. All but one kid, that is. As his classmates went bonkers, there at his tiny desk sat Perry Wallace, not saying a word, waiting patiently for his sister.

I was just enraged, not at the children, but at the teacher, Jessie recalled. But my strongest feeling of all was, ‘Is my brother going to be a wimp? Is he going to stand up for himself with these rougher guys? Is he going to be able to defend himself?’

Her mind flashed to a poem the Wallace children had been given, If by Rudyard Kipling, which begins with the line If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, but she thought that at just five years old, her brother was too young to be heeding the poet’s advice on self-discipline.

I think I would have preferred at that moment for him to be running around, too, Jessie recalled. But looking back, this is when I saw the first instance of that self-control, this discipline, and not only that, this desire to do the right thing and not follow the crowd. He learned all that so early.

If those traits would later serve him well as a pioneer, he didn’t need to look far to see another example of a trailblazer—however unheralded—in action. It was Perry Sr., who despite long odds was making a living as an entrepreneur in the good ol’ boy field of commercial and residential building construction.

Nashville in the 1950s was in the midst of what was known as its Central City Renaissance, a postwar building boom that saw the construction of the city’s first skyscraper, the thirty-story L&C Tower, as well as several new department stores, government buildings, and the continuation of the Capitol Hill redevelopment project to remove the shacks that circled the statehouse. And, as the county’s population ballooned from 257,000 in 1940 to 400,000 in 1960, residential construction—much of it brick—created increasing demand for Perry Wallace Sr.’s services as a bricklayer.

This middle-aged man from the country, father of six children, saw his chance at the American Dream. Just as that dream was fueling the development of these suburban brick homes, Perry Sr. seized on a fundamental truth: the dream required that these houses look beautiful. In the world these new homeowners wanted to live in, the lawns needed to be manicured and the bricks needed to sparkle. Through his bricklaying experience, Wallace knew that the crews often did a quick, sloppy job of removing unsightly mortar from the face of the bricks and the joints in between.

And so with an optimism far exceeding what was expected of a man of his standing, Perry Sr. started his own brick-cleaning business. For years, the Wallace kids called it Daddy’s business in a bucket, and that was no metaphor. Perry Sr. had no car when he first got started, so each morning he would wake up early and load his steel brushes and acid into his bucket and ride the city bus to jobs all over town. Eventually, as business improved, he was able to buy a car—a 1952 Chevrolet—which allowed him to work jobs as far away as southern Kentucky and northern Alabama. This at a time when merely pulling over for gas was a risky proposition for a Black man in the South. It wasn’t until decades later that Perry Jr. could fully appreciate the risks his father took to provide for his family.

Here he was in a very tough situation, making his money doing work for white general contractors in the South, Wallace recalled. The construction industry is tough enough if you’re a privileged white male. But to be a Black man with his own business in the 1950s in the South, not everybody would cotton to that. So my father was a pioneer. We understood he was working hard, but didn’t understand at the time just what kind of world he had to go out into.

As Perry Sr. began to make a little money, he saw an opportunity to improve his family’s lot. Boxes were packed and Short 26th was home no more; the family moved to a bigger, nicer house at 1110 Cass Street. The new neighborhood was integrated—the all-white North High School was across the street—but was becoming increasingly Black as whites moved to the suburbs.

It was around this time that young Perry’s own view of the world and its possibilities began to expand. He was now living at the fringes of the cocoon, old enough to take note of the disparity between certain things that he heard or read about and the environment in which he lived. One of the few benefits of his mother’s job as a cleaning lady downtown was the fact that she brought home magazines she found in the trash at the Bennie Dillon office building and the Maxwell House hotel: Life, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook. Flipping through the pages with the children, Hattie would say, ‘Oh, look at this, look what you can have if you want it,’ Jessie recalled. "She didn’t say, ‘We wish you could have it,’ or ‘We wish we could give it to you,’ but ‘Oh, look what you can have if you go to school and if you want it. There are things you don’t have now, but that’s what they are used for.’ So we learned about things that we didn’t actually have. And we always had a National Geographic. Thank God some doctor subscribed to that."

Perry was mesmerized by Madison Avenue’s portrayal of the ideal American lifestyle, fascinated by the photos, the advertisements, and the articles, all pointing to a world he did not know. "A person would wonder why you would spend your time looking through Ladies’ Home Journal or Redbook or whatever, he recalled. But the idea was that you were locked out of the American mainstream. So if you wanted to live a life of meaning, you looked at whatever sources you could, within the Black community and outside it, into the great American mainstream. How many other ways could you peek into it?" The seeds were planted that this was a life he wanted to have.

And then he found another way to peek into this other world—literally. He could see the white students walking to and from North High School across the street, and on Friday nights in the fall, there were the football games.

Perry and his buddies would walk over to Robertson’s corner store and buy some Cokes and cheese and bologna and crackers, and then make their way over to the chain link fence that sat atop a hill overlooking the floodlit football field. Invisible to the crowd below, they popped open their Cokes, stood at the edge of the fence, built their sandwiches, and watched the spectacle—one they were prohibited from seeing any other way. As they peeked through the chains, Wallace later concluded, he and his friends were in effect looking through what W. E. B. DuBois called the veil that separates the races. It had a profound impact.

We stood there for two or three hours on Friday nights and we watched the games, but we also watched the people, Wallace recalled. We watched whites live and enjoy being an American. They had popcorn and candy and a band and cheerleaders and hot dogs, and it just looked like they had a better place than we did. And I think the subtle signal that was sent was that even though they were poor, they were better than we were and they were more a part of the real America than we were.

Perry became interested in finding other ways to escape the rigid boundaries society had placed around him, some superficial, some more meaningful. The family’s black-and-white television brought a new world into their home, with Perry watching Steve Allen, Perry Como, Leave It to Beaver, The Dick Van Dyke Show, all programs that depicted a certain image of the American middle class that intrigued him. When a Black performer like Sammy Davis Jr. or Harry Belafonte appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was a stop-what-you’re-doing event, with Perry calling out to the rest of the family, There’s somebody colored on television! For a Black kid in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, mistaking Hollywood sets for a real America and daydreaming about the idyllic scenes depicted in magazines were no faulty pastimes. Reality, after all, was insane, even in a moderate city like Nashville.

In his voluminous study of Nashville-based civil rights activists, The Children, David Halberstam wrote that the racial texture of [Nashville’s] daily life seemed less edgy than that of comparable cities in the Deep South. Here was a capital city in which Black people had a history of voting and had representation on the City Council. The city’s morning newspaper, the Tennessean, had a long liberal tradition. Nashville’s segregation was largely of a soft kind, administered, it sometimes seemed, not with the passion of angry racist officials but more as a cultural leftover from the past, Halberstam wrote. True as all this may have been—Nashville was different from Memphis or Birmingham or Selma, so much so that one disgruntled segregationist declared Nashville the worst city in the world—the fact remained that there could be no soft segregation, no genteel Jim Crow.

By the 1950s, historian Don Doyle noted, the races in Nashville had never been more segregated, as tens of thousands of whites moved out of the city into the surrounding suburbs. And yet even as they came to make up a greater percentage of the city’s population, Nashville’s Black residents were excluded from most white-owned restaurants, forced to enter the downtown movie theater through the alley entrance and sit in the balcony, barred from public parks, pools, and golf courses. They were made to sit in the back of the bus and in special sections at the Ryman Auditorium and Sulphur Dell baseball field, steered to segregated bathrooms in the basement of city hall and the county courthouse, relegated to segregated schools and confined mostly to service occupations.

In this context the big question for Nashville’s power brokers was how they would handle the issue of school desegregation in the wake of the Brown decision. Following a successful 1955 lawsuit brought by the prominent Black Nashville attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Avon Williams, Nashville’s Board of Education was ordered to implement a desegregation strategy by 1957. In what became a national model dubbed The Nashville Plan, the system called for one grade to be desegregated each year—starting with first grade in year one, adding second grade the following year, and so on. As gradual and conservative as the plan was, it still included convenient outs for white parents, including the ability to transfer their children to other schools with a written request and a gerrymandering of school districts that would cluster Black students even closer together.

And yet there was still significant organized opposition to this cautious plan from elements of white Nashville. Vanderbilt English professor Donald Davidson (an aging former member of the Fugitive and Agrarian literary movements) and some downtown business leaders formed a coalition opposed to federal intervention in southern race relations, and a group of parents created a committee calling for the creation of a three-tiered system: one set of schools for whites, a second for Blacks, and a third that would be integrated. The plan was endorsed by the state legislature before it was declared unconstitutional.

With local segregationists splintered into various ineffective factions, an outsider stepped into the mix. His name was Frederick John Kasper, a racist and anti-Semite from New Jersey who found support in pockets of the South. After sparking a bout of violence in Clinton, Tennessee, that required National Guard intervention, Kasper arrived in Nashville in 1957, passing out literature urging parents to keep the n*****s out of white schools and placing threatening phone calls to Black families. The KKK arrived from out of town, too, with bands of young toughs riding around Nashville in cars emblazoned with Klan stickers. Had these groups not been so hateful, the situation might have been comical, a kind of supremacist family feud. The Klansmen couldn’t quite embrace a Yankee like Kasper, and the more intellectual segregationists of Davidson’s ilk were put off by the tactics of both Kasper and the Klan. No true leadership emerged, but still there was violence.

As an elementary school student in Nashville, Perry Wallace was often accosted by young white kids on his way to school. I had to figure out the basic law of the jungle, Wallace recalled. It was fight or flight. Courtesy of Perry Wallace.

When the first Black students and their parents arrived at previously all-white schools on September 9, 1957, they were greeted by a crowd of whites who hurled insults, sticks and stones. Later that night an entire wing of Hattie Cotton Elementary was destroyed by a dynamite blast.

In hindsight, Doyle concluded, the violence instigated by Kasper and the Klan had the ironic effect of galvanizing support for peaceful integration among most white Nashvillians. Their city was on the brink of chaos, and support for desegregation became a necessary element in a defense of Nashville’s integrity as a community.

In the midst of this charged atmosphere, one that he was only vaguely able to comprehend, Perry Wallace, an asthmatic kid who had been taught by his parents to stay out of trouble, had to walk to elementary school. And to get there, on his way from Cass Street to Elliott Elementary, he had to walk through white neighborhoods, past white schools.

Sometimes the white boys threw rocks at him. Sometimes they called him names. Sometimes a carload of teens sped by, throwing things and calling him names. And at least one group of punks surrounded him and threatened him with a knife. In those moments, Wallace later recalled, he had to figure out the basic law of the jungle. It was fight or flight. It was classic and it was raw. Sometimes he fought, sometimes he ran. Sometimes he took the bus, just to avoid the hoodlums.

But even that plan didn’t always work. Nearly fifty years later, Wallace vividly remembered one incident. Late on a spring afternoon, he stood alone at the corner of 5th Avenue and Madison Street near Elliott Elementary waiting to take a bus downtown, where he would transfer to another bus back home.

A car packed with young white males rolled down the street toward him, the teens shouting insults as they approached. Perry had endured this before, and he stood his ground, just waiting for the car to pass by. But this time, as the car got closer, one of the guys leaned out and pointed a gun right at him. Time seemed to slow down, the shouts now just so much white noise, and Perry’s eyes grew large as he stared down the barrel of the gun. The car slowed to a crawl as it turned the corner in front of him, and the guy just kept pointing the gun at Perry—pointing it, pointing it, pointing it—everything in slow motion. And then he didn’t shoot.

Maybe they were just kidding, because people just didn’t shoot people in Nashville in those days, Wallace recalled. But who knew? Who knew?

Faced with no easy solution—ride the bus or walk, it made no difference; trouble could lurk anywhere—Perry lost himself in other pursuits. There were chores at home: feeding and grooming his father’s hunting dogs out in the back yard, waking up early in the winter to fill up a freezing-cold bucket with coal for the stove. He found comfort in attending church with his mother, ignoring the taunts of the neighbor kids as he clutched his Bible on the walk over to the 15th Avenue Church of Christ.

Where you going, Preacher?!

I’m going to church!

And he came to love music. Perry’s father, no musician himself, had surprised him one day in fifth grade by bringing home a trumpet. Though Perry was never told exactly why he received the gift, he later got the sense that his father wanted him to enjoy the benefits of the study of music, believing that he would enjoy music as a source of expression, that it would serve as a safe way to help him forget the troubles he encountered and escape to new worlds.

As Perry’s trumpeting skills blossomed, he was invited to participate in the All-City Band, made up of kids from various elementary schools around town. To today’s ears, that sounds like some sort of All-Star ensemble, but back then it was the only band available to Black schoolchildren in Nashville. Since the schools didn’t have their own bands, this was a way for music teachers to give their students the opportunity to play concerts. It was while playing in the All-City Band that Perry met a small, cheerful, neatly dressed clarinet player named Walter Murray. Though at the time they were just a trumpet player and a clarinetist who happened to play in the same band on weekends, Wallace and Murray would become best friends a few years later in high school (the Black Mutt and Jeff, some friends kidded them, with Wallace so tall and Murray so short). It was a friendship that would grow deeper when they entered Vanderbilt together and continue all the way to Murray’s deathbed, when Perry was one of the last people to sit with Walter and to console his wife, Donna, Walter’s high school sweetheart.

Perry’s love for the trumpet continued as he graduated from the Elliott School and enrolled at Wharton Junior High School, one of two schools that fed into the legendary Pearl High, a major source of pride in North Nashville. Almost immediately, Perry noticed one comforting advantage to attending Wharton: the walk to school was peaceful. While the journey to Elliott had taken him through some white areas, the walk to Wharton took him in the opposite direction, closer to Fisk and Tennessee A&I and deeper into the heart of Black Nashville. My life shifted into the Black world, Wallace recalled, and I encountered no problems once I started heading in that direction.

Reverend James Lawson is arrested after organizing student sit-ins at downtown Nashville lunch counters in February 1960. A Vanderbilt Divinity School student, Lawson was expelled from the university after his role in the nonviolent protests became known. Lawson’s arrest and expulsion set in motion the events that led to the hiring of the progressive Alexander Heard as chancellor, the integration of Vanderbilt’s undergraduate schools, and the recruitment of Perry Wallace. Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections.

As the scenery changed, so too did Wallace’s curiosities. The year was 1960, and Nashville was the stage for some of the first, dramatic scenes of the civil rights movement. James Lawson, a Black divinity school student at Vanderbilt, had been teaching the principles of nonviolence to students from Fisk, Tennessee A&I, American Baptist Bible College, and other area schools, students whose names would become legendary, including Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Marion Barry. In February of that year, the students staged nonviolent sit-ins at Nashville’s segregated department-store lunch counters. Though angry whites beat them, poured coffee on them, and burned cigarettes into their flesh, and though they were arrested, these students remained true to Lawson’s teachings on nonviolence, appealing to the moral conscience of white Nashville.

For Wallace it was the beginning of an education unlike anything he had ever imagined. His teachers talked about the demonstrations, and a classmate raised the question, Why do we have to sit in the back of the bus? This was something Wallace had never thought about before. That was just the way it was: you went to the back of the bus. Suddenly, these teachers and classmates were opening his eyes. Why did he have to use a different water fountain downtown? And the more curious he became about these questions, the more he had to see what these older students were doing at the protests. He and some friends would sneak downtown—their parents would kill them if they knew what they were up to—sometimes by bus, sometimes by darting in and out among the marchers, and watch the action at the department stores and cafeterias from a safe distance.

His thirst for knowledge was intense. After school and on weekends, he walked a few miles to the Hadley Park library and flipped through the pages of Ebony and Jet, buried himself in the works of W. E. B. DuBois, and absorbed Walter White’s accounts of southern lynchings. While he was fascinated to discover these Black writers, his interests were broad. A self-described Sputnik-affected kid, Wallace was influenced by teachers who were determined to improve the math and science skills of their students, lest the country fall further behind the Russians. He began to take a genuine liking to those subjects, checking out college-level math and science books and sitting for hours at the library trying to make sense of it all.

When the bystanders at Hadley Park didn’t see the Wallace kid trudging over to the library to read DuBois, they may have seen him lugging his trumpet to private lessons on the Tennessee A&I campus. Though bouts with asthma had occasionally interfered with his trumpet playing (his band teacher at Wharton, Mr. Howell, grew upset with him when he botched a solo in the Carnival of Venice because he simply couldn’t breathe), he had a desire to get better. Howell respected his young pupil’s determination and set him up with the university’s assistant band director for private lessons in the summer. A few days a week, Wallace carried his trumpet three or four miles to the offices of Edward Louis Smith, a demanding teacher who later became a jazz trumpet player of note. The lessons lasted an hour, and Smith had Perry practice four hours a day, five days a week, using the classic method books of the legendary French trumpeter Jean-Baptiste Arban, which were printed with instructions in English, French, and German. It was exactly four hours a day, Wallace recalled. I would time it, because I didn’t want to practice that long. I would read the English and then see if I could understand the French and German. I spent a long time with those melodies and rhythms, and I came to really appreciate the notion of clear, pristine, very good music.

Even with its racial discord, there were obvious signs that Nashville was proving to be a good place for the Wallaces to raise their children. The music, the exposure to role models, the educational opportunities, and the job prospects were simply better than they were back in rural Rutherford County. And yet it was important to the parents that their children retain some of the country spirit, a closeness to nature and a measured outlook on an increasingly fast-paced life. For Perry Sr. and Hattie, there was a value to being out in the country, sitting on the front porch, walking through the fields, and walking the country roads where nature is really in charge, Wallace recalled. It’s not like in the city, where if it’s dark or if it’s light it has to do with the switch on the wall. Out there, it has to do with the forces of nature. There’s a different tempo, a different feel, and when it all comes together right, there’s a sense of the world and your place in it.

During the summer and on Sundays after church, Perry rode out to the country with his father, visiting cousins at the Wallace family farm. For the perceptive youngster, the trips were full of lessons on social status, especially divisions within the Black community. First there was the exotic drive itself, which marked the distance between the branches of the family in the very roads it required to travel from Nashville to the farm near Murfreesboro.

You’d start in poor North Nashville, and take Lafayette out to Murfreesboro Pike, and eventually the road would become more gravelly than paved, Wallace recalled. And then you’d get to roads where you’d have bridges where you’d have to wait, because only one car could pass at a time. And then the roads would get unpaved and ungravelly, and there you’d have big limestone rocks in the road. There would be brush scraping against the car because it hadn’t been trimmed, and you’d see little creeks off to the side. And, finally, you’d come to a clearing, which was Alford Wallace’s farm.

Somewhat bewildered, somewhat enchanted by the trip, Perry felt like quite the pampered city boy in the presence of his country cousins. These kids were bigger and stronger, their hands were rougher, they knew how to run around on the limestone rocks and the gravel without cutting their feet. Perry, meanwhile, used a lot of big words and did a lot of talking—talking about what, the cousins didn’t always know. Education was making this boy crazy. By the standards of young rural boys, it was the country kids who were on top. They were more down to earth, and that was a good thing. And yet Perry sensed that these cousins were aware of their disadvantage, knew that he had opportunities in the city that they would never have, and there was a bit of envy. While still trying to hold on to their rural culture in as many ways as possible, Perry’s parents, like so many others, had made a break from their own families in pursuit of a better life. And so what did that say about those who chose to stay behind? The dynamic created a bit of tension.

What the country cousins did not know was that Perry, the one they thought was a little too citified, was equally marginalized by many of his peers back in Nashville. The city kids would give me hell, and my sisters, too, because they thought we weren’t street smart, he recalled. Every member of the Wallace family knew exactly why they were catching hell, and they chose to endure the insults, accepted being called different, sacrificed some ephemeral pleasures, because they believed that someday, it would all pay off.

My father talked a lot about what it takes to make it in America now, Wallace recalled, "what skills you needed, what ways you need to be, what was the worthless way. Not that people were worthless, he wasn’t someone who condemned people, but he did understand unintelligent behavior and approaches to life. He had seen a lot of it. It was his passionate desire for Black people to do well, Wallace said, that often made his father concerned about their well-being and critical of bad habits and behavior: Probably the best proof of this was his willingness to let people work for him in his business. The only ‘catch’ was that he was a tough boss—not a mean one, but a tough one—in the sense that you had to be punctual, work as hard as he did, and conduct yourself in a respectable manner."

To keep the kids out of trouble, like other families trying to prevent their children from making bad choices, the Wallace parents kept their kids in the house. There was no hanging out at the fast food joint after school, no detours on the way home from band practice. While other guys in the neighborhood developed their own signature struts, that wasn’t an option for Perry: Daddy said, ‘You can’t have a cool walk. Cool walk? That’s out.’ The Wallace kids even sounded different from their peers, and that was no accident. They were taunted for this, too, told they were trying to sound white.

The notion was not trying to be white; that was the last thing you wanted to be, Wallace recalled. "It was what works in America now, and what is going to work in the future? The idea was to look at television, listen to the radio, and listen to the basic way that these people expressed themselves. We were living in a very humble place where people up and down the street talked and acted a whole different