From The Capital Times
By Tom Gardner

When I read about the increasing acceptance of waterboarding as a form of torture, I vividly recall how in 1968 members of the Memphis Police Department believed I could tell them information about civil rights insurgents arriving to create havoc. Forty years later I still hide my serrated scars.

I was 14 years old and forgot I was a black boy living in racist America and heading for the devil’s den of discrimination. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” stimulated my raging hormones for truth, justice and the American way. Like the main character in his book, I stuck out my thumb for a ride from my home in Wisconsin. I was so excited when someone pulled over for me that I went in the wrong direction. After hitchhiking the rest of the way from Milwaukee to Memphis, Tenn., with no trouble, I put out my thumb for the last ride to my grandfather’s place. I was sure he could take me to demonstrate alongside Martin Luther King Jr. to support his recently announced policy on poverty and Southeast Asia.

“Boy, where you from?” asked the toothpick-sucking officer in the passenger seat as his partner walked around the car to me. At the station, Tennessee police officers beat me because I was a threat to the status quo of time-honored Uncle Tom behavior. In retrospect I would have kept the king’s English to myself, shuffled my feet, and goggled my eyes in adherence to the South’s renowned sacred social rule for young black bucks.

The physical and verbal abuse heaped upon me caused several broken bones in my body and several dozen stitches on my 14-year-old skull. I guess these seven policemen were trying to protect the good citizens of Memphis from more of the Rev. King’s peaceful demonstrations. Between the baton blows to my body and over my screams of youth and innocence, their loud accusations that there were people supposedly coming to Memphis “to stir up trouble” kept ringing in my ears.

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