by Earl Monroe
I was around 16, I think, when some people started calling me “Black Ben” because I was dark. I never knew where the name came from, but I didn’t like it because it had a derogatory feeling. So I never considered it a nickname because there weren’t a lot of people who called me that; just some smart-alecky lighter-skinned people who I had embarrassed on the basketball court. So whenever someone called me by that name I just didn’t answer, which became the way I handled it from then on.
See, I had already learned from my sister Ann by the time I was 13 or 14 how people in Philadelphia mistreated and didn’t respect dark-skinned black people. And this came from black people themselves who were light skinned, or even brown skinned. Now, Ann was brown skinned, not dark like I am, but light-skinned black people looked down their noses even at her. She told me she had to deal with this attitude when she was going to West Philadelphia High School, especially with light-skinned women with so-called good, almost straight or curly hair. When she told me this I started to pay attention to how people were treating me with regard to my skin color.
I learned early on that my color set me apart. Plus I was usually taller than everyone in my class. I began to notice that because I was dark skinned and tall, women would clutch their bags tighter and look at me suspiciously when I walked close to them. That left an indelible impression in my mind. So as I grew older, I had to pull all those negative reactions toward me together and devise plans for how to deal with them.
When I saw people walking toward me, I could visualize in my mind what they were thinking about me and I knew instinctively who distrusted me just by looking into their eyes or by watching their body language. But I realized that that was the way it was and that it didn’t have anything to do with whether I was a good person or not, whether I was smart, or deserving, or talented at playing basketball. It just was what it was, and getting upset about it wasn’t going to change anything. So I just ignored people who treated me badly because I was darker than they were and refused to answer when they called me a derogatory name. After I started ignoring anyone who called me “Black Ben” and when I started to get real good on the playground court, one day someone called me “the Duke of Earl,” after Gene Chandler’s famous song. They called me this after I got good. They even made a chant up at games; whenever I did something great, they would chant, “Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl.”
I responded to that nickname, as I did when they called me “Thomas Edison” (or “Tommy” for short) because of the way I invented moves and stuff out on the court. These were nicknames I got in high school, but none of them stuck.
After practicing hard all summer and playing in pickup games and tournaments whenever and wherever I could, I returned to Bartram in the fall of 1960 with a new attitude about my studies and about playing the game of basketball. I was determined to prove myself, both at Bartram and out on the playgrounds. I knew that I loved the game by this time, loved the competition of going up against other really good players, and I knew what I had to do to get better, which was to focus my attention on the game, hone my skills, and practice hard.
I was starting to become aware of a lot of different things by this time, I guess because I was going on 16 years old and growing up. Right before my birthday in 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president. A lot of black people everywhere supported him over Richard Nixon. Kennedy was the talk of South Philly, and although I hadn’t paid too much attention to him up until this point, I saw that a lot of people in my family really liked him and voted for him. He seemed to be cool, had a beautiful, stylish wife named Jacqueline—Jackie for short—so I started paying attention to him after that.
I was practicing my dribbling a lot during the winter of 1961. By this time I was obsessed with playing basketball and getting better, you know, sharpening all my skills. So every day when I came home from school, if it was too cold to go outside to the playground and practice, I’d dribble the basketball in the living room of our house while I was listening to music. I’d dribble with my left hand and then with my right to a beat in my head that went something like, tah-tah-TAH, tah-tah-TAH, tah-tah-TAH, tah-tah-TAH, tah-tah-TAH.
I would practice it with different songs. But I started dribbling the ball so hard that the sound of the ball hitting the floor got really loud, and if my mother was home she’d yell, “Earl, stop bouncing that ball so loud in the house!”
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was developing a rhythm for dribbling that filtered up into my head from the music I listened to. I had been taking some piano lessons and was seriously starting to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, like Gladys Knight and the Pips, James Brown, the Platters, even some jazz like Bobby Timmons, a great Philadelphia piano player, and some Miles Davis. So my overall game was starting to fall into a rhythm and all of it—music, risk taking, being creative in inventing shots, my dribbling, passing, the way my body moved—began to develop into a style that was on the verge of being original. The only thing was I couldn’t do these moves in a high school game—or practice session—because the playground game wasn’t allowed there yet. I would use them off the playground in the future, but not until after I was out of high school.
During the second semester of my junior year of high school, I was promoted to the varsity team from the junior varsity. The varsity was coached by Tony Coma. But Coach Coma cut me from the varsity and I had to play junior varsity again because I was in the 11th grade. The odd thing about being cut from the varsity was that it happened right after I had the greatest day I’d ever had playing basketball. I scored points, made steals, played great defense, blocked shots, made great passes to my teammates, got rebounds, set screens, did all the other things I was supposed to do on the basketball court. Then, I ended up getting cut. I mean, I did everything that was imaginable during that scrimmage. But Coach Coma called me into his office and told me, “You’re going to have to play junior varsity.”
This really pissed me off! But I didn’t say anything because I was too shy. I never questioned why he cut me. I just looked at it as “it is what it is.” I knew I couldn’t change anything. I guess he already had the varsity team set by then. I mean, there were some good players on the varsity squad. And maybe I would have just rode the bench instead of starting and playing very well (and continuing to develop my game) on the JV squad. Who knows what would have happened? I knew by then that I could be a streaky scorer at times. You know, one day I couldn’t miss anything, but the next day my shooting might be off.
I was a center on the JV team but probably would have had to play forward on the varsity, because they had a six-feet-five- or six-feet-six-inch kid named Boyd O’Neal playing center. But getting cut like that just added fuel to the fire burning in my belly to get better and succeed. It made me want to get revenge on those who played above me, which I eventually did.
Even though I was beginning to have some success in developing as a basketball player, some things remained the same. One day, after the season was over, I was on my way to my morning class and I saw this far-out image of my cousin, Jimmy, standing on top of a truck with a machine gun. Now, in order for me to get to school I had to take a bus and the trolley to get there, because it was a long way from where I lived. So that’s what I did that day: I took the bus to the trolley. I’m riding the trolley, not thinking of anything, and I look out the window when we come around this turn and there, on top of this truck, in a rival gang territory, is Jimmy with a machine gun and he’s just shooting it, just being himself. I never found out what he was shooting at or why because I never asked him about it. I don’t even know if he was arrested, but it was him up there all right, sure as shit. It was just unbelievable! But I wouldn’t put anything past Jimmy. He was capable of doing anything when he was young, because he was just that crazy. I remember saying out loud, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Then I ducked down, covered my head, and hoped nobody knew I was related to him because it was very embarrassing for me to watch Jimmy acting o
ut in that stupid way. Plus, it was also a matter of me being in a rival gang’s territory, so I could have gotten shot. Maybe I felt embarrassed also because my outlook on life had been changed by going to high school in a mostly white neighborhood, where things like that didn’t happen. Maybe it was because I never liked stupid acts like that, or violence. Or maybe it was because I was maturing, seeing the world through a different lens, and shedding the fact that I might well have approved of this kind of behavior when I was younger but was unwilling to do so now. I don’t really know why I was embarrassed at that moment because I can’t go back and enter the mind-set of the 16-year-old I was at that time, though I know for certain I would disapprove of Jimmy—or anyone else—behaving that way now.
From that day on I went the opposite way to school, the long way, which took me two hours instead of 45 minutes. I went this way because I didn’t ever want to run into that kind of scene again, and I didn’t. Like I said, I don’t know if Jimmy went to jail for being out there shooting off a machine gun, but both he and his brother Joe went to Graterford State Prison, outside Philadelphia, a few times for something around this time, though I can’t remember the exact years. I remember going to visit them in the prison a couple of times during the summer when I was in high school, and they were so different when they were in jail. They looked so humble when I saw them there, dressed all in white, and I felt sorry for them. They both would be talking about getting their lives together when they got out. But as soon as they were paroled and came back home they would fall back into being the same people they were before they went in, doing the same old shit, you know what I mean? And I would say to myself, Is this the same person I saw in prison?
They went back and forth over the years, but the last time Joe and Jimmy got out they had both changed for real. But more about that later.
Girls started to become a serious part of my life when I turned 15, and I tried to have one in every part of the city. This lasted until I was 18. But it was a beautiful thing for me, when I started getting into girls. I got into them because I started going to a lot of parties throughout the city and I was a pretty good dancer. Girls liked me because I could dance. I’ve never been one of those people who stayed on the telephone and talked a long time. If I called a girl it was generally to say, “Hi, what’s going on?” I might stay on for four or five minutes, that’s about it.
I would generally talk with them while we both were at home—me at my house and them at theirs—in a relaxed spot. But I found it hard to just talk to anyone for a long time back then because I didn’t have a bunch of stuff in my mind. I wasn’t talking about too much deep stuff with them, though I was developing a nice, smooth kind of conversational voice, which was probably my biggest asset in terms of trying to get girls to like me back then. I was still shy, but they seemed to like me anyway. They also liked me because I was starting to get a reputation—when I was around 17—for being a pretty good basketball player. So that started to attract them, also. I guess when I got them alone they liked me even better. I don’t know. But I never remembered hardly any of their names, because I’m not good at that. I also didn’t get to really know them because at the time I was such a hit-and-run artist when it came to women. I was in and out so quickly I couldn’t keep all the names in my head. But I do recall a girl named Rosa Lee, who was around 15 and short, and Irene and Juanita, who were sisters, and Gloria and a girl named Claudette, who I took to the prom. I dated all of them, though I don’t know why their names stick in my memory; maybe it’s because they were sweet. But after them, all the names of the girls I went out with are a blur.
One night sometime during the spring of 1961, my mother sent me to the laundromat up on Wharton Street and 28th, which was close to Benson Elementary School—I think we had moved from 1120 South 26th Street to 1217 Manton at the corner of 26th Street around this time. So I went in there to wash and dry some clothes. After I had put the clothes in the dryer, I was looking out the window when I noticed the zipper on my pants was halfway down. So I took the zipper in my hand and was trying to zip it back up when it got stuck just at the moment when these white women were walking by.
So I got the zipper fixed and headed back to the dryers to finish up when all of a sudden these two white cops came in, shoved me up against the wall, and put handcuffs on me, talking about how I was exposing myself to these white women. I was shocked! I had hardly noticed the women other than to see that they were older than me, kind of plump, and definitely not fine. The cops put me in the meat wagon and they told me on the way down to the police station that they were going to beat my ass, saying, “Who do you think you are, exposing yourself to white women? We’ll beat your fucking ass!”
That really scared me.
“I wasn’t doing anything to those women,” I said. “I was just trying to get my zipper zipped back up because it got stuck.”
They just looked at me kind of mean. When we arrived at the police station, they started trying to intimidate me.
“We’re going to bust your black ass and send you back to Africa,” one said.
But they didn’t hit me. They just locked me up and I guess they called my mother, who came down to the station with our congressman Bill Barrett and they bailed me out for about 50 dollars. Congressman Barrett told the policeman that I was a star basketball player, a churchgoing guy, whatever, and convinced them to throw out the charges and let me go. That was a shocking incident for me, and I think it got me to really start thinking about what it meant to be a black man in this country. I started to become aware of the dangers of that. I hadn’t done anything and had a spotless record, so if they could treat me like that, they could do it to anyone who was black—especially a black male—and that was really scary. Still, there was nothing I could do about it; it was what it was and I couldn’t change it, at least not back then, in the days before the civil rights movement really took shape.
But it was clear I was growing up, because this wouldn’t have happened to me a couple of years earlier. The fact that I was tall and dark didn’t help my situation, either. Still, getting older brought with it other benefits besides getting better at playing basketball, like really appreciating music more deeply and learning to dance better. The music we used to dance to back in those days was R&B. We had great disc jockeys in Philly, like Georgie Woods, Jimmy Bishop, and Joe “Butterball” Tamburro. Those guys brought a lot of artists to Philadelphia—the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. We used to have a great time dancing to that music. But Philadelphia was—and still is—a really big small town. A lot of the things that happen in big cities also happen in Philly, but not on the same scale. If somebody famous in music came to town, everybody went to see them at the Uptown Theater.
We also had a lot of gang warfare in Philly around this time, with people getting shot with zip guns, knifed, all that kind of stuff. Most of the time, though, it was mano a mano back then. People fought with their hands, and every now and then somebody had a zip gun. Even then there weren’t a whole lot of killings.
The most important thing to keep in mind when you start talking about Philadelphia is that it’s the way it is because it’s comprised of many little ethnic communities—black, Italian, Irish, Jewish—connected together, and some of the times they can’t seem to coexist. But Philly is a house party town, too, and we have more togetherness than a lot of other cities. House parties are a big thing in Philly, and I used to love to go to them. They were something during my generation. Generally what happened was there’d be a house, and you’d go there with two or three guys. Because you weren’t invited to a lot of these parties you more or less crashed them, and in a lot of instances you might not be welcome. So there might be fights.
I remember one time some guys came down to our neighborhood and they had a fella with them named Gangwar Butch. Now, Gangwar was about my size, six three, six four. I remember guys jumping out of a car and going after him, and I’ve never in my
entire life watched a guy that big grow so small. Man, he suddenly got so low to the ground and he was running about a thousand miles a minute. His legs were just going and going, spinning around like bicycle wheels, or the Road Runner in those cartoons. I’ve never seen anyone run in that position before or since. It was funny! So one group of guys in a gang would come down to a neighborhood and make a sweep and then there’d be retaliation. These were the kinds of things that were going on in my neighborhood, and it seemed like they’d been going on forever. People got beat up, but most of us survived.
You came to house parties to party, you know, to dance, eat cake and food, and to hit on girls—not to fight. But that didn’t mean there’d be no fights over something stupid, usually over a girl. Because you might be in another neighborhood and the neighborhood guys might not like you hitting on the girls from their area. So, you might have to fight your way out. A lot of that happened. We fought a lot of the time at house parties, which is why we always traveled to them in groups of three or four—so we could protect each other. But we danced a lot, too, all kinds of dances. It was fun, it was like going to the Palladium Ballroom in New York City, where you had thousands of people. We just had houses full of people at these parties in Philadelphia. It was intimate, but we had just as much fun. See, I wasn’t hanging out with anybody at Bartram except with friends I knew from the neighborhood. I was going to school out there, doing what I needed to do, but my energy was consumed by basketball, girls, dressing up, and parties. I wasn’t thinking about hardly anything else outside of my own compartmentalized worlds.
It was around this time that I started having serious disagreements with my stepfather. See, he always tried to act like my real father, though I was never as close to him as I guess I could have been. He never beat me or anything like that, but it seemed to me he was always using psychology on me as a way to keep me at bay as I grew up. I remember once when I was about 16 or 17 we got into an argument because I set a glass of water down without putting a coaster under it. That error in my judgment left a mark on top of the wooden console that housed our new Muntz TV and stereo system. Anyway, my stepfather got really mad at me for doing this, and he said to me when he ordered me out of the front room, “Get out of here! You’ll never amount to anything!”
