Clarence My Man!

In the late 1960s the militancy of Eldridge Cleaver replaced the non-violent activism of Martin Luther King.   At Holy Cross you needed to be very careful with what you said and how you said it to avoid a sharp rebuke from some of our black schoolmates.   Enter my roommate Lou Massery.   Sunny disposition would be an understatement.   He allegedly had a perfect score on the Math SAT, but at Holy Cross instead of being a grind -- monkish students who did nothing but study -- Lou launched a four year campaign to make everyone his friend.   You'd think this might be a challenge at a school filled with the children of tribal New England since Lou was an Arab American, but that didn't him slow down one bit.   Lou's passion was Palestinian rights.   He was the first person to tell me "don't believe everything you read in the New York Times."  The black students didn't have a clue on how to pigeonhole Lou.  Is he one of us?  Or one of them?   To a black from rural Georgia a bushy haired dark skinned person talking Palestinian rights must have seemed like a space alien.   I remember Lou, ever the great smile, greeting Clarence Thomas one day.   "Clarence, my man!"   I cringed waiting for the inevitable:  "don't call me that [white boy]."   The then wiry Thomas eyed Lou suspiciously and said nothing.   Lou didn't miss beat.  He just smiled, shook Thomas's hand, and kept on talking nonstop.