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Robert Gray, 56, worked against racism in school as a youth at Long Beach High School. He also helped to create a youth center named after Martin Luther King Jr.

"Nineteen sixty-nine, in front of Long Beach High School, after a year of strife and turmoil and racism back and forth, we decided as black students, as African-American students, that we didn't feel like going to school anymore under these conditions. So we rallied at the flagpole and somehow the flag came down.

"Nobody got charged but me. That was a fight my parents and I had to fight alone. We were going before a judge and jury and the whole nine yards, and my Lord Jesus Christ saved my butt there, because the judge had made it very clear that he was going to send me to jail for the whole 7 years. So that was what I call Nasty County in those days.

"Was there any fear about getting involved? No fear. Was there any doubt? Yeah, there was doubt. There were doubts when I used to get calls every night ... ‘you're gonna die.' There was doubt. Because I believed it, and so did my parents. And we were in a time and an age when it was believable.

"My proudest moment was 1969. After all was said and done in the city of Long Beach as to the turmoil that we went through, some people asked me to speak on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"I remember how my father and my uncle had to sit up all night and worry about whether or not they were going to kill me. So when the town came together and realized we had other things that we could be about, I felt that to be one of the proudest moments of my life -- when I looked and saw my mother and father, who gave me hell for some of my activities, doing what I'm doing now, tears of joy.”

-- Jennifer Barrios

Click here to return to main page. (Newsday Photo / Ken Spencer / February 8, 2008)