“On March 2, 1954, Eisenhower’s special committee on Indochina recognized for the first time that in spite of O’Daniel’s optimism, direct U.S. action might be needed if the situation deteriorated drastically. At the time, the committee felt that the United States had done all it could to help the French win at Dien Bien Phu. By March, the Defense Department had spent more than $123 million beyond the funds allocated for 1953-54, and now the French were asking for $100 million more.”
– pg. 264, VALLEY OF DEATH: The tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that led America into the Vietnam War, by Ted Morgan, Random House, New York, 2010
As the school year of 1965 began in British Honduras, here I am in St. John’s College Sixth Form with a U.S. State Department scholarship to Dartmouth College in my pocket, and a Jesuit dean to watch every day who has tried to stab me in my academic back. He doesn’t know that I know that he’s a bushwhacker. In fact, the afternoon when he called me out of class to tell me about the scholarship, he put on a big performance as if he were congratulating me and as if he were so glad about my good fortune. He wasn’t giving me any news. I knew about the scholarship two days before. I put on a real Uncle Tom, humble act in front of him. But as the days began to go by, I didn’t want to be on the same scene. I didn’t want to be around this enemy of mine.
I started missing classes. He called my father and threatened him that if I didn’t go back to school, he would have the U.S. Consulate take away my scholarship. I’m not sure he could have done that, but this is British Honduras, this is 1965, and this is the Jesuits. The threat seemed real enough. I had to go back to school.
Then, the application forms for the British Honduras Open Scholarship arrived. I didn’t fill out any. The Jesuit came to my desk. He insisted that I apply for the Open Scholarship. I said to him, listen, if I were one of the other students, how would I feel to see someone who already has a scholarship applying for the scholarship I’m fighting desperately to win? I took the “A” Level exams in Latin, History, and Spanish, but I didn’t apply for the Open.
The Open Scholarship that year was won by Geoffrey Frankson, who went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and a physician. Frankson was the son of a Jamaican public officer who died recently, A. S. Frankson, and his Belizean wife, Joyce Rogers Frankson.
When our class began our final year of “A” Level studies in September of 1964 at S.J.C. Sixth Form, Geoffrey Frankson appeared in our class. We had never seen him before. Apparently, he had been schooled in Jamaica, and then his parents felt he had a better chance to win a scholarship in Belize. One assumes the competition is stiffer on the island.
You can understand that when I went to the States in August of 1965 to start school, there was a little controversy around me in Belize, and I felt some pressure. I felt I absolutely had to succeed at Dartmouth, for several reasons, and I was focused. But there were two wars going on around me in America. One was the civil rights struggle, which had reached a new and militant level in the spring of 1966 when Stokely Carmichael declared “black power” in Mississippi. The other war, a real shooting one, was Vietnam, where young men my age were facing dismemberment and death every day in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. To make the situation amongst young Americans more tense and filled with angst, those years of my time in America, 1965-1968, were years when global nuclear catastrophe seemed a substantially greater possibility than today. Vietnam and the threat of nuclear Armageddon sparked a counter-culture in young, white America which featured psychedelic drugs and hippie communes. For their part, young American blacks were becoming more confrontational and violent because of Vietnam and the black power era.
So then, the common denominator for young whites and young blacks was Vietnam. The war in Vietnam would have a greater, more lasting impact on my life than I would understand or foresee at the time. Young Belizeans of my age, fighting to stay in the United States and to achieve the “American Dream,” were drafted into the American military and sent to fight in Vietnam. I thought they were foolish not to return to Belize instead, but this was how they were seeing their reality: they preferred the risk of death and dismemberment in Vietnam to what they knew of life in British Honduras. I respect them today, and I salute their bravery. At the time, I was just angry at them. Almost all the students at Dartmouth were trying to avoid the draft (and Vietnam) any way they could, whilst my Belizean youth were going willingly to ‘Nam.
Surely, I was blessed to be in America on a student visa/scholarship. Yes, I was broke and homesick most of the time, and, to repeat, I felt I was under a lot of pressure to succeed, but Dartmouth was much, much better than Vietnam. Trust me.
I think I personally began to become really radicalized in the winter of 1967. This was after a George Wallace visit provoked a black student rebellion at Dartmouth. I spent the summer holidays of 1967 in Belize with a right tibia broken while playing football, then returned to Dartmouth for my final year in September of 1967.
January to June of 1968 was crazy. It was so crazy that I began to realize I was wasting time at Dartmouth, that I had to get home. The thing is that because of the Jesuit pressure, I felt that if I didn’t complete my studies and receive a degree, then I would be in big trouble in British Honduras. They might decide to put me in the “crazy house.” So, I stuck it out until graduation.
January to June 1968 was like this. First, the New Year opened with the bloody Tet offensive in South Vietnam. The communists overran the United States Consulate in Saigon. Tet essentially established, once and for all, that Americans were dying in vain over there: this was a lost war. In March, Bethuel Webster’s Seventeen Proposals were published, proving that Belize was in danger of being swallowed up by Guatemala. In April, they shot down Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In June, they shot down Bobby Kennedy, whose older brother, JFK, had been shot down in 1963 while he was United States President. America sometimes appeared to be heading towards civil war. You can “Google” Kent State, May 1970, for some of the sense of it.
I returned to Belize in June of 1968, and within a year I was in the streets full time. I think I am the only Belizean university graduate ever who went to the streets like that. The reason people go to university is precisely so that they can escape the streets. But there was a life process which had begun for me back in 1963 which, in retrospect, forced me to where I went in 1969. Bigger men than I, men of God, had decided certain things, and I rebelled, instinctively. At first I was afraid, but after a while it was not as if I had any choice. Things were just the way they had to be. In 1969, I reached the embrace of the people, and I’ve tried to stay locked in that embrace ever since.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.