I had always been somewhat aware of the rural Black community in the Brunswick area, as the young people from that community, through an odd decision in the school desegregation cases of the early 1970's, were assigned to Bartlett Elementary School. So I had gone to elementary school with Herbert Jones and others who lived along Independent and Society Roads, although it would be many years before I learned about the Independent Pole Bearers Society that built the subdivision and named those roads. But at some point, the Shelby County government had built a park across Brunswick Road from the Head Start center and the Bush Grove Missionary Baptist Church, and had named it for Freeman Smith, who had been a community leader in the Black communities north of Bartlett. During the summer of 1984, the new park with its basketball courts became a popular hangout for a lot of my friends who lived in the area. On one July Saturday, a huge crowd had gathered at the park including friends of mine like Herbert Jones, Jessie Yancey, Antonio Chaffin and Bobby Moss. What had drawn the crowd was that the pick-up game included Sylvester Gray, who was widely considered to be the best basketball player in our part of the county. He had been a part of the 1983-1984 Bolton High School team which lost in the state championship game for Division A. (Gray went on to a successful career at Memphis State University and had a brief NBA career as well).
Also that month was a huge Christian conference downtown at the Cook Convention Center called the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts. My mother was at the time a big fan of Bill Gotherd, and she registered herself and me as well for the event downtown. Although I was (and remain) a committed Christian, I had some reservations about Gotherd because of his views on popular music. Still I attended most of the sessions, and on one occasion, some friends of mine that I knew from the main library on Peabody, Steven and Kevin Young were there. They were African-American musicians, about my age, whose dad, if I recall correctly, was a preacher, and they were also attending the conference. We entered the session where Gotherd was talking about the "problem" of rock music, which, in his mind, did not merely stem from the lyrics, as one might expect. Rather, he suggested that the "beat" of rock music came from "the heathen jungles of Africa" and was related to the drumbeats used in pagan worship. At that point, Kevin, Steven and I all walked out of the room in disgust. We ended up walking down the Mid-American Mall (today's Main Street) talking about the subtle racism in Gotherd's pitch, before noticing a poster in a window that was announcing a new album from Morris Day and the Time to be called Ice Cream Castles. That information was very interesting to all of us, and we walked back up to the convention center in a much more enthusiastic mood.
