SHAUN KING HAS SHARED PAINFUL MEMORIES THAT DEFINE HIS DEDICATION TO WORKING FOR THE BEST IN THE NATION FOR THE US ALL TO CREATE A JUST SOCIETY.
I want to talk to you about the kid you see here.
That’s me. 1999.
Student Government President at Morehouse College.
I was 19. The first youngest student body President in over 50 years.
After so much therapy over this past year, it actually hurts me a little bit to see myself in this image.
4 years earlier in Versailles, Kentucky I was beaten to a pulp by a mob of racist white students at my high school. I ended up missing most of high school in 1995-1996 after 3 spinal surgeries and fractures to my face and ribs.
My childhood, as you can imagine, ended very abruptly.
As did most of my joy.
The surgeries and recovery were brutal.
I was diagnosed with PTSD.
And had to scratch and claw my way out of high school and into Morehouse, which became a refuge for me. A hospital for my heart and soul. An incubator.
But when I arrived at Morehouse in August of 1997, still just 17, I realize now that what I wore as seriousness and strength, in so many ways, was really just trauma.
I rarely smiled.
Rarely laughed.
I knew other brothers just like this at Morehouse. And what I’ve come to understand now, nearly 25 years later, is that many of them, like my dear brother @LeeMerrittESQ, who matched me pound for pound with seriousness, had just escaped his own trauma growing up in South Central Los Angeles with a family immersed deep into the Rollin’ 60s Crips. He barely escaped it. It’s a miracle really.
So when we got to Morehouse, we had our guard up, and as a way even showing our toughness or resolve, we translated that to a steely seriousness.
I was already dating @MrsRaiKing from high school, but she was 2 years behind me, so for 2 years, in the land of beautiful Black women from Spelman, CAU, and Morris Brown, I wore this face and glare, to keep anybody that even thought of getting close to me at bay.
And then basically threw my entire life into fighting against injustice - locally in Atlanta, even on campus, and nationally with the brutal lynching of James Byrd in Texas and the murder of Amazon Diallo by the NYPD.
I don’t regret being so serious so young, but now I understand that it was a survival strategy for me.
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