He lived in a small cabin with Momma, Grandma, aunts, uncles, and his two sisters. AC’s family struggled to exist in the sharecropping system of “slavery” constructed to keep workers always in debt.

Photo is a simulation of sharecropper’s cabin, taken at Southern Tenant Farmers’ Museum, Dyess, AR.

It was a long walk down a gravel road, past two white schools, to get to school. “We had to walk, even in the hard of winter.”

“The classroom were noisy and we only had the books the white school had throwed out. Sometimes they had words and pictures drawn in them, pages torn out or scribbling inside, but that were all we had,” says AC.

“Just about everybody, if they was Black, was working cotton, including the chil’rens. We was all in the field . . .

Photo of cotton wagon and sack from Southern Tenant Farmers’ Museum, Dress, AR.

In 1955 AC and his family moved to Memphis, to escape the slavery of sharecropping.

“They was railroad tracks we had to cross to get to school. We had to be careful cause sometimes one of the cars would come down the track by itself.

Photo: Present-day photo of the tracks AC had to cross to go to school. Now, a foot-bridge goes over the tracks, so there is less danger to pedestrians.

AC found a friend in a boy he called “Junior.” They were classmates and best friends.

Junior was there through the good and the bad, though one difficult run-in with the police, threatened to break their bond.

Note: No photos of the boys have been located, to date.

How did a pair of shoes and a trashcan, change AC’s life? From the cotton fields to the streets of Memphis with the famed Martin Luther King, Jr., AC finds new purpose as a young man during the Civil Rights era. How does he get there and what part does he play in the unfolding drama? Where was he the day King was killed?

Don’t Call Me Boy; a Black Man’s Quest for Equality - Coming in 2023