Harvey Clay Is Still Fighting

“Here was a man who was the epitome of gentleness, who taught non-violence, and they killed him. So, I figured they were gonna find some reason to kill me, too.”

-Harvey “Papa” Clay

Madison, 1968

It was the fall of 1968. Harvey Clay, a six-foot-eight-inch, 255-pound incoming freshman from Midland, Texas, stooped to peer out the window of his dormitory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Outside of that window shimmered Lake Monona.

“It was just beautiful,” Clay said. “I had never seen a lake before.”

He was 18 years old.

The journey from Midland to Madison was nearly 1,300 miles, and each of those miles ached like a tiny cut as he looked out at the lake.

There were 40,000 students enrolled at UW-Madison that fall, and fewer than 500 of those students were Black. The cafeteria served bratwurst for breakfast. Chili, one of his favorite meals back in Texas, was unseasoned and filled with noodles. Having grown up in a community with close-knit Black neighborhoods, Black barbershops, and Black night clubs, he felt “isolated and immersed in a white America” that he “had never been exposed to at all.”

Clay had been awarded a football scholarship and had enrolled as a pre-med student. He’d been surprised, when his coach made out his schedule, to find himself in “all of these Mickey Mouse classes, ‘Introduction to Agriculture’ and things like that.

“I said: ‘I don’t want to do that, I want to be a doctor.’”

With adjustments to his schedule came new challenges.

“I went to my first zoology class and there were 625 people in one class. I couldn’t even see the board from where I was sitting. I didn’t know how to take notes,” Clay said, sadness creeping into his mellow baritone. “I was lost in academia. So, I was pretty dejected there.”

His role on the football team, where he’d been drafted to play the position of center, had also become contentious. Some members of the coaching staff resented Clay’s presence at center, which is regarded as “a ‘thinking position,’ like quarterback, where you have to assess what’s going on and communicate.”

He was too large for the position of center, and his knees began to give out. The team doctor gave him steroids to play through the pain, followed by amphetamines to lose weight gained due to the steroids.

“So, I was off-balance, chemically, as well,” Clay said.

Outside of his dormitory window, beyond Lake Monona, America churned and fomented.

“I wasn’t so bent out of shape until Dr. King got killed,” he said. “Here was a man who was the epitome of gentleness, who taught non-violence, and they killed him. So, I figured they were gonna find some reason to kill me, too.”

Midland, 1961

The walk to and from the practice field where 11-year-old Harvey Clay played baseball was five-and-a-half miles in each direction. With his Harmon Killebrew-edition mitt tucked beneath his arm, he would collect his friends en route to the diamond, slipping gingerly through all-white neighborhoods. His father had paid $41 for the glove, an unimaginable sum at the time. Harvey was much larger than other children his age, and he’d had to purchase an adult-sized glove to fit his hand. He stood at the stove and branded “H. Clay” into the treated leather with a hot icepick.

During his walks to baseball practice, white children would sometimes throw rocks or shout racial slurs at him. He’d pretend not to notice, stuffing his balled fists deeper into his pockets.

But someone must have caught a glimpse of the glove.

One day, as he passed through a white neighborhood on his way to the practice field, three older white teens and their father blocked his path. The boys set in on him all at once as their father watched. As two of the boys beat him, one stripped away the glove.

Standing over Clay on the sidewalk, the father sneered: “If you want it back, you’re gonna have to whip all three of my boys.”

Clay ran to a payphone outside of a nearby grocery store and phoned his father, who’d just gotten off of back-to-back shifts at the Scharbauer Hotel downtown, where he worked as a bellman. “Stay put,” his father said.

An hour later, LC Clay’s sedan roared into the parking lot. Inside, his father sat dressed in his Sunday best: a brown pinstripe suit and tie. A .38 revolver perched on the dash.

Years earlier, one of LC’s eyes had been gouged out by a white mob as punishment for looking a white woman directly in the eyes. He cursed aloud as he sped through the neighborhood, jumped the curve like a madman, and skidded to a stop in the white man’s yard.

“I had never even heard my father curse before that day,” Clay said. “My daddy drove up into a white man’s yard with a gun in his hand. And, when he came back out, he had my glove.”

Chicago, 1969

Harvey’s older brother, Don, was so proud of his sibling’s achievements that he gave Harvey a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T with a 440-cubic-inch engine known as a “Magnum.” For folks who aren’t car people: The 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 is widely regarded as the most muscular and high-powered American car ever made. The car is featured in the 1968 crime drama Bullitt starring Steve McQueen and its legendary, 11-minute car chase.

Chicago was only a couple of hours’ drive from Madison—maybe even shorter if you’re driving the Bullitt car—and Clay would often commute into the bustling city to take girls on dates or hear live music. Midway through his freshman year, he began dating a classmate whose family lived in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes housing project.

What he saw there changed the way that he saw the world.

His girlfriend’s single mother, who had been paralyzed by gun violence, kept a chain locked around the refrigerator in order to prevent the food inside from being eaten too quickly by the family. The telephone was also kept under lock and key. Multiple people slept in each room, including the living room, where the mother lay.

He recalled the poverty that he’d seen in Midland. There, when a family struggled, neighboring families or a church community would step in to provide assistance. 

“Even the poorest people in Midland always had something to eat,” Clay said. “I didn’t know that there were people who didn’t eat. Learning that hurt my spirit.”

Madison, 1969

Tensions were rising on campus, and Harvey Clay grew angrier with every passing day. He read Malcolm X Speaks and The Spook Who Sat by the Door. He became a leader in the Black student groups that frequently hosted speakers on campus. Once, he drove to the airport in his Charger to pick up Jesse Jackson, a brand new shotgun draped across the passenger seat.

On Feb. 10, 1969, a massive student demonstration erupted on campus. Three days earlier, Clay and nine other Black students had written and presented a list of 13 demands to the University. These demands included the introduction of a Black Studies department led by Black faculty, amnesty for student activists, and a greater commitment to positive educational outcomes for Black student athletes. Anyone interested can view a detailed timeline of the 1969 Black Student Strike at UW-Madison here.

On Feb. 11, a protest outside of the liberal arts building turned violent. He positioned himself in front of a group of female protestors in hopes of shielding them. As the protest line surged forward, it was bisected by a group of white football players—Clay’s teammates—who rushed forward in an attempt to trample Clay and the young women behind him. They crashed headlong into Clay’s body, and he was immediately swarmed by police.

“They beat the stew out of me, and then they arrested me,” Clay said.

Later that semester, he and a girlfriend went out for pizza in downtown Madison on a Sunday night. As they attempted to leave the pizza parlor, Clay realized that they’d been trapped on the block by an anti-war demonstration led by Students for a Democratic Society. Clay led his girlfriend back into the restaurant, knowing that he had to work his way through the crowd to the Charger. Tear gas began to fill the street. 

“I was trying to get back to the car and pick her up, so she didn’t have to run with me through that mess,” Clay said. “But that was a bad decision.”

As he waded through the crowd, Clay emerged from a group of protestors and came face-to-face with a line of cops. Someone shoved him, then the cops immediately fell upon him and handcuffed him.

He was charged with throwing a rock.

“At this point, I’m ready to kill,” Clay said. “They wanted me to fight and kill in Vietnam, but I thought ‘If I’m gonna fight and kill, I may as well do it here.’”

Labeled a troublemaker, he was stripped of his athletics scholarship and informed that he’d need to pay the school $1,800 by the following Monday in order to remain enrolled. He left town that night. 

The following year, UW-Madison established its Department of Afro-American Studies, which recently celebrated its 50th Anniversary. The university plans to honor the students who organized the Black Student Strike of 1969, including Clay, at an upcoming commencement ceremony. There are rumblings that the school may confer honorary degrees.

Hartford, 1973

Harvey’s younger brother Carl, a touring cast member of the musical theater group Up With People, helped him get into the University of Hartford to complete his education. But things had gone badly off-course by 1971. Clay says that he was “damaged goods” at the time and that he found himself attracted to others who were also damaged. He was getting high, committing small-time robberies. His first marriage unraveled.

He struggled to turn things around. In 1973, he found himself employed as the assistant director of a group home for delinquent children. He shared a desk with a beautiful young woman named Shirley, an ambitious and hard-working professional with two full-time jobs as well as a part-time job on Saturdays.

“I saw her all day, and she was my comrade,” Clay said. “I fell in love with her before I’d ever even touched her skin.”

By the time Clay worked up the courage to ask Shirley out on a date, she’d become engaged to another man. She said “yes” to the date anyway. Today, Harvey and Shirley Clay have been married for 41 years. 

Shreveport, 2020

As our telephone interview drew to a close, Papa shared an incident that occurred shortly after the restaurant relocated to Fairfield Avenue.

Ninety minutes after closing time, Papa heard a knock at the door. He opened it to find a well-dressed white woman in her 70s.

“I want some ribs,” she said.

Papa told her that the food would have been put away, since the restaurant had closed nearly two hours ago, but he’d be happy to see if he could put together a good plate for her.

“Don’t just stand there talking,” the woman squawked. “Go get my food.”

Papa thought for a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen and put together a plate. When he handed it to her, she attempted to pay, but he waved off her money.

“Ma’am, your money’s no good here,” he said. “And you are not welcome back here. I’m not your rug, and I’m not your doormat. I am a man, and you’re not allowed to speak to me in that way.”

The woman turned and doddered out into the sunshine, and Papa locked the door behind her.

All that she had seen of Papa was his body, which she perceived to be less valuable than her own. I thought about the many others in Papa’s life who had only seen his body: the white boys throwing rocks, the football coach, his own teammates, the cops.

Papa is in need of a kidney transplant, so the threat of COVID-19 has kept him at home and away from his restaurant for months.

“Some of my customers, I know, have probably never had a real relationship with a Black person,” he said. “I embrace them, and I love them, but I am not subservient to them. They must respect me.”

When he talks to customers—about his life, about their children, about the neighborhood, about barbecue, about his grandkids—that’s how he fights, now. He wants his patrons to know and love his grandchildren, to witness his unfading love for Shirley, to eat a great meal and get a hug on their way out.

“My daddy taught me to fight, and I have fought—I’d fight 10 men at a time, you understand? I’ve got a hot streak bad,” he told me.

In the background, I could hear his grandchildren playing.

“But that’s not how I want to live anymore.”

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