Cornel West could have easily wound up in jail, says Jeff Sharlet in Rolling Stone. The 55-year-old Princeton University professor of African-American studies is today a best-selling author and intellectual provocateur. But he nearly came to a bad end in Glen Elder, the black Sacramento neighborhood in which he grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Glen Elder had no streetlights, public transportation, or other basic services; West had to cross a rickety footbridge over a creek to get to school. “You could just see the racial politics,” he says. “You could see Jim Crow.” Filled with resentment, West beat up and robbed his schoolmates, and at the age of 8, once nearly killed a boy. The turning point came one day when he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. “Why are we saluting this thing that don’t love us?” he asked. “I’m not gonna do it.” His teacher responded by striking him. “She hit a little black kid. She got a prize, man. Gotta keep us in order.” West was expelled, but he was saved by what he calls “an act of grace”: A test revealed he had an IQ of more than 160, and got him a spot in an “enrichment” school with other child geniuses. Soon, he was on the road to Harvard and Princeton. West knows he was lucky. “I had a rage, man. I was a gangster. Everyone in the neighborhood knew I’d be going to jail.”
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