Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
There would be no stops for food or bathroom breaks until they drove through Mississippi and Alabama.
Jaylon Hall remembers that directive he and his teammates — most of them fifth and sixth graders — got from their AAU coach and the chaperoning parents as they made their way from Houston to a basketball tournament in Florida.
“Those are two states in the South where you could run into a problem with 12 young African American boys running around just being kids,” Hall said. “It was the same once we got to the hotel. Now I understand why the parents kept an eye on us. They knew what could happen.”
Hall said he has several stories from childhood that he knows few, if any, of his Wright State teammates have.
He shared another tale — one he doesn’t want to go into detail here — about a time he and his brother, both of them 10 or 11, were walking through a neighborhood and were confronted in an Ahmaud Arbery situation by an adult, though harsh words, not a gun, were the weapon then.
In these times of nationwide social unrest, many people — black and white — are demanding that “Black Lives Matter” isn’t treated as just a slogan, but as a way of life and a human decency matter for everyone.
Hall’s stories have a special resonance now.
