9781422283240

ment of his teachers. To earn money as a boy, he frequently walked to the nearby town of Ferguson, knocking on doors there to ask for jobs pulling weeds or mowing lawns. He could sometimes earn as much as three dollars a day if he labored hard enough. One particularly hot day, after com- pleting several jobs, he purchased a soda from a local store and sat outside on the curb to drink it. Suddenly, a Ferguson police car pulled up, and although the frightened teen explained that he was merely taking a break before walking home to Kinloch, he was roughly handcuffed and thrown in the back of the car. When the officers stopped near a local pond, he assumed that they

intended to drown him. Instead, they ordered him from the car and warned him (usingmalignant racial slurs) never to set foot in Ferguson again. Relieved, he raced away. “I was safe but without a source of [gardening] income,” he wrote in his op-ed. “When I reached home, I told my mother what I had experi- enced. Her response was, “You will experience rac- ism for the rest of your life, but don’t ever let that be a

A scholarship to St. Louis University opened doors for Clay.

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Black Achievement in Science: Computer Science