The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, Baltimore was ablaze and four teens at Loyola Blakefield High School responded with their version of rebellion. They began asserting their racial identity, challenging authority and reading militant authors. They grew Afros.
In the days and months after King's murder 40 years ago today, consciousness spread nationwide as the word black replaced Negro and clenched fists were raised with pride. But the elite Jesuit school in Towson was caught off guard by the assault on its dress code. The Afros nearly got them expelled.
Christopher H. Foreman Jr., Ralph E. Moore Jr., Erich W. March and Victor Thomas - sophomores in high school when King was killed - were undergoing a rapid transformation. They were approaching manhood, grappling with what it meant to be black while straddling two vastly different worlds.
A year earlier they had left working- and middle-class city neighborhoods for Loyola's country-club campus, a complex of stately stone buildings, tennis courts and lush grounds. As members of the Loyola class with the largest number of black students - the four of them, out of 140 - their admission was a symbol of racial progress.
For the boys themselves, however, the transition between worlds was intimidating.
Would they be accepted at Loyola? How would their old friends view their new private school status? And what if they didn't belong in either world?
On April 4, 1968, they stopped asking such questions.
"After King, a light bulb went off," said Moore, 55, now the director of the St. Frances Academy Community Center, which links low-income people to jobs and training. "The transformation was pretty radical in us. We went from apologizing for our blackness to being more confident and assertive."
`Strong psyches'
Upon arriving at Loyola, Moore was the comedian, using a self-deprecating sense of humor as a shield from the unknown. In West Baltimore, he had attended a school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a black order of nuns who instilled the need to work twice as hard as whites to be considered equal. The consciousness awakened by King's death would shape a lifelong dedication to fighting poverty.
Foreman was the pragmatist, the eldest of four reared by a single mother in a dilapidated Walbrook apartment. The confidence he gained in 1968 helped earn him the distinction of becoming Loyola's first black student body president. He would go on to pursue an academic life, earning a bachelor's degree, master's and doctorate from Harvard University.
