"You got a sense ... that there was anger in their white households over the rioting," he said. "I had a certain amount of anxiety after the riots broke out. You wondered how you would be treated by your fellow students at Loyola."
Foreman, always inquisitive, approached King's death as a budding scholar.
"I just tried to process it as best I could; I just needed to read as much as possible," said Foreman, 56, a program director at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. "I needed the larger context. I wanted to understand why this had happened."
Foreman was well schooled in civil rights, but yearned to learn more. Spending afternoons in Baltimore's Ashburton neighborhood, where a caretaker watched him and his siblings in the afternoons while his mother worked, he met the Rev. Vernon Dobson, a civil rights leader who lived nearby. The efforts of Dobson and others to integrate the Gwynn Oak amusement park were seared in Foreman's memory.
His need for answers led him to the "holy trinity" of books on black consciousness: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Black Rage by psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Where some folks simply carried them around in an effort to look cool, Foreman devoured them.
"I remember trying to come to terms with it all; it really was a struggle for identity," Foreman said.
By the fall of junior year, the teens came back to school with a new insight, style and swagger. Not only had they grown Afros, they stopped shaving their upper lips - both direct violations of the school dress code.
Afros were also strictly forbidden in the March household. "My father said, `Either cut it, or get out of my house,'" March said.
He spent a few nights at Thomas' house. In the meantime, his father called the parish priest to mediate. March stated his case: It was not wrong to be black. This was not a fad, but a true expression of the man he was becoming.
"They realized it was no good trying to stop me," he said. "I think the whole black community eventually came to the realization that there was nothing wrong with being who you are."
Hair vs. Jesuits
Next, the politics of hair came face to face with strict Jesuit discipline. When Loyola threatened to expel the students if they did not shave and cut their hair, March called in reinforcements - family friends and civil rights activists Parren J. Mitchell, Walter P. Carter and March's uncle, Judge John R. Hargrove Sr.
