Gilroy—As commemorations unfold and stories are told for February’s Black History Month, Gilroy’s K.C. Adams wonders aloud if he could have done it.
If he could have taken the beatings. The dogs. Being spit on. Called Nigger. Dying for equality.
“I’m tough,” said the football coach, barber and hair stylist, “but I don’t know if I’m that tough.”
For Adams, 54 and just a kid when the civil rights movement roiled the 1960s, the month set aside to honor the contributions of Americans born of slavery and shackled afterwards by bigotry and hatred has profoundly special meaning.
“It’s carrying on a tradition that somebody paved the way for, spent lifetimes of hell so I could be a black man owning a business.”
At his shop on Martin Street in the heart of the downtown—Kutz and Colors Hair Salon—he likes to tell women clients they are gorgeous and call his male customers dog or dude as he slithers hot lather around the neck and ears and flicks open the barber’s razor.
When not cutting and styling hair, he coaches football at Gavilan Community College and he has spent years working with youth of all backgrounds and colors.
His own youth began as a nightmare.
Born addicted to heroin to an addict mother, he has been told he was weaned off the narcotic with another, morphine. He then spent his early years as a prisoner of a drug subculture filled with “beating and molestations; that’s what happens when you are left in rooms full of addicts,” he said.
It’s the kind of story that to Adams is part of the stereotype of blacks and black communities in the United States and the “crazy” notions non-blacks have about the lives of African-Americans.
Still, it’s his story.
At 7, Adams was taken from his mother and placed in a former Gilroy orphanage turned residential care facility for abused kids, Rebekah Children’s Home. He had a good counselor, a white woman named Etta whom he still recalls fondly, went to Gilroy schools where he became a star athlete, was graduated from Gilroy High School in 1979 and to this day is considered one of the best running backs ever to play football for Boise State University in Idaho.
In and out of trouble as a youth, he finally settled down, married and became the father of two sons and two daughters, all half-white and half-black.
A son who followed in his steps athletically and was such a good student he won a four-year college scholarship, died at 18, right before his freshman year, right in front of his father. A drunk driver hit him as he stood on a sidewalk in Mexico during a family vacation.
“He died in my arms,” said the big man whose smile comes easily even when talk turns serious.
Adams thinks a lot about kids when he considers what it means to be African American, those who came before and the importance of honoring past achievements by blacks.
He doesn’t think kids are taught enough about what others endured during the nation-changing civil rights movement, and so they do not yet share a sense of what has been passed on to them to protect and preserve and honor.
“It matters that young black kids do not learn in school about the struggle and why words like (nigger) are so hurtful to some black people,” he said, referring to the frequent use of the word in rap music.
The underlying message of Black History Month, to Adams, is that “I have a responsibility to the people who came before me to do the right thing as much as I can.”
And for Adams that means treating each person with respect.
It has not always easy for Adams. Growing up in Gilroy, his closest friends were white and Hispanic; those boyhood pals remain his best friends and confidants to this day.
He has for years endured being put in situations where he had to make what he calls the “nasty choice” between his race and his friends, snubbing the latter or risk being called an “Uncle Tom” by the former.
Blacks would taunt him, saying “the white boy will screw you over, stab you in the back…I got it bad from both sides,” he recalled, and that made it difficult to figure out who he was and who he would be.
In the end, he settled on his philosophy, which he explained in a large room whose walls are filled with photos of his kids and others he has coached:
“Don’t look at me as if I am any different than you. I am totally convinced that there is good and bad in every race and that I am the one who has to make the world a better place.”
Yet years after the civil rights movement and the progress made, work remains to be done by everyone, he believes.
Pointing to a 40-something black man in his shop, he said, “That man is from Texas, he can tell you just horrible stories; Texas is not California, but the struggle is still going on…we still have a ways to go in respecting our fellow human beings.”
