In the Name of the Father - Page 4

It was a reality Ajabu’s father knew all too well. While within West Parkview he was seen as a leader, an educated man, and a man of God, outside that world the elder West worked as a janitor, a bottom-rung occupation that kept his family in poverty. And it was while laboring at this job that Paul West Sr. died suddenly in 1964, leaving 15-year-old Ajabu to take care of his mother and siblings. “The weight fell on (Ajabu) to support the family,” Mumina says. “And he struggled with that. He could no longer be a kid, and I think that led to further resentment of his father for leaving him.”

Ajabu went wild. By day, he went to school and worked flipping burgers or whatever other odd jobs he could get. But at night he would hit the streets to shoot dice, play poker, smoke cigarettes, down bottles of whiskey, and carouse with women. When he was 19, he got a girl pregnant, becoming a father himself—a job he was nowhere near ready to take on.

In 1968, one year after graduating high school, Ajabu joined the U.S. Army, serving a brief stint in Germany before being shipped to Vietnam. There, his nascent frustration with white hegemony was baptized in blood. He was one of a disproportionate number of young black men fighting and dying for a freedom they didn’t get to share in back home. The Viet Cong set up speakers around the camp, Ajabu says. “And every so often a man would come on and repeat, ‘Black man, this is not your war. Go home.’”

Upon his return in 1970, Ajabu walked into an Indianapolis restaurant in his uniform and ordered a steak. The waiter refused to serve him. “He came back from the war a changed man,” Mumina remembers. “He was hard and cold. His thought processes were more measured, skeptical, and questioning. It was like the emotion had been squeezed out of him.”

He felt his identity, too, was false, and he abandoned his Christian name. Mmoja Ajabu was derived from dialects of Western Africa (mmoja meaning “one who is unique,” and ajabu meaning “one who brings and invites suprise”). Paul West was a white man’s moniker, his father’s name, a name that, to this day, he will not answer to.

They bang on plastic buckets with sticks and rattle beans in empty soda cans. Marching downtown, north on Illinois, the group of 35 or so whites, blacks, and Latinos are chanting in a singular voice: No Justice/No Peace. Some wear purple T-shirts with yellow lettering that reads “Justice For Janitors.” Dressed in a brown suit, Reverend Ajabu, son of a janitor, marches alongside them.

The group reaches its destination, a building that the Service Employees International Union says is owned by a company that canceled a contract with a union company and hired one that is not union-friendly. Seventeen people lost their jobs. Many of them are among the purple-clad protestors, who now line up and face the building. A man on a bullhorn calls, and the group responds.

“What do we want?” Justice.

“When do we want it?” Now.