The Orleans Parish School Board and the police department decided to launch a campaign that would enhance the image of the police.

Everything I saw on television, or in our Dick and Jane schoolbooks, showed the cops as allies of truth and justice—but this was contrary to the whispers I heard from older relatives and friends. Some of them seemed suspicious of anything the police said or did. I often wondered why, but I had no way of understanding a history of police brutality dating back to the end of slavery.

One day, when I was in the first grade, two good-looking, athletic officers came to our class to talk to us. They had gentle eyes and pleasant smiles. Their police uniforms were perfectly starched and creased. One of the officers was Black and the other was White. They were a part of a program called Officer Friendly, and they were exceedingly kind. They made it clear the only reason they became cops was to serve the community and help people like us. If a bad guy found his way to our school or neighborhood, they would come to the rescue.

I remember listening to them and feeling safe. This was confirmation. These men were exactly how I always imagined the police. I knew that the negative noise I heard was sour grapes or a misunderstanding.

I decided then that I would grow up and be a policeman.

About a year after meeting the Officers Friendly, my father drove my great-grandmother, Big Momma, back to her home in Monroe, Louisiana. She had come to New Orleans to celebrate New Year’s with the family. James, Charles, and I were thrilled to go along for the ride.

This is my first memory of traveling outside the city of New Orleans. There was great trepidation. My daddy had to take the car to the shop to check the oil and the spark plugs. We had the tires examined and refilled the windshield wiper fluid. After thoroughly looking everything over, we were ready to hit the road.

Armed with one eight-track tape that would play all the way to Monroe and back, it felt like we were traveling to another country. Until this day, when I hear “Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, I’m instantly transported back to that car ride—bouncing through rural Louisiana during the first week of 1973.

This trip occurred before the interstate was finished. We had to drive through one backwater Louisiana town after another for three hundred miles. Most of the highways were lined with thickets of trees as tall as three-story buildings. They were bunched together and covered with ferns and wild vines.

I must have seen too many television shows depicting Black people running from police or vigilante mobs, because of all the things I imagined about those woods, I thought mostly about a good hiding place. I looked at the trees and said to my dad, “If someone was trying to chase you, this would be a good place to hide.” My father said, “They have dogs, guns, and flashlights.”

After we had been driving for about three hours, we were pulled over by a country sheriff. This was a routine traffic stop until two other police cars arrived. My brothers and I were scared, partly because being pulled over by the police in the eyes of a child is frightening. Regardless of how nervous this might make a kid, everything intensifies when your family is Black and big, white, tobacco-spitting cops approach your car in the middle of nowhere. I noticed my dad’s face turning blue every half second from the blinding lights—it made me dizzy.

I saw dread in my daddy’s eyes. I could tell he was distrustful of white men with badges, and I was sure he had good reasons. This was the 1970s in backcountry Louisiana where Jim Crow was alive and kicking. My dad and great-grandmother had traveled these country roads long before I was born, and they understood the potential peril of a simple traffic stop, something my young mind could not comprehend.

The mood in the car had changed. You could cut the tension with a knife. Big Momma turned to my dad and said, “How come they pulled you over?” She became agitated. “But you weren’t doing anything.” In the fiery voice of an irreverent 69-year-old, Big Momma said she was going to ask the cops why they stopped us. She got out of the car. Trucks and cars were speeding by. We could see her blue dress, which almost passed for a house robe, blowing in the wind.

After several minutes of trying, my daddy was able to convince her to get back in the car. I prayed Big Momma would be cool and not get us all arrested. There were guns, badges, flashing blue lights, and white people. Not to mention, we were further from home than I had ever been in my life. In the eyes of an eight-year-old, we might be arrested or worse.

When it was all over, my daddy received a speeding ticket, and we were free to go. The officers weren’t friendly at all. Even though my father’s car was packed with kids and an elderly woman, the officers never mellowed out.

I hate to imagine what that police stop could have turned into if the car had been occupied by my father and his brothers. It was overkill for driving while Black. I wondered what Officer Friendly would have thought about them.

When my dad started the ignition and we were able to continue our journey to Big Momma’s house, I felt relief. I didn’t have some grand epiphany regarding how I felt, but over the years I would have other negative encounters with the police that slowly began to erode my trust.

Daddy’s beige Pontiac finally arrived at our destination. I was excited to see the inside of Big Momma’s house. It was small and neat. The big, wooden four-poster bed was her only possession that had the regality she deserved, in my eyes. We hung out at her house for less than 20 minutes, then headed back to New Orleans. The next time I saw her modest house was when we returned five years later to bury her.

We arrived back in the city around 7:30 p.m., exhausted and ready to get home. When we got close to downtown, traffic started backing up. There was a lot of commotion, with sirens blaring and blue lights flashing for the second time in this troubled day. We assumed it was a bad car accident—but we were wrong.

Something terrible had happened. There were National Guardsmen dressed in camouflage carrying M-16 rifles and rerouting us from the freeway. Finally, we could hear one of them explaining an unbelievable situation to my father. A sniper on the rooftop of the Howard Johnson Hotel had started shooting police officers. This was the first time I ever heard the word sniper. The first time I needed to consider what it meant.

The rooftop shooter, Mark Essex, killed nine people, including five police officers, and wounded twelve others. He retaliated against the police because of brutality and racism he experienced while serving in the Navy. Essex himself was only 23 years old. It’s hard to imagine that just 15 years before his shooting spree he, too, was an eight-year-old boy. Maybe he had gone to the movies with his family and watched police portrayed as the good guys, or maybe his school had an Officer Friendly program that inspired him to dream of someday becoming a police officer.

But then you grow up and realize that you cannot be Black in this country and not feel rage after what should be a mundane interaction between civilians and police, a common traffic stop. There are many Black families who aren’t as lucky as we were.

I learned that Mark Essex was not the only Black man in New Orleans whose rage exploded like a water pipe under pressure. Seventy-three years earlier, Robert Charles killed eight cops and about twenty civilians. Essex’s ordeal ended on the rooftop of the downtown Howard Johnson Hotel, while Robert Charles’s finality came from a second-floor window of a house at 1208 Saratoga Street. These two men made their last stand less than a mile of each other.

I have always thought society’s view of them both would have mellowed over time if they were marginalized white men lashing out against an unjust system. There would be multiple books, movies, plays, and songs lauding their righteous courage. But America’s memory of Black rebellion never softens, yet neither are these memories allowed to grow hard—they’re simply buried with the rest of the dead.

If you are thinking, this is a society of laws and we don’t glorify cop killers, I recommend you look up the Battle of Liberty Place. In 1874, white supremacists fought an integrated Reconstruction era police force on Canal Street. They inflicted nearly one hundred casualties, many of whom were police officers. In 1891, the Liberty Place Monument was erected in honor of the perpetrators, and the city of New Orleans was not able to remove this crass symbol of white supremacy until 2017.

The first officer killed by Essex was 19-year-old police cadet Alfred P. Harrell. He was also the only African American victim. Coincidentally, this is how the park across the street from my house got its name.

For more information on Robert Charles, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Rio of 1900 (Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics (n.p., 1900); Robert P. Robertson, The Tragedy of Robert Charles (BookSurge Publishing, 2009).

This story excerpted by permission from Lens award-winning contributor Chuck Perkins’ new book, Beautiful and Ugly Too, released today by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. Perkins will read and sign his book on Friday, August 8 at 8 p.m. at Cafe Istanbul, 2372 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117.