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2. The Gymnast
- Ohio University Press
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2 The Gymnast The photo catches high school gymnast Paul Laws in midswing as he pivots one-handed around the pommel horse at Ohio’s state gymnastics championships in the late winter of 1983. He’s making the move look easy, his left hand gripping one handle of the apparatus as he lifts his body up and around. His right arm is perfectly parallel with his right leg, the fingers of his free hand outstretched and relaxed. His wrists are taped, and he’s wearing tight-fitting white gymnast pants and a dark sleeveless top. His face exudes concentration but not strain, the confidence of an athlete performing a task he knows he does well. It’s another banner year for the gymnastics team at Worthington High School; each member competed at states, where the small squad scored 111.94 points, good enough for eighth place. In that year’s team picture, Laws, a senior, towers above his fellow gymnasts. He looks handsome and strong and calm as he stares into the camera. He is the only black athlete on the squad. None of the boys’ hair is exactly short, as the era demanded ; but even so, Laws’s Afro stands out, the longest hairstyle of any of his teammates. It’s clear from Laws’s confident expression that his hair length is of no concern to him.1 worthington, ohio, where Laws grew up, is a community of about thirteen thousand, immediately adjacent to Columbus on the city’s north side. Settled in 1803, the same year Ohio achieved statehood, it is older than Columbus by almost a decade, a fact that residents are wont to hold over the capital city. Today, Worthington is a comfortable inner-ring suburb spread across either side of High Street, a small city known for its quaint downtown, its good schools, and its genial quality of life. It has its share of new subdivisions with large, modern homes and street names like Loch Ness Avenue and hatred at home Bonnie Brae Lane, but the tree-lined streets and clapboard houses in the old part of town have a distinctly East Coast feel. “Worthington: New England in the Wilderness,” was the title of a 1976 bicentennial history of the community. James Kilbourn, one of the city’s founding fathers, was born in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1770, and later headed west as part of the Scioto Company, an organization of New Englanders determined to improve their lot in life. They named the city for Thomas Worthington, a federal land agent and later sixth governor of Ohio. Blacks are a tiny minority in the mainly white city, accounting for less than 2 percent of the population. Of the more than five hundred seniors who graduated in 1983 from Worthington High School, only five or six, including Laws, were black. In years past, Worthington had been no more and no less prejudiced than other central Ohio communities ; permissive—even liberal—but not quite color-blind. “Our blacks,” an old-timer would say of the city’s small African American population, implying that outsiders might not be so welcome.2 As early as 1821, a slave owner who brought a captured runaway slave named Isham into town on his journey south was met by Worthington citizens, including a local justice of the peace who determined the man lacked proof of ownership and set the slave free. Worthington abolitionists formed an antislavery society on March 28, 1836. A few blacks had long lived in the area, some of them associated with a brickyard east of Worthington. The city’s African Methodist Episcopal Church was the fourth congregation in the city to build a church, and its black minister, James Birkhead, was a principal land owner in the decades after the Civil War. The city’s earliest subdivision, known as the Morris Addition, was platted in 1855 and designed especially to attract Methodist ministers and free blacks.3 In 1935, Virdre C. Laws purchased two acres of land off East North Street, determined to find a better place to raise his daughters than the ghettoes of Columbus. Laws, who went by V. C., had moved north from South Carolina years earlier and gone to work at Columbus Malleable Iron on the city’s east side. He bought the property at the height of the Great Depression with the help of a banker friend who bid on the foreclosed land on Laws’s behalf. Laws and his wife, Esther, raised their...