The signature experience of Larry Gossett’s life came in 1966. Seeking draft deferment, he joined Volunteers in Service to America, a sort of domestic Peace Corps. He traveled to New York to mentor Harlem youth. “I began my work just three weeks after Stokely Carmichael articulated a new concept for Black people in this country. It was called Black Power.” Gossett devoured the obvious literature, but staff at the Michaux bookstore on 125th Street told him to expand his perspective. He’d understood The Communist Manifesto as “bad,” “evil.” But “the men and women that worked at the bookstore said, ‘What do you mean, Mr. Gossett? Bad or evil? It’s just something to read.’” So he read. “As a descendant of African slaves, oh my God, that made sense to me.”
As he stood in the airport on his return home to Seattle, his mother and younger brother walked past without recognizing him. “I had a Big Natural. I had a dashiki. I had African beads.” After his family finally spotted him, he told them that his name was not Larry. It was Oba Yoruba.
The name didn’t stick, but the new consciousness did. Gossett, as one local activist told me, became a “walking institution and walking library” of activism in the city of Seattle. In the coming years, he would co-found the Black Student Union at the University of Washington and become a local spokesman for the Black Panthers. “I was...
A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misreprese...