Vincent Kinney

But I do remember the first time I needed to put that in practice. That would’ve been 1975. I know the year because my wife was pregnant with my daughter, and my wife and I were driving along in Texas actually, and got sideswiped by a man pulling a trailer, and he did it deliberately, and I knew it at the time. It was a Sunday. I stopped at a service station and called the police, and they stopped him in some little town, and they called the justice of the peace, and we had to have a little session to talk about that. And when the policeman came to where I was on the road, he had stopped the driver of the vehicle, and the two of them were in the front of the car. I was in the back. I ended up in the back, telling what had happened, and the whole time we were in the car — he was Mr. Chauncey. I still remember the name very, very well, and I was Vincent. And it chapped my butt, to put it mildly. He sent the other man to his vehicle to get something, and while he was out of the car, I asked the policeman, “Officer, why is he Mr. Chauncey, and I’m Vincent?” And my reason for waiting until he was out of the car was to protect anything that he might decide he wanted to do in the situation where it was two white men and one clearly younger Black man. And so, I let him have his ego to save my situation, and fortunately, he was a officer who heard the message. And later, we went into town, sat with the justice of the peace, and I was Mr. Kinney after that, and he would look at me and say it every time. And that was several times. Clearly, I had learned that I needed to handle things in a way that avoided all altercation.