Jacky King; a Master in the Dojo & in Life

Prelude - For several years, I was fortunate to write profiles for Stand Magazine; the magazine for men that give a damn about being better men. My editor, the mag's founder, Dwayne Hayes, had a brilliant vision. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out. Dwayne gave me the freedom to seek out engaging men and publish lengthy sit-downs with them. As the magazine and its website have shuttered, I have the (legal) opportunity to share these profiles here. Over the course of this spring and summer, I'll share these profiles here.

Jacky King is a master. An 8th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do karate and a certified master gardener, Jacky has dedicated his life to the people in his hometown of Beecher, MI, a town of 10,200 just north of Flint.

Master King’s karate dojo has been a fixture in the Beecher community since the 1980s. In the early 2000s, King realized that his people lived in a food desert, and he created the Harvesting Earth Educational Farm, an urban farm project that teaches urban youth the value of hand labor and clean food. Since then, the project has grown to include a three-acre urban fruit tree orchard. Jacky’s life is a joyful blueprint: for those who seek to regain urban land for farming, for those who wish to change a small portion of their world, for those who see a better tomorrow.

Beecher is a difficult place to find success. The median family income in this once working class General Motors factory town is now half of the typical Michigan community. The violent crime rate in Beecher is twice that of the average US town. Yet Master Jacky King is everywhere in the community as he teaches urban youth the value of self-discipline, quality food, and the notion that giving back matters.

I followed Jacky around for a few days; in the gardens, the dojo, and the neighborhood. In the dojo, as he leads class clad in a well-worn black gi with a hard-earned black belt and its eight golden slashes, Jacky seems a large man. Not large with his voice, but his quietly powerful presence fills the training hall. Yet in the gardens, in camo shirt and work pants, Jacky is a small man, wiry and ultra-fit, like a jockey. That is, until he speaks with his student gardening staff, and once again, his presence causes him to grow in stature.

There was a torrential rainstorm in Beecher hours before I met up with Jacky. His high school age workers were up to, and sometimes over their boot-tops in muck as we walked the rows.

“The weather’s gonna be what the weather’s gonna be, kids. When it comes to farming, you can’t tense up. Can’t make it rain when you need it, can’t make it stop when you want. Look, unless you get that text from me, we’re working in the rain. Wear a poncho, get a garbage bag. Ya’ll will learn to relax about stuff when you’re farming.”

He turned to me.

“I teach life skills here, Dave. It’s all about responsibility. I’m a fair boss. I don’t know that I’m tough. I think I’m like any good boss. Show up on time. Don’t give me the story about this and that from last night. Be here. Do the work. This is on you. Earn your money. See, they think the money is the thing. It’s not, right?

“Your word is everything, not the money. Yeah, we need the money, we sell our produce at the Flint Farmer’s Market for a fair price, we don’t give it away, but these kids, they learn how to stand up for themselves. They learn – that’s why I named it the Harvesting Earth Educational Farm. How to deal with the public. How to interact in a joyful way with a stranger. How to be disrespected a little by customer, and not blow up. How to deal with someone angry and not join ‘em in their anger. All those lessons we need to learn about success in the world. We learn a lot. Together.”

As we spoke in the hoop house, Jacky peered into the farm’s tomato plants. Mostly green with blushes of red, it was easy to see that they’d be ripe in a week.

“Time to stake these out some more,” he said to no one in particular. “What’s gonna happen if this stalk lays over on the wet ground?”

Two girls stopped weeding and looked at him.

“They’ll rot?” one said.

“You asking me that, or are you telling me that?” said Jacky.

“Telling you, those tomatoes are gonna rot on the ground, Mister King.”

“It’s okay to speak the truth, ladies. It’s always okay to say what you mean, when you do it with respect. These are your tomatoes, right? So after break you’ll take care of that?”

“Yessir,” they replied together.

We walked across Saginaw Street, a busy five lane road, and headed into his dojo, King’s Karate.

“See Dave, we have a couple of different issues here, right? I got to teach the boys how to be young men, so many of them don’t have dads or uncles to teach them, and I got to teach the girls how to be women that know how to say no. They need to know how to say what’s important to them. Too many girls fall for the boys’ BS. Too many girls having babies because no one ever taught the girls that it’s okay to say no. About anything.”

We walked into his dojo. In the training area, several younger kids were sorting out karate gear. Jacky teaches classes at local schools as well as in the dojo. Later that afternoon, he and his assistant would be at Flint’s Potter Elementary and his new students would each have a new gi as part of their tuition.

“Jacky, you’ve been teaching karate in Beecher for a long time, forty years or so, right? How’d you come to martial arts and your own dojo?”

“Dave, that’s a short question with a long answer. Let’s sit and drink some of this coffee and I’ll tell you how I got here.

“I loved cars. Just loved cars-fascinated by them. I’m 64, so when I was a kid, it was the early 60s. I lived in Flint, see, the home of General Motors, and it was right in the middle of muscle cars. Course, I didn’t have any money so that presented a problem.

“I didn’t want to hurt people, didn’t fight much. I didn’t want other people’s stuff – I just wanted to ride around in fast cars – joy riding, we called it back then. Find one with the keys in it, or one of my buddies might know how to hot-wire a car, they were lots simpler back then – and we’d drive around for a while, leave the car, and run away. You do that often enough, and sure enough, the police will catch up with you.

“Got sent to Boys Farm at 13. I was incorrigible, is what they called it. I just refused to do the right thing when I was supposed to. I got sentenced to 6 months at Boys Farm. Back then, Boys Farm was in the middle of just the worst racist area in the state, maybe in the country. It was 15-20 miles south of Flint, not that far from Howell, Michigan.

“You know about Howell, right? Howell was one of the homes of the Klan up here in the North. That Miles fellow who led the Klan, the one who wanted to firebomb the school buses filled with little Black kids, he lived in Howell. Since he lived there, so did lots of Klan. I was enrolled at the local high school and there couldn’t have been a worse place to be a Black kid.

“I was a little guy, tough but little, and this school was just horrible for Blacks. It was like my name was “That N*&%%#$ Jacky.” Course, if I hadn’t been joyriding, I wouldn’t have been there, right? But most kids, they don’t think like that and I was no different.

“There was this one big bully. He was mean. Dude just destroyed people’s lives, not just the black kids. He liked to hurt people a lot. Just a cruel, nasty-ass bastard. I got level with him.

“One day, I said to him, ‘Hey, Cuz, I been doing some research. You got some colored in you. Go back a little, you got a Negro relative. Look at that nose, man. It’s just like mine. I bet we’re related. Cuz.’

“You know how bullies are. They always have those little crowds of ass-kissers trailing after them. His followers took a good look and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, the little N*#$%r dude is right. He’s part colored.’ He left me alone after that.”

“Not a good time or place to go to school for a Black guy,” I said, thinking back on the times. The year was 1967. The Viet Nam War was at its height. Student protest and the Establishment’s violent response had ripped apart the USA.

In the summer of 1967, the US was hit with race riots so devastating that 50 years later, some areas have still not recovered. Detroit was amongst the worst hit. The National Guard was on patrol at the behest of Governor George Romney. President Lyndon Johnson sent in units from the Army’s elite troops; the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The riots lasted five days. 43 people died. 33 were black. 10 were white. 24 of the black were shot by troops and police. Four troops were killed by rioters. In total, 1,189 people were injured.

I remember those riots well. My hometown of Flint was also the scene of catastrophic violence. My father’s new Buick convertible burst into flames three stories tall when rioters fleeing the police heaved their last Molotov cocktail onto its ragtop.

“Nope, not a good time at all,” said Jackie. “Gotta say, though, a lot of what happened to me back then was my own fault. I got sent to the Juvenile Home in Lansing, MI not long after those riots.

“I wasn’t at the Boys Farm anymore. I got sent to the Juvy. Not the razor-wired part, I got sent to the minimum security section, but it was still the Juvy in Lansing.

“What happened? Well, Dave, we were playing Knuckles out at the Boys Farm, you know, that game where you stick your fist out on a table and the other guy gets to slam the edge of a deck of cards down on your hand, and you gotta take it. It hurts. First guy to flinch or whatever is a loser. Well, we got into a fistfight and I flashed a knife. I wasn’t gonna use it, I just needed the fight to stop. Got me sent to the Juvy for 18 months. That was tough for me. I missed my Mom. I missed my mom a lot. Geez, I caused her so much grief.

“When I got out, my supervisor knew something.”

“See you in a couple months,” he said.

“He was right. I hadn’t learned a damn thing. My Mom and stepdad didn’t want me back right then. They could tell, too. I wasn’t any better. Hell, I was probably worse. No place to go, I was homeless. Just slept wherever I could, stole food, doing anything to get by. It was bad, real bad. I was back in Juvy 30 days later.

“Joyriding, again,” Jacky said.

He shrugged.

“Were you trying to get caught, so you could go back?” I asked.

“Yeah, maybe a little. I was a kid; 14, 15 years old, no job, no food, no place to go, so yeah, living in Juvy was for sure better than Flint streets in 1967. There were lots of homeless after the riots, grown men. It was bad, guys would beat you, maybe worse if you had food. Police would shoot you first if you stole something. Real bad. Yeah, maybe I did wanna go back.

“We’re there a little bit, few months, and my buddy says, ‘I’m getting out. Let’s sneak out, I’ll steal us a car, and we’ll head back to Flint.’ He was good at stealing cars. Really good.

“I was homesick so I was with him. We snuck out, minimum security sector, remember, and he stole us a car. On the way home from Lansing to Flint, a state trooper pulled us over. Somehow, we convinced him, this white trooper, that we were legit, a couple of Black kids on the freeway, I don’t know what he was thinking, but he let us go on our way. We got to Flint, and we had nothing.”

“Did you have a plan,” I asked. “What did you expect would happen when you got back to Flint? Move back in with your mom, get back in school?”

“Dave, we were dumb kids. We had no idea. We were car thieves, man. We were on the lam, homeless, sleeping in abandoned buildings, friends maybe sneak us into their basement for a few days, like that. I was really missing my Mom and step-dad. It was terrible how I missed my Mom.

“My brother would catch up with us, tell us Mom was worried, crying all the time, but we made him swear not to tell anyone where we were. Truth is, we were nothing, just a couple of homeless kids. It was so hard, when I think back on what I did to my Mom, man, she deserved so much better… It makes me cry, thinking back on that. She was a good woman, my Mom…

“We needed some money. Couldn’t get a job, after the riots and all no one was hiring anyone, besides we were just a couple of kids, no ID, no social security number, no one could have hired us anyway. So what’s left?

“We did a B&E (breaking and entering) in a nice part of Flint, over by the Flint Golf Club, and when we walked out, the cops were waiting for us. I tried to use a fake name, but the cops looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, right. You Jacky King. We been lookin’ for you for a couple months. You get one phone call.’

“I was so ashamed. I was so embarrassed. I couldn’t even call my Mom. Just said, ‘take me away.’ It was the worst day of my life.

“With my priors, plus this B & E, I did 18 months in Jackson Prison. That’s hard time. Jackson Prison is tough, man. We all know that. I was a little guy, right, but I knew how to get along. You gotta be like a mouse. Lay low. Stay near the edges. Don’t get in no one’s face. Keep quiet. Don’t ever see anything. Ever.

“I was almost 18 when I went in, I was 19 when I got out. I had nothing. No job, no diploma or GED, no skills, not one damn thing. I was homeless for a while again, until my parents, my Mom and step-dad, decided I could come back if I got a job. I can’t really say prison was good for me, but I was old enough to figure out what was what. I knew I definitely did not want to go back to prison. I just wanted to work.

“I caught tuberculosis in prison. Pretty common, living on top of each other. TB is real. Couldn’t walk, couldn’t catch my breath, my Mom finally convinced me to go to the hospital. I was there for a while. I don’t know if I was close to dying or not, but laying in that hospital bed, I got a chance to eat real food for a while and had plenty of time to think. Maybe the thoughts started percolating when I was in prison, but it was in the hospital that things started to make sense.

“I turned 20 in the hospital. Funny thing, I got to be friendly with this little 5 year old girl – talk with her, cheer her up, I didn’t know what was wrong with her. Well, her Mom and I get to talking one day, Mom’s maybe 26, 28, and we hit it off. She’s got three kids. Well, we took up for a bunch of years, we have three kids together. They’re all in their 40s now, and I’m their kids’ grandfather.

“That’s funny, isn’t it? I’m incorrigible. I’m a car thief. I’ve done hard time, catch a nasty disease, and next thing you know, I’m in love and I’m a family man. I know it’s time to get a real job, take care of my family, get my GED. Even today, it makes me shake my head. How did all that come together? Don’t know, but it makes me think, I’m a lucky guy.”

I asked, “You just needed time to find yourself, right, Jacky? But you’re still a long way from an 8th dan master.”

“Dave, the martial arts came about in 1973. I had a good job, working in one of the GM plants here in Flint. One day, on lunch, I walked past this guy doing some karate stuff. He had some moves, very graceful, and I stood there and watched him. Ate my lunch standing right there. Next day, same thing. And the next. Finally, he says to me, ‘I can show you some of this stuff’ and I got all excited. I learned a kata (training form) from him, right there on the plant floor. Remember, Bruce Lee was big. Bigger than big. Enter the Dragon – all those movies- and Bruce was always fighting for the right things. I could feel that when I did that kata. It was right.

“The big moment came a few days later. I remember it like it was last year. I was standing in downtown Flint right in front of the Montgomery-Wards building and a lightning bolt hit me. I know people say that but this was a bolt that hit me so hard, it was like a punch.

“’Jacky,’ that voice said in my head, ‘you need to take karate. Not maybe. Not next month. Right now. Go find a karate school.’

“Didn’t even know that karate schools were called dojos yet. But that voice, ‘There’s a karate school for you and you need to be there right away.’

“God was talking to me, Dave, finally. Or maybe I was finally listening. I have not missed a day in the dojo since, unless I was sick or traveling. I wasted so much of my youth, bad choices, acting out, refused to listen, didn’t learn to respect or be respected, for years it made me sick how I lived, I hurt my Mom so bad. All that was solved when I went into a dojo.”

Jacky’s cell phone rang.

“Gotta take this, Dave.”

I stood and look at Jacky. I make a motion towards the training hall.

“Should I step out?” I mouthed.

He nods.

A few minutes later, I heard Jacky call me back in.

“Sorry, Dave. That was the police chief. We’re pretty tight. Whenever something happens with one of my kids, he’ll call. For little stuff, I mean.”

“Jacky, that’s really pretty funny,” I said. “You spend ten years of your life avoiding the police like the plague, and here you are at 64, the fixer in Beecher. You’re the calm at the center of the storm. Somehow, you managed to get off that prison merry-go-round.”

“I see it up here in Beecher all the time, Dave. All the damn time. The prison merry-go-round is normal. Hell, Dave, it’s even accepted. Drop out of school, do some crimes, do some time, come back to town.

“That phone call, that was about a guy who’d been involved in a lot of gun crime, not one of my kids, a bad guy, and the state wants him released back here early.

“I said, ‘Would you want this guy in your community? Hell no, you wouldn’t! Why would we want him back here in Beecher? Would you release him into Grand Blanc? (Grand Blanc is a mostly white upper class community south of Flint.) Hell, no!’ I deal with this stuff every week, Dave.”

“Why does this happen? The merry-go-round? Is it racism first, or poverty, or what?” I asked.

“A lot of each, man. Lots.” said Jacky. “You and I know how strong racism is, and without good jobs, it is really tough. But we gotta take some of it on ourselves, too. I have this argument with guys all the time.

“Don’t tell me about the boats, those slave ships from Africa. You’re not a slave and me neither. Our fathers, our grandfathers weren’t. Look, do the work. Get your education. Get a job. You got problems with racism today, we all got problems with racism, right, then take some action. Yeah, it’s hard for Blacks. But we’re not special. It’s hard for lots of groups. Get out there and make a damn difference.

“Don’t just complain that we have to be this way because two, three hundred years ago we used to be slaves. I hear this from folks all the time and I don’t buy it. That attitude starts young, that everything is someone else’s fault. I hear that more than anything from parents who bring me their kid who’s starting to get in trouble.

“’Can you teach him discipline?’ I tell them the same thing – it can’t be just me. It’s you. YOU need to be a parent. It’s a triangle - me, the parents, and the kid. If you, Mom and Dad, can’t get with that, then I don’t want your kid as a student, no way. I’m not gonna spend our class time, take time away from other kids, if I can’t depend on you to be a parent the other 23 hour a day. It’s not him. It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s us. The three of us.

“My dojo rules are simple. Respect. Attention. Discipline. Love. If you can’t do that, then yeah, I kick you out. This is a kind of church. A tough church.

“You just said I was the calm in the center of the storm. No lie, this is a tough neighborhood. Things go wrong. I try to help people make good choices, help them set things right. I’m blessed. I was given an opportunity and I took it. I found something I loved, I made it my life’s work. I took on this responsibility for my people up here in Beecher.

“Look, this town, this dojo is my home. I’d be doing this if I was in Egypt. I’d be teaching youth karateka to poor Egyptian kids in Cairo or something. This is what I do, who I am. Everything I went through got me to this. I never hurt anyone. I just hurt myself.

“And somehow, it was God’s will, that all the bad stuff turned me into who I am. My students care about me, I care about them. All those kids you see out there working the gardens, setting up our organic market here in the food desert, getting the resale shop cleaned up and ready for business, that’s my inspiration.

“I been doing this for a long time, I hear from old students; doctors, lawyers, teachers, shop workers – whatever they became- that when they were faced with choices, they could hear my voice in my head, see my lessons, and that helped them. That’s not inspiration? ‘Course it is. And when I hear those stories, well, that’s my inspiration.

“I’m no angel, Dave. I still have my temper. But I’m its master now, not the other way round. I’m an asshole sometimes. But now, I notice, when I’m all asshole-ish, it comes back to me and I have an asshole-ish day. So I work hard at not letting that stuff bother me. Tomorrow’s coming. You can’t stop it.”

“That’s a very Zen attitude, Jacky. Learn to understand your mind. Accept that everything moves forward in its own way. ‘Course, the ancient Bushido masters were all about the Zen attitude, right?” I said. “Do you think that feeds into your ability to use the garden and orchard to teach the kids?”

Jacky explained his love of the garden. “The garden was something I dreamt about for a long time. I’m a master gardener, I’ve grown a lot of my own food around here for years. I wanted something else for my students, they love karate, but I needed a program for barter and wages for the kids who wanted to be here but couldn’t afford it.

“I don’t do welfare. You gotta earn your keep in this world. Welfare’s okay to help someone get back on their feet, but it’s no way to live. I decided to start the garden, put kids to work, they could barter for their classes and uniforms, and keep any left over as wages. My thing has always been, “I’ll invest in you as long as you’ll invest in you, too.” I’ll assist you. I will not adopt you. I got plenty of kids of my own.

“With the help of the Ruth Mott Foundation, I was able to purchase some tools and land up here, we built the hoop houses, and we got to work. Composting, digging, planting, watering – these kids got dirty for the first time in their lives.

“You should see some of them when they see a tomato plant for the first time. They had no idea that you start these seeds, stick the plants in the dirt, and pretty soon, tomatoes will show up on the stems. No idea about that connection. Man, are they excited. Kinda stunned, too. These are their tomatoes. That ownership, it’s powerful stuff. They learn that since they can make a difference in the garden, then they can make a difference in the world.

“I’ve got this orchard getting going, too. Apples and peaches at the moment. We had cherries, but that terrible frost last year killed them off. We’ll get more. I love orchards, the kids love the orchard. To see a tree leaf-out, then flower, then turn into a fruit? Come August, you get to walk down the row and take a bite from a crisp apple that you nurtured? Not much better for a kid in a tough neighborhood than that, right? See it right through, storms and ice and drought and somehow the fruit perseveres and you helped it happen? No better lesson.

“Right now, I have some young men and women from a motorcycle, ahem, group that are working for me because of some incident they were involved in. Local authorities assigned them to me, happy to take them on. They are awesome workers. Work hard, plus they understand mechanics. Nothing wrong with motorcycles, course, but we need to keep those young folks on track.

“I’ve also got a couple of MSU students there. They live on the orchard, earning credits, and working for us. We should have some fruit for sale this year, but it takes a while to get an orchard going.

“Think of it, Dave. Fresh fruit in Beecher. Fresh organic vegetables. Kids learning how to care for plants and themselves. Kids going home and teaching their parents. We need to make this place safe, and we need to make it home.

“Beecher’s my home, man. I’m going nowhere and I want this to be a place where my grandchildren can be safe, and say, ‘yeah, my grandpop helped make this place.’

“You seem at peace, Jacky. You’re all wound up with your projects, but I sense that you have it under control,” I said.

“I have these things I call Joy Days. A day where I just try to feel the joy, no schedule, just take the time to appreciate everything – where I’ve been, where I am, the love of my wife Dora, the kids and grandkids, hearing something good that a student did – just a day of joy. And tomorrow, I’m gonna do a little fishing.”

Jacky King. A master in the dojo, the garden, the streets. It is a rare man who uses his time in prison to rehabilitate himself. Rarer still is the man who has paid his debt, and continues to pay that debt forward, forty years later.

Post-script: Jacky King died on Dec. 13, 2018 in a Flint hospital after a year long battle with brain cancer. He was 65. He is sorely missed in his community.