Samuel Alicea sat quietly during the Merrimack Valley School District’s “community conversation,” occasionally exchanging ideas about race, differences and community.
The 16-year-old’s return to his former high school stood in contrast to the controversy that caused him to leave. The junior withdrew from Merrimack Valley High School two months after he decided to make a statement about racial equality by taking a knee during the national anthem before his team’s football games.
Alicea’s goal was face-to-face conversation. Instead, he got behind-the-back threats. Thoughtful consideration gave way to backlash.
As some community members embraced Alicea and his family, others vandalized their property.
Alicea’s family grew concerned for his safety and were soon making visits to other schools. He started at Tilton School on Nov. 8.
Even though Alicea now goes to class and plays on a team at a private school to the north, he still cares about his community and his old school.
That’s why he came back Tuesday night. So did his mother, Stephanie Alicea, and his grandmother, Caroletta Alicea, who had asked her fellow Merrimack Valley school board members in July to okay the discussion on racial equality in the wake of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests across the country.
As the only black member on the board and one of the only families of color in rural Boscawen, Caroletta Alicea said open dialogue on race has long been lacking in her community.
That need was met, at least initially, this week. Looking around at the audience members in the high school auditorium, Caroletta Alicea thanked them.
“You’re here because you care,” she said. “For me as a black American living in New Hampshire . . . you’re here because you want to start the conversation.”
While it took several months to organize the formal “conversation” held at Merrimack Valley High School, Samuel Alicea took it upon himself to spark dialogue earlier this fall. At the homecoming football game on Sept. 16, he took a knee during the national anthem, following the example of several NFL players peacefully protesting how people of color are treated in the United States.
Alicea did it at every game for the rest of the season. And it did get people talking, though not necessarily to him.
“I was a little bit isolated by some people,” Alicea said. While several of his teammates asked him why he did it, most people, Alicea said, just talked about him – in school hallways, in classrooms, on social media, and in the comments section of an earlier Monitor article.
A common criticism was that Alicea was disrespecting the country’s flag and those who fought and died for it. Others supported him, pointing out it was Alicea’s First Amendment right to protest.
Sitting in a Boscawen living room where an American flag fluttered just outside the window, Alicea said, “I heard the journalism class went over my article and that 90 percent of the kids were just tearing me apart.”
The day he first took a knee, he said some of his friends and teammates told him “they had a feeling” he was going to get beat up.
“I heard that kids were talking about shooting me,” Alicea said.
The Merrimack Valley High School junior wasn’t scared off – he told principal David Miller he still felt safe at the school. In a meeting with Miller and his family, Alicea declined the offer to have someone accompany him through the hallways or to leave his classes five minutes earlier.
“I just said no,” he said. “If someone wants to come talk to me or say something or be physical, they can do that to my face.” Alicea didn’t want confrontation, but he knew negative reactions were a possibility.
Miller said in an email that school administrators did “closely monitor” Alicea while he remained at MV, making sure there were no issues in the cafeteria or hallways.
Alicea’s mother, Stephanie, and his grandmother, Caroletta, though, continued to worry. They found two car windshields in their Boscawen driveway cracked by BB gun pellets in October, and they were also unnerved when a clown incident going around the school named targets on Instagram, including Alicea.
“I didn’t feel like he was safe,” Stephanie Alicea said. “That’s the worst feeling as a parent.”
After his mother and grandmother reached out to several private schools in the area, Alicea was accepted at Tilton School and began there on Election Day.
While Alicea called the new school a “much better fit” and his family said they were happy for him, his mother said the switch came with some sadness.
“We want to be a part of the Merrimack Valley community,” Stephanie Alicea said. But living as one of the only Black American families in a mostly-white town – the most recent American Community Survey shows just nine of Boscawen’s nearly 4,000 residents identify as black – has its challenges.
The biggest for Caroletta Alicea has been the lack of education, conversation or even curiosity between people with different backgrounds, perspectives or skin color.
Assumptions or misunderstandings of her grandson’s decision to take a knee, she said, have led to instances of fear and disrespect – something that can be avoided by simply asking questions.
“People are afraid of the unknown,” Caroletta said. “But people have the power to get the information. Just go and ask.”
But something happened Tuesday that Caroletta Alicea said had never been done before in her 48 years of living in Boscawen: the community asked questions about, and discussed, race.
“It was like a huge gift for me,” she said.
All three Aliceas sat near the front of the Merrimack Valley High School auditorium Tuesday. They listened to Massachusetts author Clinton Graham, who wrote the poetry collection Progressive Perspectives, discuss his experiences as a correctional officer, a football player in Europe and as a black man growing up in America.
“It’s hard to fathom what it’s like to grow up with a radar,” Graham explained. “A person of color grows up with a radar.”
Graham’s talk didn’t draw the masses – people sat scattered in just a few rows of seats – but after sharing some of his experiences with a quiet audience, an energy bubbled up as soon as attendees began asking questions of both Graham and each other.
An exchange between Loudon resident Jen Mercer and Samuel Alicea explored how it’s best to ask people how they might want to be addressed.
Members of the Alicea family explained, for instance, that personally, they prefer the term “Black American” as opposed to “African American,” since the latter term seems more applicable to recently arrived residents coming from Africa, while the former acknowledges the history of black people in the United States.
“If you told me that I’m African American or assume I’m African American, I’m going to be upset,” Samuel Alicea told Mercer.
Mercer in turn said that if she offends another person in the way she describes him or her, she would hope that person would speak up.
“You can let me know, ‘I’m upset,’ ” she said. “I’ve run into so many people who have different preferences.”
One audience member asked Graham whether he had experienced racism in school as a child, and how it should be handled.
“There was a time someone called me a name and he was sent out and that was it,” he said. “Nip it in the bud.”
More audience members like Salisbury resident Louise Andrus said parents should be educating their children at home about respecting others.
MV athletics administrator Kevin O’Brien said acceptance, not tolerance, should be taught.
“Acceptance means you respect it,” he said. “I think we start at that level and we can branch it out.”
Stephanie Alicea spoke to “address the elephant in the room” about her son taking a knee during the national anthem, asking Graham how he thought that could be handled in the school.
He responded that teachers helping to facilitate a conversation around the action is the best way.
At the end of the night’s two hour discussion, Graham watched Samuel Alicea interact with a man named Dean, who told the student to be true to himself and suggested the pair get a cup of coffee sometime.
“That’s how it starts,” Graham said. In the meantime, if a friend or a family member at the Thanksgiving table says something disrespectful or assuming about another person, he said, “Speak up.”
At the meeting Tuesday, SAU 46 Superintendent Mark MacLean – who helped organize the event – told Graham he planned to stay in touch.
“We don’t want it to be a one-night event,” MacLean said. “One of the things that’s rolling in my mind is, how do we equip teachers?”
One fifth grade teacher at Boscawen Elementary School, Millie Pike, said she’s already used the first Monitor article about Samuel Alicea with her class in discussing the Bill of Rights.
“I had the students read it and there was discussion about, ‘what does it mean to take a stance?’” she said.
MacLean said by phone later that he’s going to work with his leadership team on this “new ground.”
They’ll examine whether Graham’s Progressive Perspectives book or other tools should be incorporated into the curriculum, which already has elements promoting different perspectives.
“We’re going to continue working on empathy and . . . approaching people with respect,” he said. “We’d like to be as proactive as we can.”
As for the Aliceas, they said they’re going to keep doing what they’ve been doing and advocate for greater awareness of different experiences and perspectives.
“In the midst of all of this we’re still trying to be part of that community,” Stephanie Alicea said. “Going forward – of course we’re going to show up to stuff as much as we can.”
Her mother, Caroletta, said she will continue in her roles on the school board, in the State House and as a Boscawen resident.
“I applied to be on the school board because there are no people of color,” she said. “I still do the same thing – I’m fair, just looking out for the children.”
And Samuel Alicea is going to finish what he started, potentially continuing his trend of taking a knee on his new football team at Tilton School. As he grows older, he said he wants to be an actor, to make it big, and to have a platform – maybe even the Oscars stage – for his voice be heard.
People like Muhammad Ali and Kanye West, he said, “They use their platform to make a difference. I think more people need to do that.”
The 16-year-old appears to be already on his way. He said he recently got a text message from a friend who initially was upset at him for kneeling during the national anthem, but thought about it and came around.
Alicea said she told him, “I tried to put myself in your shoes as a minority – you opened up my eyes a little bit.”
Reflecting on everything this fall, Alicea compared it to shooting an arrow. When you pull back, there’s resistance.
But then once you let go, “It’s free flying,” he said, hurtling towards that target in the distance.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)