Not in our Backyard

Scott Paulson was sick of his stepson's complaints about a white posse beating up his black friends. Then the phalanx of trucks pulled up on his lawn.

A A A Comments By Beth Hawkins Wednesday, Jun 24 1998

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Paulson's stepson and Claigh Knick, for their parts, don't expect this summer to be any different from last year's, except more lonely. Their clique of friends used to number about 15 kids, but in the past two years many of the African-American families in town have moved away. For a while it was just the two of them and their friend Mark, dividing their time between the neighborhood gas station and the Paulsons' modest in-ground swimming pool.

One week after school let out, Mark moved to join his family at their new house in a western suburb. His mother, who asked that neither her name nor her son's full name be used in this story, says the family spent a year struggling with the idea of moving. None of them wanted to leave Andover, she says, but in the end she grew convinced that there was no other way to guarantee her kids' safety. "You just can't have that, where people are banging on your door and your kids are afraid to ride their bikes around the neighborhood for fear someone will knock them off--just because they're there."

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Mark's mother says she had plenty of supportive friends in Andover. But in the end, "they weren't enough to go over the head of the good-ol'-boy system." She's fought for civil rights her whole life, she says, "and my grandparents for their whole lives and my parents for theirs. It's just that I had hoped my grandchild wouldn't have to."

Claigh Knick doesn't think any amount of fighting will make a difference--or that the pressure would lift from his life even if the All American Boys disappeared. "There's nothing we can do about it," he says. "It's just something we gotta deal with."

News intern Erik Farseth contributed research for this story.