About The Author

My name is Jasper Garrison. I was born on July 26, 1946, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I was raised in Detroit with my older brother, George,  a former Detroit Police homicide detective, and my cousin, Sara, who is now a secretary with Ford Motor Co. My parents, John Arthur and Ora Juanita Garrison, were born and raised on farms in South Carolina with 11 other siblings. Both knew what it was to pick cotton and to push a plow behind a mule. Still, my mother completed high school and my father earned a college degree. They met in Detroit where they came to escape the Jim Crow South and to make a living during World War II.

Despite his education, imagination and drive, my father was denied employment equal to his qualifications in the Detroit metropolitan area's racially segregated economy. One look, and the men in charge "knew" he couldn't cut it. He was one of the many conscientious people on the Ford assembly line in the 1950s and '60s who took issue with management indifference to quality and worked secretly to build better cars whenever possible. To earn extra money, he cut hair and painted houses.

He died suddenly of high blood pressure on Father’s Day, 1966. He was 51. My mother died bravely and defiantly of cancer at 57, a week before Mother’s Day. My brother died of stroke two days after Easter 2001. He was 56. By all rights, I should have died in Vietnam on Good Friday, 1971 when I was 24. I haven’t looked forward to a holiday in a long time. When I was in high school, I joined the Army Reserves on the condition that I would begin basic training after my graduation in the spring of ´64. At that age, big names, big titles and expensive suits impressed me. High-ranking officers in the Reserves were the men who wore the expensive suits in civilian life as high-ranking executives for major corporations. As a 17- year-old private, I trembled before the superior intellect of these men with the oak leafs or eagles on their collars. The only man in the 70th Training Division with a star was like a god.

All of that changed three years later when I found myself, an acting buck sergeant, in a strategy meeting at Fort Leonard Wood, MO, with the highest echelon of officers in the division. They had to have done much to get where they were, but they had only the fuzziest notion of how to arrive at where they wanted to go next. If it wasn’t in a manual, they couldn’t do it. If it was in a manual, they asked me where to find it. When it became clear that I knew more about what was going on than any of them did, I was never again impressed by symbols of authority alone. It was how people performed that counted.

IQ scores say something about performance, if only that those with exceedingly high ones did exceedingly well one day on a battery of tests that some people revere. Like others in my group of OJI’s without a college degree to speak for my "candle power," I do have an unwieldy IQ. Without it and the help of my friends, I would not have been allowed to show what I could do in the field of automotive design, because African-Americans were judged on sight to be unqualified. In 1989, the head of an experimental interior studio allowed me to create and apply a lead-time reduction process that is now used in product development worldwide. If you’ve ever seen an '86 Taurus, a '93 Probe or a '94 Mustang, you’ve seen some of my exterior work.

I was married in 1967 and I’ve been divorced since 1974. I’ve got 2 great kids, 7 beautiful grandchildren, lots of good friends and more than my share of good breaks.

That’s enough about me. Now, if I can only get people to take a cold, hard look at a racist cop named Fuhrman, and his IQ, and his friends, and his accomplishments....