6
University Daily Kansan / Monday, November 25, 1991
Fulcher profile continued from Page 1
questions, Fulcher has returned here, where he finds it easier to talk. The conversation, coupled with interviews with numerous relatives deals with an evolving, sometimes conflictive life.
Fulcher guards his privacy and insists that he wants his family off-limits to the press. But he is accommodating to the national media by publicly谦虚ly that his stepfather abused him as a child.
■ He says he lacked a positive father figure; his stepfather often was abrasive, and his biological father was most absent. Now, at age 18, Pulitzer on his own in 4-year-old daughter.
He grew up in a racially integrated environment with almos' no grounding in African-American history or identity. But after arriving at KU, he adopted the precepts of Malcom X and became a passionate activist for African-American causes.
His manner is reserved and controlled; he picks his words with care. But he admits to an explosive temper that sometimes erupted on him when he was a teenager in Glavas and during tirades against the press.
Elementary-school teachers identified him as a future leader, but friends say Fulcher can reveal a dark side when crossed. Fulcher himself, talking with the Wichita Eagle, said he was a social chameleon who adapted to the culture of his surroundings.
"I know my compartmentalize," he says.
"There have been times when I feel like the worst person in the world. I go through these situations with great joy. In one one's life does not tell the whole story."
Family life involved violence
Fulcher was born in Kansas City, Mo., the youngest of John and Queen Fulcher's five children. Then and later, when his mother had a sixth child by her second marriage, Fulcher says he felt like a loner.
Fulcher's parents separated when he was an infant. His mother, a nurse, worked constantly to support the family, and Fulcher was cared for him. He was about 4 when his mother married.
Robert Gillum moved the family to a neat, tree-lined neighborhood on the city's south side; theirs was one of the first Black families to settle there, but the ensuing years of what Fulcher calls the "white flight" changed the area's racial mix.
Fulcher's first impression of his new stepfather was formed on the street as he was standing on the sidewalk, where he saw a large
"He walked up to me and said, 'Excuse me,' or something," Fulcher says. "And I said, 'You move.' I was a kid, and we both stood there and neither of us would move."
To hear Fulcher tell it, their entire relationship was marked by stand-offs. He says he was about 6 when it turned violent. An argument between Robert and Queen Gillum had become physical, and the children all rushed to Queen Gillum's defense. Fulcher says he bit Robert Gillum's leg hard, and Gillum kicked him across the room.
Fulcher says Gillum pulled a gun on the family, hit him and his brothers in the face and once he'd been shot.
DARRENFULCHER: A PROFILE
fight. The Fulcher children asked Gillum to leave after he put a choke-hold on their mother, Fulcher says. And if Gillum wouldn't leave, Fulcher would pretend he could: in a Sesame Street spaceship to Wichita, where his father lived.
The Gillums divorced in 1988. Robert Gillum works for the city's public-works department. He denies there was any abuse.
"We had some bad times," he says. "But I
would keep the farm alive." ■ "I snacked
Darren, you drank my fish!"
Gilium says Fulcher has a penchant for exagregation, believes he can talk himself out of trouble, tries to find scapegoats for his problem and has lied to cover for what he has done."
Queen Gilum refuses to discuss the past. She says her ex-husband was not abusive: He sometimes hit her sons, but she wouldn't let him hurt the girls.
"Maybe in a young boy's mind it seemed like abuse," she say. "Maybe Bob just didn't know him."
Fulcher sees it differently. At a student forum in September, in which he publicly apologized for hitting Glavas, Fulcher hinted that his own history of abuse may have contributed to the battery. But while he criticizes his stepfather, he says he was not all bad: Gillum paid the bills, taught him a sense of responsibility and sometimes surprised the kids with toys, including a wind-up car that was one of Fulcher's favorites.
"There were times when he was the worst person in the world, but it would be bad to judge him on those times." Pulcher says. "Hob wasn't the worst person when I remember calling him Daddy."
Child leader in neighborhood
Fulcher's best friends from the "hood" were Mike and Brian. Mike — Mike Jones — now plays for the Los Angeles Raiders. Brian is in jail for robbing a pool hall.
"It wasn't the ghetto, but it wasn't easy," says Jones. "You could run into drugs and alcohol. If you get out of high school there, you accomplished something."
Fulcher was popular in the neighborhood and says he often was approached by dealers who wanted him to sell drugs. But Fulcher focused his energy on school and sports. One summer when he was a teen-ager, he and Jones coached a baseball team of younger boys.
"Darren saw so many people go down, so many problems in life," Jones says. "He tried to keep drugs out and kids off the street and ... set an example of positive Black leadership."
Despite his size—just 5-foot-6 and 135 pounds — then Fulcher excelled at football. He put himself on a disciplined regimen, earning the rank co-captain and all-state defensive back.
"I can see him now, drilling people," says Keith Hanamine. Southwest's athletic director and former football coach. "He was a star. He had heart, character, desire and leadership."
On the field, Fulcher would level players twice as large, then reach down to help them up. After a tough loss to Rival Southeast High School, they would walk across the field and congratulate the win.
"He was extremely disciplined," says Eric Arner, an Overland Park lawyer who was an assistant coach at Jewell. "Darren was willing to try anything to make himself better."
In 1986, Fulcher earned a partial football scholarship to William Jewell College in Libererburg.
ning coach.
Overcoming racial innocence
Fulcher says she was asleep to racial barriers as a child. His high school was 60-percent Black, but its students were "children of no color," according to a teacher there. Fulcher's chums in the neighborhood and on the playing field were Black; in the accelerated classrooms at school they were predominately white. He sahes he was bilingual—taking 'hood lingo and white lingo and sashaying between the two worlds with ease.
"I was blinded by my education, how I had actually been indoctrinated into believing in a Christian belief."
His first awakening may have come at Jewell, where only 2 percent of the 1,400 students were Black, where 90 percent of the Blacks are white, and that they remember whites using racial slurs.
But the alarms really went off for Fulcher one day when he was sitting in front of Wescow
Fulcher had exhausted his knees and his money at Jewell, and after spending some time in California with his real father, he enrolled at KU as a soonborn.
What he saw in front of Wesco were the athletics tables in Greece, greens clustering in the middle.
"I looked around and thought," Damn, I am Black." he said
He embraced the principles espoused in "The Autobiography of Malcom X": Rather than change to fit the establishment, change the establishment.
"Here was a man who came from the bottom, who educated himself and knew he who was." Fulcher says. "He wasn't afraid to stand up for what he believed. And when he thought his opinions were wrong, he would go back and change it. He always growing and searching for himself."
Fulcher later became one of the founders of Black Men of Today, which addresses minority recruitment and racial violence and tries to foster positive images of Black men.
"Being Black in America is a sticky situation," he says. "It's like being in box. We're all trying to get out of the box, and we're fighting each other to get out instead. Working together."
Co-founder Mark McCormick says Fulcher provided the group's passion.
"Darren was the person who kept us spiritually committed," he says. "He is in touch with who he is culturally and spiritually, and he has a way of making him happen to one of his people happens to him."
McCormick, now a reporter for the Louisville (Ky) Courier Journal, says Fulcher has the makings of a great leader — if he can be a good leader than be controlled by them. "He can be too nass-
sionate, to the point of not thinking clearly," McCormick says.
Each fall, Fulcher and his daughter go to a park, choose a "special leaf" and laminate it in a scrapbook. If the weather is nice, the girl's friend brings them on, joins him, her own, younger daughter(s) and
Fulcher agrees: "I was never good at commenting, when I was hurt. I have a tempue that to lose.
Fatherhood responsibilities
Fulcher was 17 and had been voted "biggest flirt" at Southwest when he stopped Jessica McKnight in the school hall and asked her for a date. She said no.
"His girlfriend, who was my friend, was standing right there." McKnight recalls "I stood for a while."
But Fulcher persisted. They dated for some time after he left for college. Even now, when Fulcher speaks of McKnight, his voice drops, his eyes roll, and he can't stop his smile. He calls her wild, the love of his life, the only woman he could "never put a handle on."
Their daughter was born after their breakup; Fulcher learned about it from a cousin. McKnight, who has since had a second child from another relationship, says she initially didn't want Fulcher back in her life. But again, he persisted.
"I just didn't want the kid to grow up without a father," he says. "I grew up without a father. I always wanted someone to throw a football with, to play catch with."
Fulcher is now a regular visitor to McKnight's home in Kansas City, Md., where she is raising her daughters with the help of relatives. He voluntarily gives McKnight money he can. Last Christmas, he took the girls shopping and bought every toy they put in the cart.
"He's so loving and emotional, and they have so much fun together," McKnight says. "They run Darren. They might be the only two women who can control that boy."
February batter incident
Fulcher won't say exactly what happened
to morning of Feb. 11. Neither will Audra
Glau
"I don't feel I need to talk. 'Glaas says." "We chose to resolve it. And Darren told me that anything I say will be twisted and taken the wrong way."
In September, Glavas wrote a letter publicly supporting Fulcher's continued presidency. She now says she was pressured to make the decision because of the publicity the publicity caused her to quit a job.
"life has been awful," she says. "Do you
need hard it to go to school and still try
deal with it?"
She says Fulcher has lied about the February incident to "make him look good." But he never did.
Fulcher admits that his relationship with
Sarah began, since she started dating him in high school.
"We have had some fights," he says. "We've both done things that we're a shame of. Some people think we've been wrong."
was never a hit."
Audra Glavas had complained of earlier physical confrontations with Fulcher, according to her brother, Aaron, a student at American University in Washington, D.C. Fulcher will "be your friend, but if you make him mad," he'll lay out you."
And childhood friend Ray Gatapia says he once pulled Fulcher off Glavas during an alteration on a social outing. "He may have only stuck Audra once, but he's manhandled her a lot."
Last winter, Fulcher was bench pressing -34 pounds. "Maybe a slap me is a hit to someone else."
Perhaps Fulcher ranked at the accusations from his African-American friends that he was "talking Black, sleeping white." As Fulcher became more involved in Black politics, he says he became less able to talk to Glavas, who is white. And at some point, he says, she began to symbolize the white establishment.
Fulcher's father, John, an aerospace mechanic in the Los Angeles area, says, "Darren doesn't make it a practice to hit women. I will say that Darren is a lot like me — he does have a temper. If someone pushes him in a corner, he will fight back."
"I see being angry," he says now. "Just at the system, at the world."
Looking forward to the future
Student government often serves as the minor leagues of national politics. Fulcher says he's being watched: U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebum's office keeps clips on the controversy, and he recently had dinner with State Rep. Wint Winter Jr., R-Lawrence.
"He told me to just hang in there," Fulcher said, he said I had handled myself adquirably.
To gain the presidency, Fulcher forged a coalition of minorities, women and liberal white fraternities in a time when the campus was eager for some racial diversity.
He has lest favor with some of his stunceatheminist allies who now see his assault onGlavas an assault on all women. But Fulcher has been accused that he has been the victim of a racially biased press.
"It's difficult to see your name in the paper every day. It can wear you down," says Carlos Fleming, a Cleveland senior and a member of Black Men of Today. "But Darren deals with it like a man. He's made it a lesson, a stepping stone."
Through it all, Fulcher continues his jbp as student body president, plugging away at what he says will be his legacy: A major lecture series came a step closer to fruition recently when Senate approved his $23,000 request. He continues to work for better campus lighting.
"I'm just trying to do what's right," he says.
"That'll call I can do."
That, and wait for the Judicial Board's ruling. Regardless of the outcome, he plans to graduate with a history degree in May, then enter law school. When he speaks of his future, he does not qualify it with might-be or want-to say simply "I'm going to be a U.S. senator."
And regardless of the outcome, he says he hopes to have more time to relax, to take walks in the cold and climb to the top of Wells Overlook, where he can think.
"This is a good time," he says. "What's so surprising that I'm getting to know Darren. Self-esteem is lacking."
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