Finding The Fire
That is the high point of a sprinter's life and very few people can be successful in it. The talent to run fast is one component, but the focus and drive, the welled-up fire inside each sprinter that explodes along with the starter's gun, propelling the runner down the track, must come from somewhere. Behind every good sprinter is an upbringing that creates and then shapes this type of mentality. Kimani Paul-Emile is no different.
Kimani was born in Boulder, Colo., to parents who worked in education and stressed it for their daughter. When she was five, the family moved to New York City and then settled near Boston when the youngster was in third grade. Thus, life began in the Rocky Mountains, but Kimani would grow up in a big city environment.
Or would she? After living in Belmont, Mass., for two years, the Paul-Emile family moved to Sudbury, a small Boston suburb. "Sudbury is a small town and I actually liked growing up in a small town," she said in a recent interview. "I live in New York now and I'm really happy with that, but it was like everyone knew everyone else [in Sudbury] and that was neat growing up."
But there were obvious outward differences between the Paul-Emile family and the other residents of Sudbury. With a mother from Jamaica and a tri-lingual father from Haiti, Kimani did not look like many other Sudbury children of Irish or Italian descent. Whereas Belmont had been a multicultural community and Kimani's elementary school had included scores of children of color, Sudbury was different.
"Sudbury was pretty much an all-white town," she remembered. "I think we were one of maybe two or three black families in Sudbury. But being in a small town, because everyone knew each other, you didn't have to feel too much of the whole..."
And then she pauses, trying to search for the right phrase, the right word. This is an extremely positive individual and she is proud of the town where she grew up. She knows discrimination exists in the world, and indeed, has committed her life to relieving people of the pain derived from prejudice. But Sudbury was her haven growing up, sheltering her from the dark outside world, and she wants to be clear that although Sudbury was an all-white town in theory, it was an extremely accepting place in reality.
"It wasn't diverse, but my high school had a busing program where students from Boston were bused in to schools in the suburbs," she finally says. "It wasn't successful in many places, but it actually worked in Sudbury."
But it wasn't always easy. Racism reared its ugly head soon after Kimani and her family moved to Sudbury, not in the form of strong epithets or threats of violence, but out of ignorance. "Why are your palms white?", other children would ask Kimani. "Can I touch your hair?"
"I remember when I first moved to Sudbury," she said. "I was in fifth grade and we moved in the middle of the year, which is very difficult for kids. The school I had gone to [in Belmont] before we moved to Sudbury had been really diverse. It was my first week of school and this kid came up to me and said 'you know, you don't act like a black person, you don't talk like a black person. 'I remember being so floored. And I just looked at him and said, 'well, what are we supposed to talk like, what do black people in France talk like, what do black people in Africa talk like.' And I remember going home and telling my parents, 'I can't take this, we have to move back [to Belmont].'
"But going back to the small town thing, as people got to know me, they knew ME. I had people ask me ignorant questions, but it was because they didn't have exposure to people of color."
She says it all so matter-of-factly that you wonder how she built up the maturity to consider these issues so thoughtfully, to look back on a negative childhood experience with laughter. Consider "Why are your palms white?", the question that Kimani often was asked by other children. It's a question that Kimani describes with a laugh as her "favorite." Again, she took a potentially difficult childhood experience and learned from it, focusing on the positives and not allowing secondary issues to deter her.
You begin to see the foundation for a track sprinter's psyche, and that's why Sudbury is so important in Kimani's athletic career. She remembers being 10 or 11 years old when she began to run track, about the time her family moved to Sudbury. Certainly, the talent was in the genes. Her father, Serge, had come to the United States when he was 20 years old to attend NYU, and he had been a track star at that institution. But remember, talent is only part of the equation. To be a successful sprinter, to be willing to line up in the blocks time and time again, to be able to handle the extreme change in emotions that can take place in such a short time, you must have that positive outlook on life that Kimani developed, you must have that ability to laugh, and you must have that focus and drive.
Track & field became a huge part of Kimani's life in high school and she excelled at the sport. She remembers being a two-time state champion, but cannot remember the events or the year. Instead, her high school memories gave way to what she describes as an "amazing" collegiate experience.
Kimani always had known that she wanted to run track at a school that was academically challenging; with two academic parents, there wasn't much of an option. During the 1988 New England Championships at Brown University, when Kimani was a junior at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, she approached Teri Smith, a star Brown sprinter in her freshman year at the time. Kimani asked Smith how she enjoyed Brown and the two young women became engaged in conversation. Smith invited Kimani to visit the Brown campus and to stay with her. Then, a few months later, long-time Brown head coach Bob Rothenberg called Kimani and her college choice was set. She applied early to Brown and was accepted for admission in the fall of 1989.
You can sense her growing smile as she speaks by telephone about her four years at Brown. The "amazing" experience began a week before school even had started, at the Third World Transition Program, an orientation program geared towards students of color. There, she participated in discussions about what it's like to be a minority, and made many friends with whom she remains close today. The multicultural environment at Brown offered her a new community, different from the one in which she had been raised, and Kimani was excited by the change, by the opportunity to meet fascinating people from all around the world and learn about their unique approaches to life.
"For many of us," she says, "it was a time, and maybe for the rest of our lives the only time, that you can spend a week with all of these amazingly accomplished people of color who are aware of what they're doing and where they're going and what the potential is. It's hard to express, it was just amazingly empowering."
For an individual who "always" had known she wanted to be a civil rights litigator, the experience helped to legitimize and shape a career path. Kimani double majored in political science and American civilization, with a focus on women of color, and competed on the track team for four years. Although it was a huge time commitment to participate in athletics on top of a full courseload and other campus activities, Kimani persevered and excelled at everything she did. She won a remarkable nine Heptagonal Championship titles in four years, including three indoor 200-meter crowns. Ironically, the one first-place finish that escaped her in the indoor 200-meters was snatched up by the very same Teri Smith who had introduced Kimani to Brown.
After graduation, she attended Georgetown University Law School and, in the summer of 1996, began a two-year fellowship at the Center for Constitutional Rights. In her office in New York City's Greenwich Village, she works on labor issues affecting two disadvantaged groups, women and people of color, including lawsuits against sweatshops in the garment industry. Although it is just a fellowship, she already calls it her "dream job," and has accepted an offer to continue in her work after the fellowship concludes this fall.
Kimani is a unique individual and track fittingly gave her one more thing that is not guaranteed for the average champion sprinter. Kimani Paul-Emile was married last year to a man she met during her freshman year at Brown, and to no surprise, she met him in the track program. She says that Brown taught her to stretch boundaries and she is extremely thankful for that experience. The discipline, focus and drive she developed as a sprinter help her today in the courtrooms and boardrooms around the nation.
-- Dan Rosenthal
***Please note, this story was written for a previous Ivy League Black History Month celebration. It is reproduced here for archival purposes and has not been updated.***