Living through difficult times again
After attending a United States Naval Academy admissions briefing at the John D. O’Bryant Public School in Roxbury on Saturday, longtime neighborhood activist Greg Davis, who was with several other folks from the DudleyRoxbury community, came up to me on Malcolm X Boulevard, and we had a nice long conversation about what it was like in the old days in the black community.
We talked about how I played basketball for an all-black basketball team, Jack Crumb’s Bruins, with Jeep Jones, Roscoe Baker, boxing champion Walter Byers, Bobby Davis, Sky King and Eddie Washington, just to name a few of the many great athletes who grew up in the area. Boston’s neighborhoods produced some of America’s best athletes.
But a few minutes later another resident stopped me on Washington Street and said, “Mayor, when you and Mel King used to talk to the young adults in the neighborhood a couple of years ago about the importance of education and staying away from drugs, that was one of most positive things I have ever seen. They really admired and listened to you guys. I heard you on ‘The Morgan White Show’ on WBZ Radio the other night and tried to phone in to tell you that I wished that you and Mel still spoke to the kids like you used to do. You are both longtime Boston neighborhood guys, and nobody knows Boston neighborhoods better than you two guys do.”
As I told my grandson Joe, who was with me, I have many wonderful memories of this neighborhood that go back many years, playing sports, the Mission Church, Hibernian Hall, Roxbury Boys Club, and I even told him about how on Saturday mornings I would take the streetcar to an Irish newspaper and record store, O’Byrne DeWitt, in Dudley Square with my grandfather, who joined other men who were born and fought in The Irish Rebellion. I would hear them talk about growing up in Ireland when their country at that time was involved an open violent rebellion with England. Talk about persecution and discrimination.
But when I hear on the radio and see all the political hate speech on TV going on in Washington, D.C., today, it makes me wonder if we are any better off today than Catholics were in Ireland, blacks were in the South and Native Americans were in the West. I thought a lot about this Saturday while listening to the great history of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the heroic sacrifices of our U.S. military over these many years, the blood, sweat and tears of American families, and our past immigrant population and compare it to today’s elitist, self-serving activists who have dominated the news for their own narrow political objectives.
It makes you wonder, how hopeful is our nation’s future? It sure doesn’t sound like the proud history of America, which past generations of Americans fought, died and sacrificed for.