|
I'm meeting next week with some Roman-Catholic friends of mine because I have an issue that the Roman-Catholic church has not weighed in on the miserable and devastating violence that we have going on in our communities right now. They haven't weighed in on that. You know, obviously we have that in the black church. But I have some other friends who are not African-American in the Protestant community, religious folk, that ought to make a statement. As I said earlier we've got to make the connection that you don't go in and just rip the heart out of a community. Take the culture and life out of a community and then not recognize that today's violence is born out of that. These kids did not grow up with the folk looking over them and looking out for them that I did. I learned to play baseball in a community setting that everything was black owned and black run. Every dime was paid for by the Prince Hall Masons. Now my dad happened to be around. Prince Hall Masons is a black fraternal, a Masonic order. Now, my dad happened to be around, but my partners, my buddies, whose dads weren't around didn't grow up thinking black men didn't love them. We had two men that were our coaches and they knew more about life than they did baseball. So they coached us more about life than they did baseball. They helped us to grow to be men. That's what's ripped out of our communities.
It ain't all on the other folk. We let it happen. We let it happen. We let the influx of money that came in; allowed them to take things out of our hands. When we were growing up playing baseball in that league none of us grew up thinking. I considered myself the best pitcher on our team. Sometimes the coach didn't think so, but I never thought it was because of the color of my skin. So I got reinforced as a person before I really had to confront a whole lot of that. You know I had those incidents growing up, but I had so much reinforcement. That's what kept me healthy though any ugly incidents that may have come my way. And now we don't have that.
I submit that it's because our cultural and social structure was destroyed. You're talking about going to the Cotillion. I don't know what time you went to it, but in our neighborhoods, we had black cotillions that rivaled anyone's. A friend of mine just got back from Denver, he went to his granddaughter's cotillion, and he brought the book back, and I was shocked: she and another girl were the only two black girls in the cotillion. In my day, white people had their cotillions and we had ours. As I mentioned to you, I wasn't allowed to be a part of my girlfriend's—she got escorted by somebody else, because we were "thuggish." I was an only child. My parents were working-class people, but because I was an only child, our money went a lot further. So we bought a house, and our family lawyer lived across the street from us. My doctor, Doctor Elmer Anderson, lived near us. But my folks didn't have all that college and stuff like that, so, on the one hand because of where I lived and where I went to school, I was expected to be a part of that, but my mentality was still back on the other side of town, and those were all still my best friends.
You mentioned in the pre-interview about the black community not owning property. What are your thoughts economically?
I'm so glad you've jogged my memory because I think that's important. What I said in the pre-interview was: as African-Americans, we have more money now, but we had more wealth when I was a boy. And what I said was money and wealth are two different things; money, the only thing you do with money is you consume, you become a consumer. But with wealth, you make things happen. And what I mean by that is we used to own property, and we owned businesses, we owned property, we owned commercial structures as well as residential structures, we had capital goods that we owned. And now, we own less—we have some big things, but I'm talking about in the large way. And when I say we have some big things, we have some very famous people who own a lot—Oprah, P. Diddy, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and others—Earl Graves—and others that you may not have heard of. But, then, average folk were investing in their lives by owning things. You could go up and down the street on Fillmore Street—hundreds of black businesses. I can tell you that as late as the early seventies, we used to jokingly say that—I wasn't preaching then, remember that—that if you, at midnight, if you started hitting the clubs on Fillmore, starting at about O'Farrell, and go all the way to Clay or Washington, and you didn't catch a woman, you didn't deserve one. At that late, there was Minnie's Can-Do Club, the University Hideaway, the Scene, the Flamingo Room, Jack's, Nate Thurman's, The Beginning, and I know I'm leaving out some, you follow me? Up and down the street. And that's as late as the early seventies. There was just life up and down. Well, these were black-owned places. Well, what does that mean? That means that the people who owned these places were contributing to every event that was going on in our community. When youth groups came through, when the little league team had a chance to go to Vallejo, or to L.A. to play, the city government and the state government and the federal government did not give us the money to go. Our community—the church made a donation. Every boy on the team, or if it was a girl's event, every girl—the church made donations. And that's how they went.
|
