Satch Sanders

[kevin lok <kevin.lok@lycosmail.com>]

http://www.bostonherald.com/bostonherald/colm/fitz02092000.htm

Ex-Celtic still feels pain of past prejudice
by Joe Fitzgerald
Wednesday, February 9, 2000
Satch Sanders, the defensive stalwart who collected eight championship
rings in a 13-year run with the Celtics, sat in his New York office
yesterday, pondering this paper's Page 1 headline: ``Study points to
segregation in Hub-area home sales.''
Now an NBA vice president, Sanders, 61, knows firsthand the hostility
blacks encounter when moving into lily-white environs.
He received those credentials in a tony Chestnut Hill cul-de-sac where,
after being named Harvard's basketball coach upon his Celtics
retirement, he bought a lovely home worlds removed from the Harlem
tenements in which he was raised. But his ownership was immediately
challenged by night riders who shouted obscenities while littering his
lawn with trash.
What hurt even more, however, were the neighbors who never acknowledged
what happened, let alone conveying regrets. A quarter-century later, it
remains a painful memory.
``You can't say nothing has changed,'' he suggested. ``We all know
better than that. Opportunities are expanding in many areas for blacks.
The biggest change is that there's now the possibility of recourse,
thanks to laws and regulations. But the question we still need to be
asking is, `Are people changing?' That's the change that's needed
most.''
It's basic: Where freedom is limited, no freedom exists. A housing
market limited by the covert resistance of residents is not a free and
open market.
When Boston NAACP President Lenny Alkins charges ``there are affordable
houses in predominantly white areas that are not shown to people of
color,'' it hardly comes as news.
The busing crisis that split this city apart was spawned by
surreptitious racism that quarantined minorities within the inner city.
Neighborhood schools could no longer be defended once neighborhoods
became reflections of institutional bigotry aided and abetted by real
estate agents and bankers.
The imposed cure, as reprehensible as the disease, forced kids to pay
for that unacceptable behavior of adults. Now here we are, 25 years
later, still playing the same game.
Late in his Celtics career, Sanders talked with great emotion about a
summer visit he had paid to his old Harlem stamping ground down by the
corner of 125th and Lenox.
``It hurt no end to stop at a traffic light and see maybe 15 kids on a
stoop and realize not one of them may be lucky enough to realize there's
something else on the other side of that river, another life below 96th
Street.
``I mean it's sickening to drive through there at night and see this
sweltering mass of humanity on every block, pouring out of those
buildings in search of the simplest kind of comfort, like a bit of
breeze. Damn, how big a gift is that, just to be able to draw a fresh
breath?''
That home in Chestnut Hill would have meant more than any of those
neighbors could have imagined but he wasn't welcomed and he knew it. It
brings to mind something Malcolm X observed the morning after his home
was firebombed in 1965.
``I'm not in a society that practices brotherhood,'' he said. ``I'm in a
society that might preach it on Sunday but doesn't practice it any day.
Ten men can be sitting at a table, dining. I can come in and sit where
they're dining. I've got a plate in front of me, but there's nothing on
it. Because all of us are sitting at the same table, are all of us
diners?
``I'm not a diner until you let me dine. Just because you're in this
country doesn't make you an American. No. You've got to go further than
that. You've got to enjoy the fruits of Americanism.''
Clearly, as yesterday's story revealed, those fruits are still not
available to everyone.
``You look at what happened in Texas, where that man (James Byrd Jr.)
was dragged to death,'' Sanders said, ``and you can't help wondering,
`What has really changed?'
``Yet we know there's been lots of change. You can't indict an entire
nation; you have to look at individuals. That's where the real change
must occur and we've still got quite a way to go.''