Re: Satch Sanders

["Cecil Wright" <cecil@hfx.eastlink.ca>]

Thanks for posting this story Kevin.  I was one of those small black boys
who lived in Roxbury in the early 60's, wondering if I would be able to make
it to the 70's.  My family also moved to a suburban, predominantly white
community where we faced some hostility, but fortunately, not to the same
degree as Satch, Russell or any other number of black athletes who toiled in
Boston.

Many of the other high school athletes from Boston, who I later went to
college with, were involved in the METCO program.  Most people thought how
nice it was for them to have an opportunity for them to go to a "good"
school outside the city limits.  What they failed to recognize is that they
had to rise at 5am to get the transpoprtation to arrive on time.  And if
they were involved in a team sport, there were times when they wouldn't make
it home until late in the evening.  Certainly, it was a heavy cross to bear.

Alot of people will not see the pain behind such stories, but it is real,
and most often, overlooked.

Thanks again.

Cecil

----- Original Message -----
From: kevin lok <kevin.lok@lycosmail.com>
To: celtics <celtics@igtc.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2000 9:17 AM
Subject: Satch Sanders


> 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.''
>