October
1, 2004
THE “BARACCUDA” IS BACK!
Did
you see former State Representative Raymond A. Jordan at the Stone Soul
picnic? He looked healthier and more
vigorous than he has looked in many years.
It is no surprise to us Six Corners boys that a Cedar Street boy has
emerged from his illness with the same dignity and determination with which he
lived with it. Congratulations,
Raymond, and welcome back!
The
real value in Bill Cosby’s decision to speak out against the forces that have
infected Black culture is that many others are now following his lead and
condemning behavior that had become acceptable by default, i.e., behavior that
would not have been allowed in the past but, by our silence, was being allowed
to become part of the habits and customs of our youth culture. Parents and other adults, poor or rich, once
had much more influence over kids’ behavior and Cosby has popularized the message
that the decay in certain sectors of the Black community will not be reversed
until we make positive parenting popular again.
BLACK WOMAN WINS SUFFOLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S RACE BIG TIME!
According
to the stream of information coming out of the mainstream press, Andrea Cabral,
a Black woman who was appointed by Jane Swift to be Suffolk County Sheriff, was
supposed to lose to White Boston city councilor, Stephen J. Murphy, in her
first effort to be elected to the office.
As it turned out, Cabral trounced the Irishman in almost every
area. Of the four cities that make up
Suffolk County, she beat him in three, including Boston where she beat him by
almost 11,000 votes (29,831 to 18,938) after the Black community turned out in
droves to vote along with many White voters who ignored the strong and unfair
suggestions by the mainstream press that Cabral was less qualified.
ROY MULLEN: VICE PRESIDENT FOR SALES
Roy
C. Mullen, founder of Mullen Printing Company, has joined the POV team
as Vice President in charge of sales.
Many of you may recall Mullen Printing that started out in what is now
Ben Swan’s campaign headquarters and expanded to a much larger facility on
Liberty Street. At its height, Roy’s
million-dollar business employed 23 people.
We expect Roy’s enthusiasm and characteristic determination to bring
many new advertisers to our paper.
Welcome aboard, Roy!
GO SOUTH YOUNG MAN!
Our
grandparents fled to the north and our contemporaries are streaming back south
and at least one writer has captured the spirit of why. White author Jan Morris, on a return visit
to Charleston, South Carolina wrote, “What a delight it was to see interracial
couples strolling unselfconsciously through the merry crowds—there on East
Battery Street, within sight of Fort Sumter itself! How lovely to detect, in the talk of one of the grandest of
Charlestonian chatelaines, not a flicker of the old racial condescension! How
pleasant to be able to forget whether I was talking to a black person or a
white! What a relief to feel that, if interviewed by today’s Post and Courier
(one of which had skewered her during a 1953 visit, one even writing that she
was one who “wouldn’t mind my daughter marrying a Negro”), I could truly claim
with impunity that a nephew of mine had long been married to a distinguished
black lawyer from Uganda.” Wall
Street Journal, August 8, 2004. I
also recently visited Charleston for four days and found it to be a
delightfully inviting place to visit and I’ve lost count of friends and
relatives who have permanently relocated to the South. How things have changed since the days of
Emmett Till, days when I refused to take the perilous drive south with my
grandfather to visit his relatives for fear of losing life and limb.
DON KING: BUSH REPUBLICAN
So
what’s the big deal? The Republican
Congress is trying to pass a bill to regulate boxing and Black boxing promoter
Don King has contributed more than $40,000.00 to the Republican National
Committee and is traveling the country promoting the Bush presidential ticket
among Black voters. He says his Republican
conversion is based on his belief that Bush is “the man with the plan” who has
convinced him that he is committed to reach out to minorities. Journalists Greg Hitt and David Luhnow
suggest that King’s real motive is to influence legislation that could
interfere with his boxing empire. Wall
Street Journal, August _, 2004.
Isn’t it amazing how they can make a story out of a Black businessman
looking out for his own self interest when he is doing exactly what every major
business contributor in America is doing?
LIBERAL/CONSERVATIVE
GOBBLEDYGOOK!
I
sure hope you all read Howard Manley’s article on Maryland’s Black Lieutenant
Governor, Michael Steele (Boston Herald, September 2, 2004), whose
speech at the Republican National Convention could have easily been a manifesto
for Black progress. The only criticism
that I have of Manly is that I don’t understand why he applied the conservative
label to a speech that seemed to me to be the same old common sense that many
of us learned from our forbears. Some
of Steele’s comments:
“What truly defines the civil rights
challenge today isn’t whether you can get a seat at the lunch counter. It’s whether you can own that lunch counter
to create a legacy of wealth for your children.”
“What government can do is give us the tools we need and then get
out of the way and let us put our hopes into action.”
“If we expect to succeed, if we expect
our children to succeed, we must look to ourselves and not to government to
raise our kids, start our businesses and provide care to our aging
parents.”
“You cannot strengthen the weak by
weakening the strong. You cannot help
the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class
hatred. You cannot help the poor by
destroying the rich. You cannot build
character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and incentive. And you cannot help men permanently by
doing for them what they should do for themselves..”
Manley
wrote: “Weird or not, Steele represents
a growing number of African-Americans who are buying into Bush’s message of
economic self-reliance. Of all the
social programs aimed at minority and poor communities, that component—the virtues
of small and big business—has remained lost.”
True. But Manley should know that Bush is not the
Messiah of economic self-reliance any more than John Kerry discovered
government aid. And to suggest that the
two are mutually exclusive is ridiculous.
Business welfare in this country in the form of bankruptcy laws,
government bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks and more dwarfs individual welfare,
a fact that doesn’t change Steele’s central message. My point is that Bush and the conservative Republicans don’t own
Steele’s message any more than Kerry and the liberal Democrats own it and
labeling the message simply distorts it.
I HAVE A DREAM…
…that someday someone among the various municipal unions will stand up and say that it is time to come together in a spirit of shared sacrifice and join the rest of Springfield in determining what we all can do to help Springfield in its greatest hour of need instead of always asking (demanding) what Springfield can do for them. n