Thanks to Paul Green for teaching me how to shoot off the dribble.
This audio turned into a memoir. Not the original intent but I decided to put it up anyway. I may use a future audio to bring the story up to becoming a “communist” (of sorts) within two (or maybe it’s three) years of the instructive Detroit incident related here —and to becoming radical in the very same onetime Sundown Town referred to in today’s audio (DeKalb, Illinois).
It’s fashionable to hate sports in certian “left” intellectual quarters. I’ve lost a lot of my onetime atachment to professional sports (it helps that all the big Chicago teams suck right now) but that’s not me. In my experience, sports were an essential and mostly healthy aspect of socialization and tended to help me resist the pull of US-American racism. Music (though also curiously enough sports fandom ) and disease did the same for my father. My mother’s brief teaching career in the Robert Taylor Homes (1965-68) was instructive for both her and me.
Here (below) is Dr. King in Soldiers’ Field. I was in the crowd somewhere with my parents. The driver of that limo was my futute boss at the Chicago Urban League (2000-2005), James Compton.
A Race, Sports, Family, Music, Neighborhood, and Car Theft Memoir and Reflection