(When I returned to Commack last fall for my 30th high school reunion, I got to hang out with Ricky 'Moon' Mullins, my charming old friend and former high school basketball star whose family did eventually get to move into their rebuilt house. When I walked down there to see the destruction, I discovered that racial slurs and ' Go Home!' were spray painted across a piece of plywood used to board up the remains. Within a year of my move to Commack a house two blocks away was burned nearly to the ground as its construction was almost completed. I guess, at the time, I was having a somewhat different reaction to the work of Martin Luther King and his followers than were some other members of my new community. Undoubtedly watching George Wallace, Bull Connor, and the horrors of water cannons and police dogs turned loose on American dreamers in the South primed me for becoming a lifelong skeptic and activist. Viewing that struggle as a youngster, and as a young student of American history, it taught me viscerally about the inequities of America. Forty years ago this month, we took the first of those steps eastward, moving from Plainview to a newly-built house on a former potato field in Commack.ĭuring my early years I'd been watching the Civil Rights movement on television. When I was a little white kid living in a lily-white town with the lily-white name of Plainview, it was the American Dream of my Depression-Baby parents to have a successful family business and to keep moving us eastward-further and further away from New York City-to a series of homes on bigger and bigger lots. Tondayala Charise DuPré, from James Howe's THE MISFITS It's always about black or white, and if you don't think so, it's because you're white.' 'Don't be tellin' me this isn't about black or white.

In 1969 the Coretta Scott King awards were established to recognize authors and illustrators of African descent whose distinguished books promote an understanding and appreciation of the 'American Dream.' But I ain't so sure that place will ever be ours.' We got a lawyer fighting for us to be able to move in there. They think people living in Section Eight housing are poor, dirty, and bad for the neighborhood. But the neighbors went to court to keep us out. 'Zora says none of this woulda happened if Momma and me had gotten that Section Eight house in Pecan Landings. 04 January 2004 BEGGING FOR CHANGE by Sharon G.

Begging for change by sharon g flake