Passing the torch from the old guard to a new set of heroes and heroines
As we look toward the end of the year, it is customary to also reflect on those we lost and their impact on our community. This year, that reflection was even more special for me because my aunt Jean McGuire was one of the Museum of African American History’s (MAAH) latest Living Legend honorees. And she is one of few leaders still alive from what I refer to as the “Old Guard,” the generation of Black leaders from the Boston area who asserted their community’s power and wiped out de facto segregation in the Boston Public Schools, the police force, fire department, and state and local municipal jobs. They also fought and changed the private job market and higher education and pushed to change and make life as we know it less discriminatory overall. One lesson we can learn from them is they all knew each other and tended to work together. Even when they disagreed, they engaged one another.
Others from McGuire’s generation who are still with us include former State Representatives Byron Rushing and Shirley Owens-Hicks; Hubie Jones, former dean of Boston University’s School of Social Work; Melvin Miller, founder of the Bay State Banner; art historian Edmund Barry Gather; and businessman Marvin Gilmore.
Unfortunately, many of the Old Guard are gone too soon. Most recently, we lost the legendary State Representative Gloria Fox, considered the poor people’s advocate. As a representative from Roxbury, she fought relentlessly for her people and, when she retired from the Legislature, was the longest serving woman in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. This year we also lost Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first Black woman reporter on local television in Boston. Sara was a personal mentor of mine and former colleague for more than a decade at WBZ-TV Channel 4, CBS’s Boston affiliate. As first black reporter on WBZ, the nation’s first television station, Shaw worked tirelessly to tell stories about redlining, poverty and systemic discrimination that was more prevalent when she started as a television reporter in the late 1960s.
The year before we lost Mel King, an icon to the local rainbow coalition of progressives in Boston and the highest-finishing Black candidate for Boston mayor so far, in the 1983 mayoral race. He conceived the “Rainbow Coalition” politics that Jesse Jackson adopted for his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for president. In 2023, we also lost Saundra Graham, the first Black woman elected to the Cambridge City Council and first Black woman from Cambridge elected as a state representative. She dedicated her life to trying to create better opportunities for children and youth as a specialist in day care legislation, establishing the mass Child Care Coalition, and also helping to create the Trotter Institute at UMass Boston.
In 2022, we lost another trailblazer in Bill Owens, the first Black state senator elected in Massachusetts and an early leader in the reparations movement. Owens overcame many obstacles to the progress of Black people and efforts to stall legislation to advance their interests. He also was instrumental in the creation of the state office that assists minority businesses and the city’s summer youth jobs program.
Other members of the Old Guard passed longer ago. Ken Guscott was a major real estate developer, former president of the Boston NAACP, and Jamaica’s honorary consul to Boston. His many business achievements include the only Boston skyscraper built by a Black-owned development company. The former headquarters of the State Street Bank near South Station is prominently visible as you approach downtown from the south on Interstate 93. He passed in 2017.
Then there was Ed Brooke, who was elected attorney general of Massachusetts and the first U.S. senator in the country post Reconstruction. He was instrumental in blocking Richard Nixon’s nomination of a segregationist southerner to the Supreme Court. Brooke died in 2015.
Paul Parks, the first Black secretary of education in Massachusetts, died in 2009. Also, there was Thomas Atkins, who was elected to the Boston City Council in 1967 and served as president of the Boston NAACP when school desegregation began and later general counsel of the NAACP nationally. We lost him in 2008.
We cannot forget Elma Lewis, who founded the National Center of Afro-American Artists and Elma Lewis School in Roxbury that trained and mentored generations of Black youngsters who since have become national and international arts leaders. Lewis — among the first MacArthur “Genius” Award winners — was lost to us in 2004.
From the Old Guard, we also lost Henry Hampton of Blackside Inc. and “Eyes on the Prize” fame in 1998. Ruth Batson, a concerned parent who inspired the school desegregation lawsuit and became an early director of the Metco program, died in 2003. Hampton and Batson also were early champions of the Museum of African American History and the African Meeting House.
There also was former State Senator Royal Bolling Sr., who built a Black family political dynasty based in Mattapan. His sons, Royal Bolling Jr., once a state representative, and Bruce Bolling, first Black president of the Boston City Council, followed in his footsteps to fight for equality. We lost Royal Sr. in 2002 and Bruce in 2012.
These are many people from the Old Guard upon whose shoulders the next generation of Boston’s civil rights and community leaders stand. There are baby boomers like Keith Motley, Joseph Feaster, Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, Kelley Chunn, Louis Elisa, Lee Pelton, and Colette Phillips who have continued the struggle to make our community more free and fair.
My aunt Jean McGuire’s acceptance speech to the MAAH audience reminded all of us what her generation of Black leaders lived through every day. The reality is that “ freedom is not free,” she said. I fear too many of us take freedom for granted. Now we must take the lead from prior generations of Black leaders as they pass the torch to Gen Xers like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers’ Michael Curry, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, MIT Professor Karilyn Crockett, Harvard’s George “Chip” Greenidge, the Urban League’s Rahsaan Hall, the NAACP’s Tanisha Sullivan, community development finance expert Glynn Lloyd, State Senators Liz Miranda and Lydia Edwards, and State Representative Chris Worrell are just a few of the new leaders who must continue to push our city, state and nation to live up to the nation’s creed.
That creed holds all people are created equal and born with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which means living in a country free of discrimination. Our forefathers and foremothers literally gave their lives so we their children could have a better life, and now it is our responsibility to stand in the breach and fight so we give children a better world than we have lived in.
Ronald Mitchell
Publisher and editor, Bay State Banner
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.