Boston’s police department is facing backlash after posting a tweet that honored a white basketball coach for Black History Month. The since-deleted tweet commended the late Celtics and legend Red Auerbach, for being the first NBA coach to draft a black player, fielding the league’s first all-black starting lineup, and hiring its first black coach, Bill Russell.
The tweet:
“In honor of #BlackHistoryMonth, we pay tribute to @celtics legend #RedAuerbach for being the 1st@NBA coach to draft a black player in 1950, field an All African-American starting five in 1964 and hire the league’s 1st African-American head coach (Bill Russell) in 1966.”
Red hot fire is what happened after that. Critics want to know why is a white man being honored for Black History Month?
Twitterverse:
Only in #Boston do the @bostonpolice honor Red Auerbach for #blackhistorymonth. So we already have the shortest month and now this. Please file this under Hell Nah aka Not Having it aka Not Ok. #bospoli #Boston #mapoli
The Boston Police Department really tried to #AllLivesMatter Black History Month.
We do celebrate many people in Boston and Red is rightfully one of them. We don’t often hear about many others though and Black History Month, Women’s History Month ans Hispanic Heritage Month give a chance to add other heroes and sheroes in the mix.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said the department’s tweet was completely inappropriate and a gross misrepresentation of how we are honoring Black History Month in Boston. “We are celebrating the accomplishments and limitless contributions of the Black community to our city and the entire country, from Harriet Tubman to great leaders of today such as Chief Justice Ireland, artists like New Edition and Michael Bivins, powerful activists including Mel King and Superintendent Lisa Holmes, the first African-American woman to lead the Boston Police Academy training program.” The mayor added that black leaders and activists should be honored with “the respect they deserve” not just in February, but every month of the year. The BPD to their credit did apologize and replace the tweet with one honoring Bill Russell, but not before some more drama.
BPD new tweet:
#ICYMI: In honor of #BlackHistoryMonth we pay tribute to Bill Russell, one of the greatest @celtics of all time and the first African-American head coach in the history of the NBA when he was named @celtics coach on November 15, 1966.
ICYMI is short for “in case you missed it.” The new tweet was met with disbelief and mortification. People got the feeling the BPD just didn’t get it. Personally, I think it was a matter of “piss on them ungrateful nigge*s.” Anywho, the NAACP called the tweet beyond perplexing” and very sad. “Every time we think there may be some signs of hope…we get a reminder that we have a long way to go. A mighty long way to go,” a Monday Facebook post from the chapter read. “The people of Boston deserve an apology…and not the tweet that says ‘may have offended some’…or ‘not our intention’. That does not matter. The tweet was offensive. Period.”
Boston has had it share of riding the race trolly. Boston was among one of the last cities to integrate their schools. In the summer of 1974, federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city’s schools, creating one system for blacks and another for whites, separate, unequal and unconstitutional. Some 18,000 black and white students were ordered to take buses to schools outside of their neighborhoods. That’s when it hit the fan. On the day the schools system was to be desegregated, just 59 of 201 schools were desegregated that day. South Boston High School or “Southie” was ground zero for anti-busing rage. Hundreds of white demonstrators, children and their parents pelted a caravan of 20 school buses carrying students from nearly all-black Roxbury to all-white South Boston. Jean McGuire, who was a bus safety monitor recalled, “I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School… the bricks through the windows, signs hanging out those buildings, ‘Nigger Go Home.’ Pictures of monkeys. The words. The spit. People just felt it was all right to attack children.”
Many parents who could afford it moved to the suburbs or sent their children to private or parochial schools. The year busing began, there were 86,000 students enrolled in Boston public schools, more than half of them white. Today there are 54,000 students, and less than 14 percent are white.
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