“I’ve lived in Aurora all my life, and I never knew all that was going on.” My old friend Ruth cornered me to say how much she liked my book. It was full of exciting local history she did not know existed.
Ruth is White. The people in my book are mostly Black. That explains why she never knew that Coach Walters was putting our town on the map in a national arena. That arena is the Amateur Athletic Union and its Junior Olympics, where Coach’s child athletes have been winning medals over the past six decades. The AAU website says it “has set the standard for amateur sports in the United States with one goal in mind: ‘Sports for all, forever.’” Race is not a factor there.
To research those decades I delved into our daily newspaper archives. Until recent years there was no reporting about the lives of our Black citizens. No weddings, births, deaths, engagements, or fund-raiser galas; no man-on-the-street observations; no achievements applauded.
My friend Ruth would have read that paper every day. She would not have known what was missing. She would have lived in a White neighborhood while the Black citizens lived in their redlined, segregated housing.
No wonder she was excited to learn more. An entire community was thriving on the other side of the unknown. Unlike Ruth, I got to meet many Black achievers, entrepreneurs, and just plain people like me. I interviewed them for my book about Coach Walters. Many were more admirable than myself, but all were as humanly flawed as I am.
Like Ruth, I was energized to learn what had been kept from me for a lifetime.
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