Boom! by Tom Brokaw

Author:Tom Brokaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781588366474
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Stan Sanders

“Watts in 1965 was a riot, not a revolution.”

When Ouida Barnett Atkins was growing up in white privilege in Mississippi, Stan Sanders was growing up in Watts, the sprawling black community in South Central Los Angeles that became an international symbol for urban racial rage when it exploded into six days of riots and fires in 1965 after a young Watts resident was beaten by police.

Before the riots, Watts was to Los Angeles what Georgetown was to Jackson, Mississippi—the city’s largest and best-organized black working-class community. The Sanders family was typical of the residents who settled in Watts following World War II. Stan’s mother and father migrated there from Texas in the late Forties, after his dad came home from the war. They were looking for work and hoping to escape the harsh racism of their native state. Stan’s father went to work for the city of Los Angeles, hauling trash, and remained a city employee for forty years.

For a modern young man in California in the Fifties, Stan Sanders had an unusually close connection to slavery. His mother was forty-four when he was born. Her mother, Stan’s grandmother, was born into slavery in 1857 on an eastern Kentucky tobacco plantation. She gave birth to Stan’s mother forty-one years later. As a result, he says, the legacy of slavery was very real. “It shaped the ethos of our family. I can remember my mother singing lullabies sung to her by her mother—slave lullabies.”

Sanders’s older brother, Ed, personified the family’s brief generational journey from its roots in slavery to the slow opening of opportunities for black families in urban America in the Fifties. His football prowess in Los Angeles earned him a scholarship at Idaho State. He joined a now-integrated Navy during the Korean War. He was a gifted boxer, so the Navy assigned him to its service boxing team, and he was soon the talk of the sport. In 1952 in Helsinki, Ed Sanders became the first African-American to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. He defeated Ingemar Johansson of Sweden, who would later become the world heavyweight champion.

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