I grew up there, went to dances there and dated girls from there.
I got stabbed, beat up, road my bicycle there.
I was just there this past weekend and going back next week. have friends and family there.
The reason why it is not reported many times things are handled "in-house" when these things occur.
I love The Bronx.
I was born in Brooklyn in 1936. As I recall, the streets of Brooklyn and Bronx were, until the mid-1960s, as safe as any other place in America and safer than some. But then things changed.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 held that any American citizen could move from any state to any state of choice -- and, if need be, apply for and promptly receive public assistance (welfare). I am recalling pictures on the front page of the
New York Daily News and
The Post of thousands of migrant Blacks from the deep South arriving at Manhattan's mid-town
Greyhound bus depot, many of them carrying suitcases, some tied with rope, and pillowcases stuffed with belongings. One such picture showed a line of these mostly unskilled, illiterate, impoverished refugees, descendants of slaves from the land of
Jim Crow, extending from the doorway of the Eighth Avenue welfare office all the way down to Ninth Avenue, and around.
What happened next was a dramatic rise in street crime; burglary, assault and robbery (
mugging), car theft and malicious assault. The rise was such that the ranks of the NYPD swelled from 23,500 in 1965 to over 40,000 by 1979. Nearly double.
While I will be denounced as a "racist" for what I've said above I am simply reporting some easily verifiable facts, the summary of which is the witnessed migration of hundreds of thousands of Southern Blacks from states where Jim Crow mandates forbade them to use the same public toilets as Whites and, in some extreme examples, forbade them to walk on a sidewalk used by Whites.
The topic school-bus incident may be called a continuing element of an apparently endless legacy. A
payback in the North for things that happened in the South, long go.
