Drylongso Awards bring honor to Boston anti-racists

Kay Bourne

Karen Miller, the first female firefighter on the Boston Fire Dept., was fascinated with the job from her earliest years – and angry about how the department seemed biased against black people.

In her acceptance speech at the Drylongso Awards, Friday, Nov. 4, she recalled that growing up in the Orchard Park housing development (now Orchard Gardens), she could hear the sirens from the fire house nearby. “As kids we’d go over to look at the trucks,” she recalls, “and the firemen would chase us off. But we saw that when little white children visited, not only did the firemen welcome them but even let them sit on the trucks.

“My mother is hearing what I’m about to say for the first time tonight,” she continued. “In retaliation, we kids would go up on the roofs of the project when the fire trucks responded to our community and we’d drop rocks down on them.

“I’m not saying I’m proud of that way of dealing with the department’s negatives but I am saying our work isn’t done to make it an equitable Boston service. When I came onto the department, my fellow workers put glass in my boots, my equipment would disappear. But I did the job and I fought to bring more women on. There are 19 female firefighters to date.

“However, the last two classes of graduates to the department were all white, and we’re losing the African American firefighters we have to retirement and injury. We need fire fighters who understand the different cultures in this city, who can understand the different languages that are spoken so I’m going to keep up the fight.

“Recently, I asked my 10-year-old son, who has seen all that I go through, what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he replied, ‘I want to be the commissioner of the fire department,’” Miller concluded with familial pride.

The awards sponsored by Community Change gives its prized recognition annually to persons who fight racism, as their statement puts it: “ordinary people doing extraordinary anti-racism work in Greater Boston.” Other awardees Friday night at the dinner held at Simmons College were Judy Tso of Aha Solutions Unlimited, Candelaria Silva-Collins, director of ACT Roxbury Consortium, and Libbie Shufrow, president and CEO of Boston Center for the Arts and a member of Community Change since 1971.

Also receiving awards were Mukiya Baker-Gomez, community activist and chief of staff to state Rep. Gloria Fox; Yawu Miller, senior editor of the Bay State Banner; Dr. Vivian Dalila Carlo, assistant professor, School of Education, Lesley University and consultant to the WGBH-TV children’s show “Postcards from Buster;” and Union of Minority Neighborhoods.

Gospel singer and educator (and former Drylongso awardee) Larry Watson was emcee. The children of Ballet Rox performed several dances from the upcoming Urban Nutcracker. The award was a framed Afro-Ethnograph by Reginald L. Jackson that combines a photograph “The Shackle” with a quotation from Bishop Desmond Tutu.