On Wednesday April 16th, ya’ may recall reading that I went to the Habitat for Humanity “Blueprints and Blue Jeans Ball”. (I wrote about it here, under the title “Walking the walk”.) In re-reading my entry, I see now that I failed to mention something that turned out to be pretty significant a few days later. I have the opportunity now to make that mention, and I intend to do so.
The Habitat event was different for a lot of reasons – the suggested attire, the size of the auction, the average age of those in attendance, and the MC was a guy I hadn’t heard of. So while the salad was being set on our table, I took a second and reviewed the program for more information on who Ken Arthur was and why he was speaking. It turns out that Ken was chosen as MC because the Arthur Family were the first recipients of a San Francisco Habitat for Humanity Home about 12 years ago. Ken started out rather nervously as he addressed the crowd – not surprising, when you consider the audience numbered over 500 folks.
Ken told us the story of how he came to know of Habitat, and it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. He and his wife were doing errands one Saturday and ducked into a sandwich shop to pick up some lunch. Habitat had some fliers at the counter … something like “Own Your Own Home!! No Money Down!!!” and Ken turned to his wife and said “Yeah sure – these nice folks would just LOVE to give a black family living in Bayview San Francisco a new home for nothing” but, for whatever strange reason, he folded up the flier and stuck it in his back pocket. And for whatever strange reason, when his wife was doing laundry a few days later, she took the note from his back pocket and put it in her handbag, instead of throwing it out. Stranger still, they decided to apply a few weeks later. “It couldn’t hurt” was the thought … “not like we have anything to lose, really.” And, most strange was the call the family received a few months afterwards, telling them that they’d been chosen as the first family that Habitat for Humanity San Francisco would partner with.
Watching Ken’s face while he related this series of events, you could see what having a home had done for this family. They were still living in the same Bayview neighborhood and they were still dealing with the same pressures, the same crime, the same problems. The ONLY difference was that they had a home … and it turned out that was all the difference that was needed.
Ken wrapped up his speech that evening with a couple of items that filled the room with laughter. The first was that he admitted he’d managed to fill a few tables with extended family members, who didn’t really believe that Ken was chosen to MC the event, and they just KNEW he was fibbing to them when he said he’d be presenting the Mayor of San Francisco with an award. The second was that Ken invited the whole room to join him in Tennessee in a few weeks. He wanted everyone to watch – and cheer – as his second son would be graduating from Fisk University.
That was Wednesday, April 16th.
Shortly after Midnight on Monday, April 21st, Ken Arthur was murdered. He was found lying dead in the street, a few blocks away from his home.
Now I won’t pretend that I KNOW Ken Arthur or his family. However, after reading the news on the HFHSF website, I have decided that I need to be a little less jaded. I’ll bet that a lot of people who read of Ken’s death in the local paper saw the words “stabbed in Bayview” and thought “well yeah – that’s a crappy area and that kinda thing happens all the time”. Well dammit – it doesn’t have to be that way. If you live in a city with an area like Bayview (and every town has an area like it to some extent), I encourage you to stop accepting this kind of violence as “usual”. I don’t mean donate, or volunteer, or even get involved. But please – let’s stop shrugging off this kind of thing as “standard” just by virtue of geography.
Murder is ugly … even the word itself is hard to look at. And it SHOULD be that way – no matter where it happens.
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