Meet Brook Bacon

A Black man living in New Hampshire reflects on his roots, after his father was shot by the police in the summer of 2020.

We met Brook Bacon on a 63-mile Justice Walk for his father.

Mile after mile, we talked with Brook about his childhood in a rural area on the east side of Georgia; about his move north with his mother and their struggles with student loans and housing; about his marriage to a white woman from New Hampshire and his life now in her community; and about the Georgia state patrol trooper who shot and killed his father, Julian Lewis. It was a dialogue with Brook that we would continue for three years.

You can read more about Brook’s life and his quest for justice in our book. You can also listen to an interview with Brook and Louise on Boston public radio, WBUR, to learn about his story, his mother’s sacrifice for his future, and about our book more generally.

“There Is No Promised Land”

The first day we met Brook, we also met his mother, and her words stuck with us. “There is no promised land,” she said. That was her reflection on the journey north she made with Brook, searching for a place she could improve their financial standing. She concluded after years in Boston that it was not a promised land, and she ultimately returned to Georgia.

Another family in our book — James Woodall’s family — moved to Boston in the early 1960s also looking for an environment more favorable than Georgia. But they, too, were disappointed and moved back to the South. While in Boston, James’s family spent their time living in Roxbury, a historic Black neighborhood there.

Roxbury: A Historic Black Neighborhood in Boston

A lot has happened in Roxbury since the early 1960s, and one change has been the creation of Madison Park Development Corp. Roxbury’s homes were at risk in the late 1960s as the city of Boston bulldozed many to build highways. By then Roxbury was mainly a non-white area — after years of white flight — and Roxbury residents fought to keep their community intact. They won in part by creating a non-profit community corporation in 1966 to preserve the neighborhood. That non-profit is now called Madison Park Development Corp, named after a park that was lost. Madison Park Development creates housing that is subsidized to make it more affordable than it would have been … and it offers programs that help renters save some of their rental funds to later make down payments on homes.

We co-hosted an event last night with the Madison Park Development Corp. Set in the 100-year old civic theater, Hibernian Hall, the event welcomed people from around Boston and residents of Roxbury. Our fellow panelists included officials from the Boston Federal Reserve, the Boston Foundation, and Madison Park Development Corp.

We were glad to spend time in this historic Black community, and we are donating 100 books to residents of Madison Park Development buildings. These books were purchased at Frugal Bookstore, a Black-owned bookstore in the neighborhood. You can purchase your book there too, if you’ve not purchased already.

We wanted to share with you some of the insights from the panel.

Leslie Reid (CEO of Madison Park Development Corp.) bristled at the term “financial literacy.” She said that the residents of Madison Park are quite literate. “I am amazed everyday about people in our community and how financially literate they are,” she said, referring to the maze of applications they fill out for financial benefits and services. She said that, instead of “financial literacy,” people should talk about the need for more “financial energy.” That’s what people need to lift their family’s wealth, she said, energy to do even more work on their finances, but due to bureaucracy, she said, “we are sucking it away from people everyday.”

Des Allen (the Boston Fed’s Assistant Vice President of Regional and Community Outreach) emphasized the need for more focus on Black wealth building beyond housing, as well as more focus on the liabilities side of wealth. She warned that cities like Boston are at risk if they do not focus on wealth building for non-white people, given the demographic changes that are predicted. “We are going to have an economy that is not vibrant,” she warned.

Courtney Brunson (the director of the Boston Foundation’s Partnership to Close the Racial Wealth Gap) discussed the foundation’s Boston Indicators team that is working to collect and provide more data about racial wealth gaps. The Boston Fed — well-known for its groundbreaking 2015 study of racial wealth gaps — is also working on a new study. “Just putting numbers to lived reality is so expensive,” Brunson said. Until now, “we haven’t had the time and the resources and the effort to start to uncover these numbers.”

We want to underscore Courtney’s point that collecting and studying data on racial wealth gaps is essential. If you don’t know the facts on something, you can’t really discuss policies around it. Because of this, our number one goal for our book is to make the figure “15 cents on the dollar” a nationally recognized statistic.

Alfia Turner (a Roxbury resident interviewed by Abadur Rahman of the Fed) was the highlight of the event. She spoke about growing up and not realizing until she was 12 that she lived in a poor area. She said she actively had been working to move to a new financial level, and studied accounting at Northeastern, but in 2009, she had a personal setback. Now she and her children are trying again. Her son has started a clothing company. After she watched us show graphs of the Black-white wealth gap, Turner said emphatically, “we are trying to fill that gap.”

We cannot fully capture the spirit and energy of the racial wealth gap symposiums we are holding around the country. It’s about the program but also about the connections that are being formed in the audience and at the mingling portions. We hope you will attend one to see for yourself. (Our events page is here.)

Thank you for reading,

Louise and Ebony