Guest column by Clare Grady

Earlier tonight I crossed paths with my friend Gino Bush. I hadn't seen Gino in several months, but had thought of him often, since reading the letters to the editor in the Ithaca Journal regarding the renaming of State Street and the ensuing dialogue on the Journal website.

The website dialogue was especially personal in attacking Gino. I was hit hard by the hatred in the attacks on Gino.

It hurt to see such hatred targeted toward Gino, not just because he is my friend but because he is a black man—a black man who has already endured a full share of the brutality of racism.

This is an overdue apology to Gino for my silence in the face of these attacks, because I know that silence is complicity, and because I know some of his story.

I know that Gino's grandmother was lynched in the early 1900s in Detroit. And that Gino himself was shot by a white man, for nothing less than being black. On the awful day of his shooting, Gino was working as an ambulance driver. He and his co-worker were responding to an emergency call. Upon entering the house Gino was greeted by a white man who took one look at Gino and yelled at him, using the “N” word, demanding that he get out of the house. Gino was shot in the back, and sustained a serious injury to his spine. He still bears the pain from that wound.

Knowing that the wounds of racism go deeper than the flesh, I took it to heart when Gino shared the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the column that he wrote, published in the Ithaca Journal on October 9, 2006. I believe that they are words worth repeating again and again, for those of us who do not have to live with the daily reality of being black in America:

"Being black in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being part of the company of the bruised, the battered the scarred and the defeated. Being black in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with the clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation and then being hated for being an orphan."

I want to thank Gino for his love and service to the Ithaca Community, for being a mentor to the youth of color in the circle of Recovery, for bringing the MLK street initiative from that circle to the larger community. I thank him for caring enough to be the lightning rod, for taking the heat, as he perseveres in this campaign to rename State St. after Martin Luther King Jr., a campaign which has opened the door for all of us to enter this conversation on racism here in Ithaca. There is lots of good work being done, let’s encourage it and not discourage it for it is the next generation who will reap the harvest of our intentions.