My academic adviser and professor at Harvard graduate school once told our Higher American Education class that the best education anyone could get here in Boston is listening and getting to know the diverse people talk about their unique experiences since moving to Boston as immigrants from countries like Poland, Ireland, Italy and Cape Verde, to name a few. I developed an intense curiosity about what Dr. Charles Willie said that day, and carried that thought around with me whether it was as mayor, in the Army, playing pro basketball or traveling throughout the world as a United States ambassador.
I have to admit that learning about those kinds of life experiences was both challenging and fun. Not only did I want to learn about their immigrant experiences here in Boston and America, but just as importantly for me, the conditions where they came from. The unique assignment at the Vatican gave me the opportunity to travel the globe, as the Catholic Church is universal and worldwide, from China to South Africa, visiting people who would become friends, like my hero, imprisoned Nelson Mandela, to courageous Irish patriots like Bobby Sands, dying in a Northern Ireland prison. You could say I witnessed both despair and hope.
Last Friday at the Ukrainian Independence Day Flag Raising Ceremony at Boston City Hall Plaza, I was invited to deliver some comments about the courage as well the persecution of the people of the Ukraine by Communist dictators and Soviet Russian oppressors, right up to the present time. I told of my experiences in Communist-controlled Poland, Moscow and Crimea and how much the people had to endure and suffer. The crowd of Boston-area Ukrainian Americans, mostly from Jamaica Plain and Roslindale, and Christ the King Ukrainian Catholic Church gathered at City Hall, nodded their heads in agreement as I was speaking. They all knew the Russian government’s tyranny in Ukraine continues to this day.
But it all came back full circle when a witness to the crisis and oppression in the former Soviet Union came up to me after the ceremony and introduced himself while I was speaking to a few Boston area soon-to-be-college freshman and introduced himself. He said that he was part of an organization of Boston Jewish advocates for freedom and liberty who went to Moscow and the Ukraine when I was mayor of Boston to discreetly but successfully seek the release of Jews from a Moscow prison. “We quietly arranged for the release of those illegally confined, but never made a big issue of it. You went off to Armenia that had been ravaged by an earthquake.”
That’s why these Boston immigrant stories we hear today, no matter where the people originally may come from — El Salvador, Afghanistan or Asia — are going to be far more educational and moving than anything one’s going to hear in any prestigious university classroom.
Ray Flynn is a former mayor of Boston and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.