His Early Years
Shivers grew up in Oakland, California, in an area known as the projects. He was one of eight children. His father moved the family to the U.S. west coast to get away from the segregated south. Shivers suffered the pains of racism at a young age when he lost out a job to be quarterback for his high school team to a white person. In West Oakland black children were only allowed to play at DeFremery Park, the park could be considered as a national landmark for it has been home some of the best athletes and activists the world has seen. Shivers went to school with Bill Russell, Frank Robinson, Curt Flood, Joe Morgan and Vada Pinson. He also grew up with the founding members of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard. Shivers left Oakland in 1960 to serve in the U.S. Army.
Read more about this topic: Roy Shivers
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)