Feb 4, 2009 5:57 pm US/Eastern
Black Success Story Recalls Growing Up In Miami
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Nelson Adams, 56, grew up on an uneven playing field in Miami's inner city, and went on to become one of America's premier physicians, thinkers. He currently presides over the centuries' old National Medical Association, an organization of African-American doctors in America.
Adams is a product of Miami's inner city, and sometimes goes back to see the old neighbors whom he likes to say helped raise him.
Recently, he spotted Clarence Bland driving in his old Lincoln Continental. He's known Bland for more than 40 years.
"It's been a long time," Adams remarked as he shook his hand.
"You look like you are getting younger and younger," Bland replied.
The greeting took place at the corner of Northwest 46th street and 15th court just across the street from his childhood home.
It's still a quiet, peaceful and serene area with tree-lined streets with small, well-kept homes.
Adams gew up in this quiet section of Allapattah that produced black pioneers like Athalie Range, Traz Powell and Gwen Cherry.
But none of them became known throughout the world like the man who became Adams' next door neighbor when he was just ten.
In the mid 60's, a brash, young boxer named Cassius Clay came to Miami. After living briefly in Overtown, he moved right next door to Adams, and kept kids in the neighborhood spellbound.
Adams recalled," He would show movies outside on a big screen. They were reel- to- reel films, and his old films, of course, were of him boxing."
Adams was so inspired, he tried boxing briefly. He won a couple of bouts until one night he got a big reality check when someone slugged him in the face.
"Before I knew it, I was seeing stars," remembered Adams. "I had been hit smack in the nose. I knew then that boxing was not for me. It made me a much a better student," he laughed.
Cassius Clay tooled around in Miami, trained on Miami Beach and become Muhammad Ali, "The Greatest".
For Adams, he went on to medical school, becoming a prominent doctor who fondly reminisces about the all-black community he shared with a boxing legend.
When asked to comment about some who would say integration hurt the black community, Adams answered, "It was a mixed bag." He continued, "Back then, you understood that everyone lived together in the black community so you got the good, the bad and the ugly. "
Lately, it's just been "ugly" as he laments over the recent mass shooting that shows how some have forgotten to live by the Golden Rule: do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
"The guy who sprayed those citizens (with gunfire) was not living by that rule. He would not want that to happen to his family," he added.
Adams believes things can change if inner-city kids can get the chance to grow up with less crime, and better examples of the real goodness that lies behind neighborhoods, the kind Adams saw as a kid in the likes of Ali and others.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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