As a teenager, Michael Patrick MacDonald was alienated in South Boston – “Southie” – during the 1970s. He lived in a community with a code of silence, an unspoken set of rules that prevented residents from discussing or speaking out against the daily issues of poverty, violence, drug abuse, suicides and murders occurring in the area.

“We all come from situations where we can use them as experiences to help other people. We are all going to experience pain, and probably have, and that’s the place where we connect,” MacDonald told a packed audience in Blackman Auditorium Monday night. “For me, I was very fortunate to find this route at a young age … [rather] than to turn to violence.”

MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony Housing Development, which forms the foundation of his memoirs and national bestsellers, “All Souls: A Family Story from Southie” and “Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under.”

“After I wrote ‘All Souls,’ I didn’t think anyone would read it. I was hoping my family wouldn’t read it, and I was hoping my neighbors wouldn’t read it. It was my own truth-telling project,” said MacDonald, who is a leading Boston activist helping to launch grassroots anti-violence initiatives and working for social change nationally. “[But] I definitely wanted young people to read it, people who had experienced that level of trauma.”

MacDonald, who is teaching two Honors Program courses this semester, spoke during the kickoff event that celebrated the 25th anniversary of the university’s Honors Program. For “Finding Our Voices, Working for a Better World,” MacDonald chronicled his journey from an alienated teenager living in South Boston who eventually broke the silence of the community when he found his own voice.

“A big part of finding my voice was finding the courage to talk about it,” he said.

MacDonald lived in a vulnerable community that was insular, where “no one else really came in, and no one really left,” he said. Three of his siblings died violently, a fourth from pneumonia after being turned away for treatment and a fifth, his only sister, who sustained brain damage after being thrown off a roof after a drug-related fight.

“One thing we all have in common is pain, and lots of time pain will silence people rather than get them to really find their voice,” MacDonald, who was one of 11 children in his Irish-American family, said.

Despite the best qualities of South Boston that were manipulated by James “Whitey” Bulger, Boston’s most notorious gangster who ruled the neighborhoods of South Boston when MacDonald grew up, he said he firmly believes in the area’s goodness.

“I actually do, to this day, believe that South Boston is the best place in the world for me,” he said. “It’s all of the things I cherish about connectedness and loyalty, and I take it with me wherever I go in the world.”

MacDonald said it took him years to find his own voice that differentiated from the mentality in his hometown. In 1990, he was introduced to community organizing. He worked against violence and the drug trade, and promoted healthy living for young people. He said he made the “best friends of his life” in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan – though he currently lives in Brooklyn N.Y.

“I was fortunate enough to have the desire to cross the Broadway Bridge … and participate as much as I could in the bigger world … reconnecting and turning that into social action, that is where I found my voice, long before I became a writer,” he said. “Knowing what it means to connect with other people who have so much in common with you, and proving that our differences are really just a lie.”

– Michele Richinick can be reached at [email protected].