Boston is the capital city of my home state of Massachusetts where I was born and raised to adulthood, attending K-12 public schools, and where I earned two degrees at the state’s flagship public research university, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I can see the W.E.B. Du Bois library, the tallest research library east of the Mississippi River, from the front porch of my childhood home.
Prior to transferring to UMass Amherst, I had been raised by my mother and grandmother in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston. Both of my grandparents and my mother were born and raised in the Boston suburbs of Newton and Waban. It’s also where my mother met my father, a young jazz pianist doing gigs in and around the Boston and Cambridge area.
Some of my earliest memories dating back to 1980-1981 were my early childhood education years spent at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. school in Cambridge. I was taught by a very tall Black man with an afro named Randolph Ward who was a graduate student at Harvard, though his students all referred to him as “Mr. Randy.” He would later become the San Diego Superintendent of Schools.
Boston has a long racist history, including a booming slave trade, that it apologized for in 2022, only 390 years later. And the city offers no plan for reparations to Black people, unlike Evanston, Illinois. Does that sound like false contrition to you? It certainly does to me.
But it is still the city that I loved enough to enroll at Boston University where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. earned his PhD and where Black author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi is a faculty member. Dr. Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research there. He also wrote my personal “Bible for U.S. history,” Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I only spent my freshman year at Boston University, after which I transferred to UMass Amherst, a better cultural fit for this working-class girl raised in farmlands.
Despite the honorable work of my maternal grandparents, both career civil rights activists, I cannot ignore the long racist history of Massachusetts or its capital city, beginning in 1630 with the importation of the first African slaves and the legal sanctioning of slavery in 1641. In 1670, Massachusetts made it legal for the children of slaves to be sold. The fact is that Boston and other northeast cities had booming slave trades.
The site of the first meeting house in Boston built in 1632 includes the names of the following white male preachers whose first names are all coincidentally “John.” They are John Wilson (Puritan minister), John Eliot (missionary) and John Cotton (minister).
Ironically, cotton would be a huge import to the northeast from the southern states long after slavery was abolished in the Commonwealth. As the sign indicates, the meeting house was used for town meetings and “for sessions of the general court of the colony.” Of course, the “just us” system only applied to white men at the time.
Fanueil Hall, a marketplace and meeting hall located near the waterfront and today’s Government Center, is named after Peter Faneuil. He was a wealthy colonial merchant and slave trader who donated Faneuil Hall to Boston.
In January 2023, Faneiul Hall name change proponents were arrested at a Boston City Hall sit-in. So much for tolerance of antiracism activists in a city that had already acknowledged its long racist history. The work of Dr. Kendi is therefore all the more relevant and meaningful.
In 2018, The Boston Globe was a Pulitzer finalist in local reporting with its seven-part series, “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality.” The newspaper issued this message to its readers:
To our readers:
The Spotlight Team began this project on race with deep humility. Taking on this topic has to be one of the most challenging - and controversial - assignments in journalism. Especially in Boston.
Here you will find our full seven-part series, in which we tried to answer a question so critical to the city's identity and future: Does Boston still deserve its reputation as a place unwelcoming to blacks? If so, why - and how can the situation be improved?
[I wish they had used “Black people” to emphasize their humanity in a world that so dehumanizes Black people]
This series can only scratch the surface of this complex topic. Our hope is that our report is fair and thought-provoking, and sparks discussions.
That same year in November, my mother would be murdered. Following an involuntary move home after twenty years to manage her estate, I would take a job as Graduate Program Manager for the Chemistry PhD program at my Alma Mater, UMass Amherst. It would be there that I would take a mandatory anti workplace bullying workshop as a returning employee. In graduate school, I had been a research and teaching assistant while enrolled in a Master of Education program.
In one of the largest departments at the Commonwealth’s flagship public research university, I would encounter zero Black people at the faculty, staff and student level out of a PhD population of 147. It was the Admissions Committee Chair, a tall and menacing white male faculty member who would verbally assault me with his finger wagging angrily in my face and yelling in a shrill voice, “we don’t want to end up on the front page of the Boston Globe, you know?!”
This is how an explicit directive to increase diversity within the program was met: with fear and anger at addressing the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room of course being zero Black people and a long history of racism and sexism in the Department that was revealed to me by brave current students and alumni alike.
And yet despite being an alumna myself and a long-time resident of Amherst, known for its progressive antiracist politics, it was not enough to spare me. I would be forced to leave that job during a raging pandemic and return to Florida, my current state of residence. I am now in the land of book bannings, assaults on civil rights, and other forms of right wing censorship. My response to the current political cesspool in this state is to write Black and women’s history for which I am trolled incessantly on social media by mostly white men.
In defense of the Commonwealth, it is still one of only two states where a Democrat woman and LGBTQ+ member governs, the other being Oregon. My hope is that Governor Maura Healey, a white woman, will be able to lead the charge on reparations for Black people in her state.
In a Facebook post from 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, she writes:
BE THE CHANGE:
· Buy Black
· Educate yourself about race and racism
· Don’t let the casual slur, prejudiced comment, or microaggression slide by
· Invest in community organizations doing racial justice work
And while I agree with all of the above suggestions, I must add one more of my own, inspired by Evanston, Illinois: pay reparations to American descendants of slaves who are residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and whose descendants you sold into slavery.
Damn, this is a good read.
Ibram X. Kendi is a liar and an idiot. Not surprised you included him in this ridiculously stupid article.