Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) demonstration with Joseph J. Ettor speaking from platform to striking barbers in Union Square, New York. (1913)

You don’t need a union to take action for justice on the job

Last week 1,200 Tufts Medical Center nurses unionized with the Mass Nurses Association (MNA) called a rare one day strike for a better deal on their latest contract. This doubtless left many onlookers—especially younger ones—scratching their heads and asking “what’s a strike?” No surprise, given the American corporate media’s ideological aversion to covering all matters labor, past and present. But fortunately a willful omission that is easily remedied by news outlets willing to honestly discuss the political economic struggles of working people.

A strike occurs when any group of workers refuses to work. Usually to demand reforms on the job like better pay, benefits, and working conditions. Although commonly perceived as an action that can only be taken by members of a labor union, that is not the case. Historically, workers struck long before there were formal unions—and more recently, the right of most workers in the private sector to strike was enshrined in section 7 of the New Deal era National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The salient part of which reads:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection…

The Supreme Court supported the idea that any group of workers covered by the NLRA had the right to strike and engage in “other concerted activities”—whether unionized or not—in the 1962 decision National Labor Relations Board v. Washington Aluminum Company. Finding that a group of seven ununionized workers had the right to refuse to work in an unheated factory in the dead of winter until its furnace was repaired.

Naturally, most formal strikes are called by organized unions like the MNA, but it’s worth focusing on the right of ununionized workers to strike because we live in an era when labor unions have been beaten down by giant corporations and the rich people who own them. To the point where the vast majority of all working people in the US are not unionized. Over 89 percent of us in fact. Much research indicates that the precipitous decline in living standards for American families since 1979 is directly connected to the decline of union power. Notably a 2016 study by the Economic Policy Institute “Union decline lowers wages of nonunion workers” that demonstrates the important role unions play in increasing wages for all workers when they are strong.

But another way of looking at the situation is that worker militance on the job has been in steep decline over the same period that unions have been smacked down to the proverbial curb. When strikes were common, working people got the goods. As strikes have become more and more infrequent since the 1970s, the fortunes of the working class (which by the way includes all you supposedly “middle class” people out there who wear dressier clothes to work and have fancy degrees) have trended downward.

This state of affairs is certainly the fault of the “one percent” who control the commanding heights of capital, but blame can also be laid at the feet of many American unions—which have become decidedly less willing to fight over the decades since they won concessions like the NLRA from bosses and the government. Its leaders preferring to put their dwindling funds and often woefully limited political aspirations into backing Democrats for office at all levels. Who—on the rare occasions that they get elected now that most Americans understand them to be bought and paid for by the same ruling class that has made the Republicans into a caricature of a political party—continue to backstab working families with depressing regularity.

So workers in Boston and beyond, unionized and ununionized, need to step up and start exercising their NLRA right to “concerted activities” on the job… up to and including strikes. Before we all lose that right. The Trump administration is many things, but it is no friend of working people. And any damage it does to labor will not be undone by corporate Democrats or anyone else without pressure from below. Strikes, aside from their instrumental value, are very much part of the necessary political pressure for a more fair and just America.

It won’t be easy. Many, many laws have been passed by Democratic and Republican administrations alike since the McCarthy Era to reverse pro-labor reforms and stop working people from fighting for their rights on the job. People who do so will definitely lose battles on their way to building a better society. Believe me, I know. I have taken such risks inside and outside of unions, and lost jobs on more than one occasion.

But there will also be many victories. And as Frederick Douglass, a man who did not just help lead the abolitionist movement to victory, but was also elected president of the Colored National Labor Union in 1872, said:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

If you believe in democracy, on and off the job, then you will stand with union workers like the Tufts nurses when they strike. And you will take the fight to your workplace—whether it’s unionized or not. Reviving existing unions and building new ones along the way. And then onward to vie for control of the halls of power.

Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2017 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

A glimpse of the days when sports stars shone closer to earth

INTRO BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

I don’t mean to knock today’s pro athletes. Many of them came from humble origins and worked crazy hard every day for years to achieve their goals. And now they make ungodly amounts of money.

But a century ago, plenty of sports stars came from humble origins, worked crazy hard, etcetera, and made no money. Not at their sport, they didn’t. They were strictly amateurs. Plumbers, printers, or policemen by profession; serious, competitive runners, jumpers or hockey players by avocation. Their exploits were covered in the era’s sports pages alongside those of the Red Sox. (Baseball was the only team sport that paid then.) All the training these athletes did came during their precious spare time.

When my Harlem-slum-born great-grand-uncle William J. “Bricklayer Bill” Kennedy ran marathons, hard rules against receiving remuneration—sorry, no shoe sponsorships—were the least of a runner’s obstacles. (Heck, when he started, there weren’t even running shoes.) In a marathon in the early 20th century, just dozens of men raced along rocky, rutted roads, dodging horses, autos and bicycles, choking on clouds of dust.

In fall 1913, after winning marathons in St. Louis and Chicago, Bill Kennedy caught typhoid fever. When he emerged from the hospital three months later, desiccated and prematurely gray at age 30, his athletic club assumed he was out of contention permanently. So in spring 1915, they refused to pay his train fare from Chicago to Boston to compete in the nation’s premier marathon. In his unpublished memoir, Bill recalled his solution, along with other harrowing journeys to races. On that note, remember the following excerpt, reprinted here in its original unedited form, the next time you hear about today’s teams traveling by private jet.

—///—

Now in order to take part in one of these marathons, it is first necessary to reach the city in which the race is being held. But only a small percentage of these athletes belong to clubs financially able to pay their expenses to take part in these out-of-town runs. How then do they get there? In a field of over a hundred probably not more than a dozen have had their expenses paid by a big club, some company they work for, and in some cases by their friends taking up a collection to send them to the race, as I have had at times from the bricklayers on the building on which I was working. . . .

Of the American competitors in my day, the Canadians would come in a car riding six or more who shared the cost, many hitch hiked their way, and others arrived via freight trains or blind baggage. Being able to tell of my own means of reaching the start, I will relate a few incidents when I was not financially able to travel de-luxe. . .

In one of my early races I was loafing around St. Louis and decided to go to Chicago to run in an indoor race. The weather was mild in St. Louis, so I crossed the bridge to E. St. Louis and climbed into a box car. After sundown the wind shifted north and it was down to zero by the time we reached Decatur Ill, where I unloaded and slept in the lobby of the R.R.Y. The next evening with the thermometer at 10 below I rode a box car to Chicago, jogging back and forth to keep from freezing. At every stop the end brakeman walked up to my Pullman banging on the door he would shout “Are you awake Brickey?” “Yes Sir.” “Don’t go to sleep or you will never wake up.” Arriving in Chicago at 5 A.M. in a blizzard, I rode a Halstead St. car to the Bricklayers Hall, and slept alongside the furnace all day, down in the basement. Three days later I ran that indoor marathon at Riverside Rink finishing an hour behind the winner “Sid” Hatch. . . .

Many years later Frank Lalla and I hitched it to Boston by auto. We made it to Worcester but had to walk the last 40 miles to Boston. In the Bunker Hill Marathon the next day, Lalla finished fifth and I walked up Bunker Hill showing the whites of my eyes in 10th place. . . .

1933 for a marathon held at Wilmington Del., six of us from the Cygnet club of E. Port Chester traveled by car, going down the Jersey side. Learning at the ferry that the charge was by passenger, we put four of our boys under the rumble seat, paying for two passengers. For lodging at Wilmington, after trying the Y, the police station and fire dept., we finally slept in the park. We all took a beating in the race the next day, which was nearer 28 than 26 miles.

Hardship meant nothing to us old time marathoners, like good steel our bodies were highly tempered to take punishment, and until a distance runner has the stamina and will power to do so, he will never become a successful winner. . . .

Back in 1915, being out of work in Chicago, and having been running on the roads all winter with the idea of again trying the Boston Race. Being out of funds, I decided to beat my way by freight – hitch hiking not then in vogue. With thirty cents in my pocket, I climbed aboard a cattle car out of South Chicago one night. It was a cold night, so I climbed up and slid in to the feed box, closing the lid down on myself. It was warm enough in there as the cattle engender heat but you can’t sleep very well with them eating your bed from under you.

I held that train down for two nights and a day, pulling into Buffalo the second morning. The only food I had in that time was at Toledo, where we stopped to take water. Raising the lid of my berth, I saw the picture of a 16 oz. schooner of beer and under it “5 cents.” I was out of that box in a jiffy, across the tracks, and downed two of those beers, grabbed two handfuls of pretzels, and back into my Pullman. It gave the high ball.

I lay over for a day and slept in a 10-cent flop house at Buffalo, making Albany the afternoon of the fourth day. Before prohibition it was the custom with most breweries that an out-of-town visitor could sample their product. So, paying my respects, I was the recipient of four schooners of brew, my vitamins for the day. Leaving Albany I arrived by freight in Springfield, Mass., at 2 A.M. I met up with a policeman who, on questioning me, took me over to a livery stable, where the night man put me up in the loft to sleep. On being roused at 6 A.M. I learned that I was not the only guest that night. I was allowed to depart with a handshake, while my fellow guests, who were members of the local fraternity [hoboes], were forced to manicure the horses and stalls.

Now within sight of my goal, and knowing the Boston section of the Twentieth Century was due shortly, I decked it into Boston, arriving on the fifth day after four days and nights on the road. -Bill Kennedy

A writer in Boston, Patrick L. Kennedy is the co-author of Bricklayer Bill: The Untold Story of the Workingman’s Boston Marathon, released this fall by Bright Leaf, an imprint of UMass Press.

Join Patrick and the Kennedy clan on Sunday, Nov 12 at Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain, from 1:30 to 4:30pm, for a signing, reading, and live trad Irish music from members of Tin Can Hooley.

An abridged trudge through Boston’s long, repetitive history of opiate abuse

From January to September of 2017, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) confirmed 932 opioid-related deaths. While such reports are increasingly unsettling, Massachusetts and especially the city of Boston are no strangers to such plagues, as our complicated and disheartening history with hard drugs spans more than a century, dating back to the inception of synthetic heroin and prescription opioids in the early 1900s.

The media first started reporting on the prescription opioid crisis before the term heroin was coined in this country. Journalists also caught on long before 1912, when laws were put in place to imprison those distributing the drug for up to 17 years with an additional fine as high as $5,000. While the rules were meant to curb the spread of pain-relieving drugs like morphine and other pain-relieving drugs, officials were caught off guard when the “new vice drug” heroin hit streets. Though initially described by manufacturers as the ideal drug for a number of disorders, and first marketed as a nonaddictive, by the mid-1910s, people were discovering its extremely addictive potential. Sound familiar?

In time, laws would prove to serve little good, especially at stopping those working within it. Numerous doctors were caught over-prescribing heroin, with a disturbing number found guilty in criminal court of selling opiates outside of their practice. One particularly disturbing case involved one Dr. Herman, a Back Bay practitioner caught distributing up to 20,000 heroin tablets through street dealers in his area in 1916, all while working out of a place called the Norway House.

Stash Photo via Boston Evening Globe (Aug. 15, 1916)

On the prevention front, the Boston Watch and Ward Society, which formed in 1879 and notoriously worked to censor and ban works of literature in the city (members were known to harass librarians at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square), also became one of the region’s most important allies in the struggle against a growing heroin epidemic. Specifically, they raised public awareness about Boston’s “Heroin Square,” a notorious nook in the South End, near the corner of Columbus and Warren avenues, where dealers roamed free and operated with little to no interference from law enforcement.

That area, of course, has an ugly legacy. Methadone Mile, or the stretch of Mass Ave that intersects with Melnea Cass Boulevard in Roxbury, is essentially the city’s epicenter for the opioid crisis, in large part due to numerous addiction clinics and shelters surrounding Boston Medical Center. This is only a few blocks away from the old Heroin Square that was active in 1914.

Though hard drug use has fluctuated through the decades, news coverage has mostly come in fits or not at all. For the most part, newspapers in the earlier part of the 20th century strictly depicted addicts as impoverished fiends. The media is still largely asleep on the job, but if there’s any compassion coming through these days, such sentiments were first reflected during the Vietnam War era. Take the case of Jim Hannon, a veteran who received an honorable discharge for his injuries, returned home to Mass, and received opioid treatment for the pain caused by shrapnel in his back. Due to a formed addiction, he eventually turned to heroin after the end of his legal treatment.

Hannon was charged with heroin possession in 1971, and his trial in Plymouth County saw an unprecedented number of reporters and protesters, many of whom were veterans, outside the courtroom. Opioids had been a problem in Mass and elsewhere for generations up to that point; still, the case brought some of the first widespread attention to the drug’s pervasive reach.

Yet here we are, nearly 50 years later…

This throwback is a collaboration between Dirty Old Boston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and DigBoston. For more throwbacks visit facebook.com/dirtyoldboston and binjonline.org.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Commonwealth has recently seen as many as 1,700 new cases of the flu every week. The influenza scare has made national headlines for more than a month and stayed there even through the school shooting in Florida and various presidential insults, as flu-related hospitalizations have risen high enough to spur facilities in California to arrange overflow tents in parking lots to keep up with the influx of patients.

Flash back to 100 years ago, when the Spanish flu epidemic was similarly worrying Americans. With vaccine developments not nearly as ubiquitous as they are in 2018, many Boston-area doctors relied on pseudoscience and, out of both desperation and ignorance, said and did whatever they could to tame an ongoing public outrage about flu deaths. Countless citizens worried they could drop dead next. By the end of 1918, more than 1,000 people had died from the flu in Boston alone.

Doctors hurriedly dreamed up creative, if often ridiculous, cures, the whole time reassuring people that the outbreak was contained. Some imprudently advised their patients to inhale things like “acid gas” fumes, while others sought more modern remedies. At the dawn of the 1918 epidemic, Boston Mayor Andrew Peters publicly received a flu shot in an effort to spread awareness.

Of course, New Englanders have endured influenza for more than a century. Before the Spanish flu, people often suffered from what was commonly called the grippe. Struggling to slow the rising death toll, people often relied on whiskey, which had long been advertised as an effective remedy against most sicknesses. In the late 1800s and even during Prohibition in the 1920s, Boston officials issued permits for doctors to prescribe whiskey to flu patients.

Patients In Unidentified Ward | Photo via Boston City Archives

Another popular solution in the Boston area was quinine, a compound commonly used at the time to fight diseases, including malaria. The media played a significant role in the response effort, and in 1889 began pushing quinine as a better alternative to whiskey, leading to the drug seeing a five-times increase in sales. Quinine overdoses eventually became frequent; still, as reliable remedies continued to elude health officials, some pharmacists went rogue. One outlaw became notorious around the city for selling a home-brewed solution; his tagline: The only sure cure for the grippe.

Looking back, it seems like several outlets went to great lengths to blame anyone and everyone besides the government. In one instance, a writer at the Boston Daily Globe even accused the Chinese community of having and withholding the antidote, a statement based on the reporter’s personal observation that Chinatown residents had avoided the flu altogether.

The deaths confused even the most respected of doctors. Influential US Surgeon General Rupert Blue told the Boston Sunday Post in 1919 that the germ was “preparing for a mighty attack on the human race.”

After the dust settled in the early 1920s, details of the outbreaks slowly vanished from the popular narrative. But as the current nightmare mounts—Massachusetts has seen more than 100 flu deaths a week since the beginning of the year—it may be helpful to revisit our past and to see how political and healthcare leaders before us moved past hysterics to find solutions.

This throwback is a collaboration between Dirty Old Boston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and DigBoston. For more throwbacks visit facebook.com/dirtyoldboston and binjonline.org.

Background: Seaport in the ’60s, photo courtesy of Boston City Archives; Left: The American House shortly before closing, Boston Evening Globe, July 15, 1916; Middle: health education employment projections, Boston Sunday Post March 2, 1919; “Expansion In New England,” Boston Daily Globe June 2, 1920

From textiles to technology, and the American House to Amazon

Amazon’s creep all throughout the country has resulted in it popping up or growing operations in several major cities. Like this one. Locally, we’ve spilled a lot of ink about major behemoths like Amazon, and General Electric, promising jobs in the region in exchange for government kickbacks. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course, but you know the routine by now.

The promise of new jobs is nothing foreign to the people of Boston; our city has long been sought after as an “up and coming” location for a booming corporate atmosphere. Looking through the job listings of the early 20th century, it seems that there were similarly high promises floating back then. In the heyday of the cotton industry, headlines as well as the classifieds boasted of massive budget increases for the city and its cotton mills. At certain moments, 100,000 jobs were promised to the working citizens of the region in a single swoop.

Not surprisingly, as industry grew here and people flocked, those thousands of employees became dispensable. This as wages dropped or remained stagnant, and as taxes often increased to fund corresponding services. The result, according to the Boston Post in 1909, was “an incalculable injury to the city and every laborer.”

Looking at the city a century ago, it isn’t hard to find newspapers full of stories about broken promises. There had been big wins for organized labor in the area beginning in the late 1800s, but a depression hit in 1893, leaving more than a third of even organized laborers jobless, and beginning a period of uncertainty that would stretch through the end of WWI in 1918. According to the 1977 book, Boston’s Labor Movement: An oral history of work and union organizing, by Sari Roboff, “by 1895, the percentage of the [Boston] population in industrial production had fallen off significantly, and textile factories began leaving for new regions as early as 1900.”

Few industries were spared. In one case, the American House, a long-standing Boston hotel at the time that attracted a number of prominent visitors through the early 20th century, closed in 1918 and displaced hundreds of employees. Despite the promise of opportunity, many workers were forced go out and find a new way to make a living.

Fast-forward to today. Unemployment in the region has decreased as of late, dropping from around 10 percent as recently as 2012 to 3.5 percent today, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Furthermore, according to the BLS, from January 2017 to January 2018, Massachusetts added an estimated 29,000 jobs. No doubt much of that comes from an influx in the tech sector and from companies that will be swallowed by or serve the mighty Amazon if its new corporate headquarters lands here. Or perhaps even if it doesn’t.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. As one outlet broke it down in 1975, the post-Sputnik era of innovation, kicked off in the late ’50s, placed a heightened importance on the sciences, which soon became an integral part of America’s economy and culture. At the same time, engineers overall endured a 2.5 percent decrease in pay as the market got saturated. A higher unemployment rate for newly graduated engineers followed.

No one knows for sure if Amazon increasing its footprint here many times over would lead to the same kind of oversaturation. At the same time, officials may want to study the history that we should be familiar with and be wary of the promises that any industry or corporation brings to the area.

This throwback is a collaboration between Dirty Old Boston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and DigBoston. For more throwbacks visit facebook.com/dirtyoldboston and binjonline.org

The 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination is sadly a searing reminder of unaddressed gun violence in America. And because gun violence has gone unaddressed for half a century, the future generations of children residing in a safer and healthier America who MLK spoke about so dreamingly in his speeches now live in fear of guns, or in some case are running scared for their lives from them.

During the March for Our Lives student-led demonstrations demanding safer gun laws that took place in Washington, DC last month, one of the surprise guest speakers was nine-year-old Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like the hundreds of thousands of children and teens who came to the nation’s capital with the mission to end school shootings, Yolanda Renee King told the audience, “My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of the skin, but the content of their character.” Standing on stage  alongside one of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors, Yolanda shared her dream with the crowd: “This should be a gun-free world, period.”

As I watched King’s cherubic-looking granddaughter deliver her speech to a cheering crowd, I nearly cried realizing Yolanda never met her grandfather, because a bullet shortened his life leaving us all wondering how long he could have otherwise lived.

As King wrote in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in April 1963, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. … This is the interrelated structure of reality.” In 2018, no one could have fathomed the top issue contemplated by American school-age children is the epidemic of school shootings—whether in wealthy suburbs like Newtown and Parkland, or urban cities like Chicago and Baltimore. Gun violence is killing our children, and gun reform continues to be an issue as a country we can’t seem to budge on.

It was a similar problem 50 years ago.

Just two months after King’s death in April, with a nation still in mourning, New York Senator and then-presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June. His brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated five years earlier in November 1963. Immediately following JFK’s assassination, King told his executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Andrew Young, Jr., “Guns are going to be the death of this country.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson thought so, too. Johnson wrote to Congress requesting stronger gun laws in the wake of RFK’s death. “Far too many [guns] were bought by the demented, the deranged, the hardened criminal, and the convict, the addict, and the alcoholic. So, today, I call upon the Congress in the name of sanity … and in the name of an aroused nation—to give us the gun control law it needs.” Johnson passed landmark civil rights legislation during his tenure, but he could not make a dent on gun reform.

King would have been proud of the March for Our Lives demonstrators. It demonstrated the collective power of children and teen activists to shame and to bring recalcitrant Second Amendment advocate lawmakers to their knees as the “Children’s Crusade” of 1963 did in Birmingham, Alabama. The Children’s Crusade braved arrest, fire hoses, and police dogs to bring to the nation’s attention their state’s unrelenting segregation laws.

I don’t know if MLK could have ever imagined an epidemic of school shootings. No one could. He did, however, speak out about America’s children being reared on a steady diet of violence, suggesting a  link between watching violent acts in movies or television shows resulting in antisocial behavior or acting aggressively in life.

“By our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes,” King said in 1963.

King’s assassination shocked the nation. The alleged weapon was a Remington 30-06 hunting rifle, a firearm easily obtained at the time, like the AR-15, which was used in the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is today.

The high volume of school shootings can be blamed on the NRA, as well as on its allies, all of whom employ similar tactics that were used 50 years ago to obstruct gun safety legislation. No one back then, however, could have fathomed the NRA would use such tactics against the safety our children. But our children have spoken up, and they want sweeping new gun control laws now and not crumbs.

King’s assassination is a glaring reminder of what happens to a future generation when an important issue like gun safety goes unaddressed. In King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech he said, “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.”

I’m hoping lawmakers are listening this time.

Newly released public records raise serious questions about a state police “civil disturbance” training given to local law enforcement. A PowerPoint presentation released under the public records law includes slides depicting troopers assaulting a defenseless antiwar demonstrator, as well as a photoshopped image that ridiculed the body shape of a female Black Lives Matter protester.

Although state police officials were not sure how many times the presentation was used during trainings, it was delivered as recently as October 2016 to a group of local law enforcement by Commander Robert Leverone and Trooper Charles Luise. At the time of the training, both were assigned to the Public Order Platoon, a state police unit responsible for quelling riots and civil disturbances. For manning barricades and training others to do the same, both received generous compensation packages. According to a MassLive database, Leverone earned $179,408 in 2016 while Luise hauled in a little over $140,000.

In their introduction, Leverone and Luise state that the purpose of the training is to “review concepts, policies and tactics of civil unrest response, and prepare officers for the eventuality of deployment to such events.”

The presentation begins on a nostalgic note, with slides showing “riot duty” through the ages: the 1973 Walpole prison uprising, UMass clashes from the 2000s, and other incidents. One slide shows a collage of photos of the state police during the April 1970 Harvard Square Riot. In several pictures, a male protester is seen cowering, hands interlaced behind his head. Truncheon-wielding troopers loom over him. News outlets at the time reported that more than 300 people were injured in the melee, which began as a protest against US involvement in the Vietnam War.

In an email, state police spokesman Dave Procopio acknowledged that the photo “may show a trooper about to kick a protestor” and stated: “If that in fact was the action that followed, that was an inappropriate and unnecessary use of force.” Procopio went on to note that the photograph was more than 40 years old before adding: “We do not, in the current day and age, train troopers to utilize any such striking or kicking techniques against a non-combative person. Such action,” he continued, “would clearly not be tolerated today and the officer would be investigated and disciplined.”

The presentation also highlights state police action at more recent disturbances. There is a photo of what appears to be a topless protester from a 2003 demonstration with the United States Marine Corps logo digitally pasted over her chest, while special attention appears to have been paid to the way police broke up the January 2015 blockade of I-93 by Black Lives Matter protesters. Passive resistance by demonstrators, many of whom formed a human chain across the busy highway by locking themselves together and to buckets of concrete, resulted in a major traffic jam and 29 arrests. Getting a slide of its own is a photograph of one protester, Nicole Sullivan, digitally altered to show her arm locked to a bucket of fried chicken. A Google image search quickly revealed that the original picture was snapped by the Massachusetts State Police Media Relations team and showed Sullivan and another protester with their arms locked to a concrete container. In a statement, Procopio maintained that state police personnel “did not create that image through any type of photo editing software or any other means. It is our understanding that the altered photo has existed on the Internet—source/creator unknown to us—for some time.”

But the state police’s mea culpa rings hollow for Kade Crockford of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “Protest is a fundamental right in the United States, protected by the First Amendment,” said Crockford, who directs the ACLU’s Technology for Liberty program. That the training module, Crockford added, included “what appears to be a fat-shaming joke about a Black Lives Matter protester is offensive and suggests officers don’t take freedom of speech seriously.”

State police spokesman Procopio confirmed that in response to this investigation, the doctored image of Sullivan will be “immediately removed from the PowerPoint.” “The altered image is unprofessional and inappropriate,” he wrote in an email, and its inclusion in the training was “not reflective of the values of the Department of State Police.”

For her part, Sullivan—a longtime activist in Greater Boston—said she was disappointed but “not surprised” to learn of her cameo role in the police training. Sullivan says she received threatening messages for weeks after the I-93 blockade, a harassment campaign she feels the state police could have done more to stop. “For them to use a hateful meme of me in what is supposedly training material is just terrifying,” Sullivan wrote. “It shows just how openly they condone harassment campaigns against anti-racist protesters.”

A records access officer with the state police initially claimed to have found no evidence that the training ever took place. However, training records released by the Springfield police department indicated that Sgt. Matthew Benoit, a member of the department’s SWAT team, attended the civil disturbance training in October 2016. Subsequent public records requests filed with Springfield uncovered the state police PowerPoint.

In 2016, the group Investigative Reporters and Editors awarded the Massachusetts State Police its annual Golden Padlock Award, recognizing the most secretive government agency in the United States.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. To see more reporting like this you can support independent media at givetobinj.org.

With media attention focused almost solely on the turbulent affairs and this week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un of North Korea, we’ve heard a lot about topics like nuclear diplomacy of late.

But even before North Korea was ruled by some certifiable madman or another, back when the North and South were united, the intrigue coming from the West—including here in Boston—was of a similar fashion, underlined by apprehension over perceived threats, however valid.

Looking back to the early 20th century, the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904 over, among other things, influence in what was at the time a singular Korea. Shortly after that conflict began, international negotiations impacting that part of the world commenced in Washington, DC. The Boston Sunday Globe sent a reporter down to interview Japanese diplomat Takahira Kogorō, with one topic of discussion being “Yellow Peril,” or what would nowadays be seen as purely xenophobic nightmares that Americans have about an East viewed as an aspiring imperial force. Addressing such concerns, as well as the possibility of a combined military force between China and Japan, the ambassador said that any such worries were founded in “gross ignorance or malicious desire to harm Japan in the eyes of the world.”

It doesn’t seem the Boston media paid much attention to remarks made by Takahira. Racist headlines about “Yellow Peril” persisted; in a 1917 Globe dispatch, writer Arthur Brooks Baker described his encounter with a “yellow heathen,” depicting his speech with a bigoted accent, even mentioning the prospect of indenturing the person into slavery.

The idea of “Yellow Peril” was additionally used in a more general sense, often applied to people from all Asian nations, reducing them to one threatening entity. Such efforts were co-branded with patriotism, not unlike contemporary rhetoric from anti-immigration voices. Only in the 1920s, it seems, did journalists begin to differentiate between people from different countries and regions; even then, however, the sentiments were derogatory. In the early 1920s, as America was rife with anti-Asian sentiment in part due to the threat of Japanese expansion, the Boston Post sent a reporter to Seoul for a “Trip to the Orient,” where he hailed Korean society for improvements that came under Japanese rule.

Thirty years later, the Korean War broke out between the North Koreans, backed by China and the Soviet Union, and South Koreans, backed by the US and others. In the decade that followed, the threat of atomic warfare loomed large. Reports about such situations may have changed in tone and their degree of prejudice in the time since—as have some of the allegiances, with US President Trump coddling the Russians and the North Koreans—but in many ways, in the context of past coverage, it seems America is stuck at a similarly sketchy crossroads, and is, at least to some degree, still grappling with media-assisted threats of nuclear annihilation.

This throwback is a collaboration between Dirty Old Boston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and DigBoston. For more throwbacks visit facebook.com/dirtyoldboston and to help us keep on digging please contribute at givetobinj.org.

Somewhere among the journalistically negligent docs jamming up popular film streaming services are some legitimate feats. The award-winning PBS series American Experience is one of the clear professional leaders, and if you live in Eastern Mass you’ll want to watch its excellent installment The Race Underground, all about the miracle that truly was the building and conceptualizing of America’s first subway, in Boston, back in the late 1800s.

There’s just one catch—while it truly is an artful work of history reporting, The Race Underground is also depressing. Because with the exception of some minor details, the narrator and interview subjects might as well be talking about 2018. To demonstrate this problematic juxtaposition, we pulled more than 1,000 words from the episode’s transcript, replaced (a minimal number of) dated terms like “horses” with more neutral or contemporary ones, and excerpted it below for you to have a good laugh (and/or cry) as you read this on an un-air-conditioned Red Line on the hottest day of the summer. [Ed. note: Words in bold were added by us. Also, please don’t read too deeply into the whole twist at the end. While gondolas may be a fraction of the answer to our modern woes, we’re in need of much larger solutions overall.]

Narrator: On the morning of Thursday, Feb 9, 2017, the east coast of the United States from Virginia to Maine awoke to the severe blizzard in American history. Four feet of snow fell from the skies and fierce winds created snowdrifts up to fifty feet high. With over 400 dead and citizens left scared and angry, the blizzard underlined a transportation crisis that had been escalating for decades. In a booming economy, cities were flooded with thousands of immigrants and rural Americans seeking opportunity in a newly mechanized world.

Clifton Hood, Historian: The problem is that everybody’s crowded into a fairly small area. The available modes of transportation are slow and cumbersome. The city is growing but the transit system isn’t growing with it.

Narrator: America was in danger of choking on its own progress. In no place was the problem more overwhelming than the nation’s most congested city, Boston, where nearly 400,000 people packed into a downtown of less than a square mile.

Stephen Puleo, Writer: There are almost 8,000 workers in Boston pulling railways around the city. It is a cacophony of noise, dust, horse manure, smells, in the downtown area, extremely congested.

Narrator: As America struggled to address its transportation crisis, leaders in Boston pursued a radical solution. But their race to maintain the nation’s first subway would clash against political gridlock, selfish businessmen, and a terrified citizenry.

Brian Cudahy, Writer: The idea of an efficient subway in Boston was an enormous risk. It was a breathtaking jump into the unknown and that can’t be underestimated. This was a jump into the unknown.

Mark Gelfand, Historian: The development of Boston, as in most other cities, was largely in private hands. And these developers of large tracts of property recognized that their profitability depends upon making these areas accessible to the downtown area. And so there is a direct and crucial link between development and transportation.

Narrator: Boston was bursting at the seams. Its population had more than doubled since the Civil War, to nearly 450,000. The city’s buses and street railways were overwhelmed.

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Historian: The streets were absolutely packed every day with all these hundreds of thousands of people were pouring into the downtown. So you really had just this incredible mass of people in a very small area.

Narrator: Ride-sharing companies also aggressively competed for passengers in Boston’s downtown.

Doug Most, Author, The Race Underground: Boston, New York and the Incredible Rivalry that Built America’s First Subway: Each of them has their own routes and fares. And it was this crazy, convoluted system. If you wanted a taxi in 2018 you would raise your hand and all these different cars might race to pick you up.

Clifton Hood, Historian: The term “transit system” implies that there’s a coherence. I think it implies that there is a kind of public service. It implies that there is a technological efficiency. And I don’t think that’s how most Americans and certainly not most transit operators view this. It’s the profit motive that determines the quality and the amount of service.

Narrator: At the State House, Gov. Charlie Baker boldly proposed the privatization of the city’s large transit system, which he would control. His argument was for efficiency, but he knew that by controlling all the lines, he would be positioned to do as he pleased with his suburban expansion.

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Historian: I think there was actually a lot of support in many ways from the larger public. You might think, “Oh, a monopoly. People aren’t gonna like this,” but there was a sense that it was very inefficient to have so many different companies competing with the MBTA for passengers.

Narrator: Whitney suggested that to rid the congestion strangling its streets, it was necessary to construct more tunnels beneath the city.

Mark Gelfand, Historian: This is an era in which cities and states are prepared to make significant investments in infrastructure. Baker recognizes that in some respects the very well-being and future of the city is at stake in terms of its transportation needs, and that it may go against his grain to embark upon such a project as this, which offers the possibility of, of tremendous waste and corruption, but, nonetheless, is so essential to the city’s future that it must be undertaken.

Narrator: By June, Mayor Marty Walsh followed through with his promise to take back the streets and convinced lawmakers to form the Rapid Transit Commission. Its mission was simple: study the problem of congestion and offer a solution. After 50 public hearings and 10 months of study the Commission published a massive report. All options were on the table, including a gondola traversing Boston Common.

Stephen Puleo, Writer: The Boston Common is considered almost a sacred place to Bostonians and has been since the city was essentially founded in 1630. And it has been used throughout Boston’s history as a community gathering spot. There was sort of a pledge made by city fathers at the time that the Boston Common area would be kept free of any roadways, free of any development, and would be open space. Its very name, “The Boston Common,” means it’s for the common wealth, for the common good. It is a place for all Bostonians to be able to gather.

Brian Cudahy, Writer: “You’re going to dig up the Boston Common to build some sort of a silly thing that we’ve never heard of before?” People were horrified. There was a lot of opposition to it.

Narrator: When the elevated plan was voted down, Matthews saw his chance and intensified his advocacy for a gondola. Armed with data from the Rapid Transit Commission report, he argued that such pods would cut transit time by two-thirds to one-half.

Mark Gelfand, Historian: The decision to build a gondola is remarkable in demonstrating how Americans were willing to try something new and place their bets on the future. That they understood that technology was reshaping their world and electricity, the tremendous potential of it, is going to be unleashed here in the sky.