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THAT N-WORD AGAIN

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A short history of rationalization, hate, and debate

 

Pizza mogul “Papa” John Schnatter is only the latest public figure to use the n-word and then (kind of) apologize. Because Schnatter blurted out the insult during a communications training session rather than directly in the face of an African-American, he argues that his use of the word doesn’t constitute a “slur.”

 

“It was a social strategy and media planning and training,” he argued, “and I repeated something that somebody else said and said, ‘We’re not going to say that.’”

 

Of course, this is just one example. In this political climate, it seems an overview and brief examination of the n-word, its use, and relevant examples is in order.

 

  • In 2002, Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, who wrote the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, said that while the word has been used to “terrorize and humiliate” African-Americans, “it’s also been used as a term of endearment and a gesture of solidarity.”

 

  • In 2006,  Michael Richards, who played the lovable and goofy character Kramer on the TV sitcom Seinfeld, used the n-word on stage. His racist rant was a tirade aimed at hecklers in the audience at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood, and subsequently aired nationwide. The outburst shocked not only his fans, but summoned an ugly time in US history and derailed his career.

 

  • In 2011 it was disclosed that at the entrance of former Texas governor and then-presidential hopeful Rick Perry’s hunting camp features a rock painted in block letters with the word “Niggerhead.” For decades leading up to that, Perry’s camp hosted lawmakers, friends, and supporters, none of whom apparently had enough of a problem with the fixture to speak out about it publicly.

 

  • In discussing Perry’s highly offensive racial marker, Barbara Walters, co-host of The View, herself used the n-word, sparking a debate with her then-co-host Sherri Shepherd. “I’m saying when you say the word, I don’t like it,” said Shepherd, who added that she’s used it among African-American family and friends. “When white people say it, it brings up feelings in me.”

 

  • In 2015, President Barack Obama used the word on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron during an interview about America’s racial history—creating shockwaves. At the time, legal analyst Sunny Hostin said the president’s use of the word was inappropriate because of his office and the history of the word itself. On the other hand, New York Times columnist Charles Blow countered that assertion, saying Obama used the word correctly in a teaching moment.

 

  • Obama’s send-off at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner ended with the n-word. Comedian Larry Wilmore, and then-host of Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, in his closing remarks thanked Obama for his tenure as president and the mark he made in the world, saying, “…to live in your time, Mr. President, when a black man can lead the entire free world. Words alone do me no justice. So, Mr. President, if I’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it, my n—. You did it.” Indeed, there were audible gasps and visible grimaces of shock, pain, and embarrassment.

 

  • Last year, Martha Stewart dropped the N-bomb during a taping of Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party. Stewart, still a neophyte to hip-hop culture, asked during a filming with Lil Yachty on the show, “Does it upset you when Snoop says ‘nigga shit?’”

 

  • The word by comedian Bill Maher last year on his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher. A lot of hurt came after the guest, US Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, invited Maher to visit Nebraska and “work in the fields,” and Maher mockingly responded, “Work in the fields? … I am a house nigger.”

 

  • Dennis Lehane, Boston native and best-selling novelist of Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island, and Mystic River, to name a few, used the word at Emerson College’s commencement last year. In talking about Boston’s 1970s busing crisis, Lehane highlighted how white opponents of school desegregation shouted, “Niggers out” at protests. Twitter blew up attacking Lehane, and he apologized immediately.

 

Is there a double standard here? After Maher dropped the word, some people on social media defended him, saying that he used a modified version, as in it ended in an “a” rather than an “r.” They claimed he morphed the word into a term of endearment. I contend that you can’t conjugate the word, because it’s so firmly embedded in the lexicon of racist language and is still used to disparage African-Americans today. Many slaveholders pronounced the word with the “a” ending, and in the 1920s, many African-Americans used the “a” version as a pejorative to denote class difference. The confusion, however,  illustrates what happens when an epithet like the n-word, once banned from polite and public conversation, gains a broad-based cultural acceptance.

 

Many African-Americans, and not just the hip-hop generation, say that reclaiming the n-word serves as an act of group agency and is a form of resistance against the dominant culture’s use of it. In other words, only they have a license to use it. However, the notion that it is acceptable for African-Americans to refer to each other using the n-word while also considering it racist for others outside the race unquestionably sets up a double standard. Also, the notion that one ethnic group has property rights to the term is a reductio ad absurdum argument, since language is a public enterprise.

 

The fact that some African-Americans appropriate the n-word does not negate our long history of internalized self-hatred. Rather, our society’s neo-revisionist use of the word makes it even harder to purge the sting of it from the American psyche.

 

Language is a representation of culture, and reinscribes ideas and assumptions about race, gender, and sexual orientation that we consciously and unconsciously articulate in our everyday conversations, and consequently transmit generationally. My enslaved ancestors knew that their liberation was not only rooted in their acts of protests, but also in their use of language, which is why they used the liberation narrative of the Exodus story in the Old Testament as their talking book. The Exodus story was used to rebuke systemic oppression, racist themes, and negative images of themselves.

 

Our use of the n-word speaks less about our rights to free speech and more about how we as a people—both white and black Americans—have become anesthetized to the damaging and destructive use of epithets. Some activists argue that Michael Richards and offenders like him should be made to volunteer in a predominately African-American community, while others claim that in such places African-Americans are keeping the n-word alive. What could work for many, though, is a history lesson, because reclaiming racist phrases doesn’t eradicate baggage or correct fraught racial relations.

 

As “Papa” John Schnatter has proven again, what’s clear is that use of the n-word is capable of keeping hate and hurt alive.


DIRTY OLD BOSTON: THE HUB’S WAR ON SATAN

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When Boston’s war against the Antichrist was raging

 

The Satanic Temple, a self-described group of “politically aware, Civic-minded Satanists” based out of Salem, recently made waves in Arkansas, where they rallied in response to the construction of a Ten Commandments monument in Little Rock. Attendees showed up to the rally with horns, pentagrams, and other satanic imagery to confront the bible-gripping, God-fearing Christians who were unhappy with their presence.

 

While the Salem Satanists ruffled feathers down South—one state senator claimed the group was using “fake arguments and misinformation to take advantage of the good people of Arkansas”—around here they are largely accepted. It hasn’t always been that way, though. Salem’s notoriously intolerant history is well known, as are the travails of people in that city who had rather interesting convictions back in the day. Boston was the same, with a religious climate similar to that in Little Rock in 2018, right down to an irrational fear of Satan’s spawn.

 

In an issue of the Daily Globe at the dawn on the 20th century, ministers announced a “War on Satan” in light of what they perceived to be a time of great regional religious awakening. Representatives from several Christian denominations planned meetings to address their plans to move the city toward a holier lifestyle. Members of the general public were forbidden to attend and the press was told to stay away, though the invite list did include businessmen who were active in church circles. Some things never change.

 

The combination of religious fervor and the funding fostered by those businessmen led to a campaign led by ministers and moneyed interests to increase the number of hawkers on streets paid to hand out pamphlets. The resulting tracts featured “flaming statistics” that showed an apparent decrease in new converts, and encouraged those who were not active in the church to feel “a profound sorrow.” A classic shaming effort, it warned Satan’s disciples to vacate the city at once.

 

In time, despite the initial shade thrown at the press, the desperate men of God released a statement pressuring reporters to aid in the campaign as part of their own religious duty. The effort largely fell flat, though in time there would be yet another local theater in the war on Christ’s perceived opponents.

 

 

Roughly three years later, the so-called Holy Ghost and Us Society declared its own battle against satanic forces. Stationed on Mass Ave, a Maine native and reverend named Frank Sandford cultivated roughly half a million bucks (more than 10 million in today’s dollars) through his followers. As one columnist for Fibre and Fabric, a textile trade rag at the time, reported in 1900:

 

A gentleman who styles himself Rev. F. W. Sandford has come to this city, and opened up to “save souls.” I don’t know that there have been any souls lost here, therefore I do not know really the modus operandi. It seems to me that he is after a good living without … working.

 

Sandford discouraged life insurance, calling it a “sinful device of Satan,” and demanded that disciples turn over their policies to him, for they must sacrifice their all to God. Books other than the Bible were forbidden to be read by his followers, while he shared a similar disdain for the press, calling them “Satan’s slaves.”

 

Such sacrifices, however, weren’t required of Mr. Sandford. Through his own devilish work he procured a yacht and a sophisticated carriage, all while he established chapters all over New England.

 

More than 100 years later, it’s almost unbelievable that satanic worshippers of any degree—however in line with regional politics they are—are allowed their basic freedoms. Perhaps it’s because they’re not stealing life insurance policies.

 

Looking through old newspapers, it’s clear that there have always been unscrupulous cult leaders in Mass. For the most part, they’ve worked for Christian churches.


 

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.

DIRTY OLD BOSTON: THE RISE AND RAGE OF BOSTON PUNK IN THE ’70S, ON FILM

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DMZ 

 

As millenials (like me) are learning in these increasingly nostalgia-hungry times, Boston was insanely different in the 1970s. From the crap economy, to Vietnam shock, to the Nixon presidency, and so on.

 

Add middle-class (read: white) flight to that mix in the wake of court-ordered busing, and you have a city riddled with hostility, arguably in crisis. Yet despite those conditions, or perhaps largely because of them, various new fascinating subcultures took root, and in many cases channeled problems of the era into powerful and memorable music.

 

Boston rock has always had its heroes in the limelight—Aerosmith, the Cars, you know all the big names. But bubbling below the mainstream, the city’s punk scene and its offshoots had famously unique cult followings that speak to what was popping in the clubs back then. Most subterranean icons never got much recognition in their day, but there have been some consolations in the decades since, in part thanks to the hard work of Chris Parcellin and Lenny Scolletta and their film, Boys From Nowhere: The Story of Boston’s Garage Punk Uprising.

 

With said intimate look at the nuances of grassroots local rock, complete with input from the circuit’s esteemed veterans, set to screen at the Regent Theatre in Arlington on Nov 10 with a question and answer period to follow, we took the liberty of beginning the inquiry.

 

What got you into this project? What were some goals and motivations behind the documentary?

LS: I got into the scene in ’77. I was a drummer for some local bands and actually opened up for the Real Kids at the Rat. After seeing them, I always wondered why they never broke out nationally. They always had a fanbase in Europe where they could tour, and groups like Blondie and the Ramones down in CBGB were getting good deals.

 

I had worked in the field doing public access stuff, so I knew how to be a camera guy. I thought, Would someone like me be able to get this together? I had a camera and some experience, so I figured why not at least reach out to the bands. [Parcellanris] reached out to them, the response was good, and one thing kinda just led to another. We set up as many interviews as possible. I really wanted to get to the bottom of this question that had been lingering in my head as to why these bands fizzled out when they were such great musicians.

 

CP: My older brother went to see the bands at local clubs, so I heard them through him when I was about 13 or so. I remember thinking how different the sound was from what was on the radio. It was new and refreshing to hear local musicians with such a passion for the sound. I think what I wanted to accomplish was to show how the bands weren’t getting the appreciation they deserved. They had been forgotten in time and they made some great music, a lot of which can still be heard and enjoyed today. …

 

New York is a national media center. Boston became a secondary market to all that. Boston bands always needed to work a little harder to get that national coverage, and these bands just weren’t in it for the fame, they had no desire to put out number one hits, they did what they wanted to do, which was to show Boston a good time and foster the scene.

 

Were the musicians and groups easy to get in contact with? They must have been scattered.

CP: It definitely was difficult. Some of the guys didn’t want to talk—understandably, too, considering we had no track record. They thought, Who the hell are these guys? I have to credit Rick Harte [of Ace of Hearts Records] because he helped communicate to them that we were legit and just wanted to celebrate the music. I ran into him at a Classic Ruins show so I interviewed him and we spoke a bit. He saw that we were in this for the right reasons.

 

The scene was plagued by unfortunate circumstances that ultimately led to the lack of widespread attention. What would would you say contributed to that?

LS: Sire Records was signing the bulk of the bands like DMZ and the Nervous Eaters. What was so strange about it was how much better of a grip they had on the New York sound. The producers just weren’t matching up and the bands were so happy to get signed that they kinda just went along with it.

 

They weren’t given enough creative control. They were victims of the industry. The producers … wanted something to throw on the radio, but what they didn’t realize is these bands were the antithesis of that marketable sound. Maybe if the ball had got rolling they’d have been able to produce better recording in the future. It wasn’t until they started pressing their own records that they finally captured what they were going for. Had Ace of Hearts been a major label, things would be much different.

 

CP: There was never a lack of interest locally, but so many intangibles can go wrong. They weren’t given enough say in the final product, ultimately. That’s one of the unfortunate parts of being in a band, ya know, even down to the album covers. It comes with the territory, never getting that big, it does. What’s unfortunate here is these bands were so good.

 

Legendary Kenmore Square club the Rat was obviously a major part of this, but what were some other memorable places to see the music?

LS: There was Cantone’s on Broad Street, which was more of a divey place. A lot were centrally located—there was Storyville, a lot of bands played there, and the Channel. These venues usually didn’t last very long, unfortunately. The Channel was good because bands on the way up were playing there along with bands on the way down, and they could fill up the place. Now it’s a parking lot by South Station. Another great place was Chet’s Last Call in the West End; I saw the Ramones there.

 

CP: I think WBCN is important to mention here. While it wasn’t a venue, it played a hugely important role in the scene in terms of radio broadcasting. WBCN had always played alternative music. Charles Laquidara came through in the ’70s and … they were doing stuff other stations just wouldn’t do, and from there played local bands religiously. From there, stations like WERS, Emerson’s station, played local shows that widened the audience. The main college stations didn’t play big Top 40.

 

What were some of the contributing factors to the Rat’s doors closing?

LS: By ’97, the scene was done, and no one took the torch. There just wasn’t the same type of community with the regulars and all that.

 

CP: As the local revenue got harder to generate, people weren’t as apt to seeing live shows as they used to.

 

Boston wasn’t a pretty place to be at the time. Do you think the music was a response to that?

LS: Yeah—’77 and ’78 were tough times musically, with punk and disco getting big followings that were part of such different sounds. I had a record store in Malden and was selling a lot of those local records. I think it helped that I was right down the street from the high school. The kids would come in for the local music and would ask me where they could see them play as I played them in the store. From there they’d go see the bands at the Rat and such, and the energy was infectious. The city was just so much different, it’s almost unfeasible that it used to be like that. The fanbase was just so passionate.

 

CP: Well, the drinking age was 18, so younger kids could go see the music. There weren’t as many distractions back then. Today with the internet it’s less of a big deal when you hear about a show or a band because it’s so oversaturated. There was more mystique because you couldn’t just check out the band online beforehand.

 

What hindered the movement, if anything?

LS: The hate came from misunderstanding because it didn’t sound like the status quo, but it was so influential on the sound to come. It became mainstream from London and New York bands, but our unique Boston sound wasn’t received well. The progress was a lot like hip-hop, it just took awhile for it to stick.

 

CP: There was definitely a culture clash between locals who didn’t seem to understand what was going on. It was something new that didn’t sit well. The disco fans felt infringed upon, especially because that big disco club Narcissus was right across the street from the Rat, and punk just didn’t mix well in the era of Saturday Night Fever. … There were a lot of fights between the punks and the disco fans. It got pretty violent at times.

 

Check out the next screening of The Boys From Nowhere at the Cabot Theater in Beverly on Nov 10th and at the Regent Theater in Arlington on Nov 16.


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.

HALEY HOUSE TO SUSPEND CAFE OPERATIONS, PLANS TO REVIEW CONCEPT AND REOPEN LATER THIS YEAR

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We were extremely sad to learn late yesterday that Haley House is temporarily suspending operations at its cafe in Dudley Square. With that said, as you will see in the extensive oral history of the nonprofit that we did with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism for its 50th anniversary in 2016, Haley House has always been resilient and motivated to do what is best for the people it serves, and we have no doubt it will come back bigger and stronger later this year. What follows is a letter released by Executive Director Bing Broderick.

 


 

Dear Friends,
 

After careful consideration, Haley House has decided to temporarily suspend restaurant operations at Haley House Bakery Cafe effective January 12, 2019, in order to review and renew our business concept, with the goal of reopening restaurant operations later in the year. While the Cafe’s restaurant operations are paused, our catering and wholesale baking operations will continue, as well as our Take Back the Kitchen Program. We will also host the 11th annual Souper Bowl Fundraiser on February 10 at Haley House Bakery Cafe.

 

Since 2005, Haley House has proudly served the Roxbury community through our social enterprise restaurant. Over the past several years, the surrounding neighborhood has experienced dramatic shifts in the economic, social, and commercial landscapes. Inevitably, these contextual changes have impacted Haley House Bakery Cafe’s business, resulting in losses that Haley House cannot sustain indefinitely.

 

Recognizing this, the Haley House Board of Directors voted unanimously to suspend restaurant operations in order to start a renewal process, in keeping with Haley House’s 50+ year tradition of innovation and responsiveness to changes in community needs.

   

Our renewal efforts will focus on the most productive way to continue serving the Roxbury community while building on the Cafe’s legacy of vibrant, community-driven programming and supportive employment opportunities. This break will provide an opportunity to pursue fresh ideas that best align the Cafe’s menu, operations, and programming with current community needs and permit us to move forward with a more economically sustainable social enterprise. A key component of this process will be soliciting input and support from our key stakeholders, including community residents, staff, and food industry experts.

 

The temporary suspension of restaurant operations, unfortunately, will involve some of our valued employees being laid off during this period. We have notified them of this decision and will provide them with pay in lieu of notice through February 1, 2019. We have enlisted the help of the state’s rapid response team to assist them with their job search and to enroll them for unemployment benefits. We will work diligently to help every affected worker with their job search and to pursue any other available assistance they might need. We greatly regret the disruption they will face as we move forward to ensure the Cafe’s ability to operate and provide valuable employment opportunities on a sustainable basis.

 

The Board and staff express gratitude to the staff, volunteers, customers, vendors, community members, investors, and donors who have extended energy, support, and loyalty for the last 13 years. We hope that our customers and advocates will increase their purchases of our catering services and wholesale products during this transition so that we can continue to employ the staff we are retaining to work in those functions. We look forward to your continued engagement in renewing our retail operations to better meet needs of the community in 2019 and beyond.

 

Bing Broderick, Executive Director

 

GET YOUR SOUPER BOWL TIXX HERE

WHY GATEHOUSE’S BOSTON ‘MEGACLUSTER’ IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY

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No corporation should own most newspapers in a region

 

In last week’s Apparent Horizon, “GateHouse Editorial Flacks for Mass Retailers,” I dissected an editorial, “The benefits of a teen minimum wage,” calling for a subminimum wage for Bay State teenage workers that turned out to have run in over two dozen eastern Mass newspapers owned by news industry behemoth GateHouse Media. Focusing on the article’s masked conservative slant—built, as it was, around a single report by a Koch-funded think tank—I walked readers through the political problems with that position and GateHouse’s support of it.

 

In this column, I’ll take a look at the structural crisis of media consolidation—and why it makes the GateHouse teen wage editorial even more disturbing than it looked at first glance.

 

Since the 1980s there have been a number of profound shifts in the economics of the American newspaper industry. One of them was the phenomenon of large companies treating news publications more and more like any other profit center—buying them up in larger and larger numbers, eliminating as many of their full- and part-time staff positions as possible while slashing wages and benefits for those that remained, increasing their use of contractors, and consolidating business operations among outlets in the same geographic area. These groups of newspapers came to be called clusters. Which differed from traditional chains in the physical proximity of their constituent outlets. And made their new owners a great deal of money.

 

In the interim 30 years, according to the excellent ongoing work of former Knight Ridder editor Ken Doctor in his “Newsonomics” columns for Nieman Journalism Lab and other publications, companies like GateHouse, Tribune Publishing, and Digital First have bought so many papers that those clusters have turned into something new: megaclusters, as they were dubbed by “major newspaper business broker Dirks, Van Essen & Murray.” They function the same way clusters do. But operate over larger geographic areas with ever more daily and weekly newspapers (and specialty publications) under their control. As of 2017, about 50 percent of all local papers in the US were part of a cluster or megacluster.

 

Those newspapers bear only passing resemblance to their namesakes. Mainly because the wage and staff cuts that began in the 1980s never stopped. To the point where a local paper like the Cambridge Chronicle—in which I first noticed the editorial under discussion—owned by a media giant like GateHouse (and in turn by other companies and investment groups) is now down to one lone staff person.

 

To really understand the significance of this development, it’s necessary to turn back the clock. Fifty years ago, the Cambridge Chronicle was an independent newsweekly. It had several staffers—including reporters, editors, salespeople, and a production crew. It was the go-to news source for coverage of all issues and happenings in Cambridge, and it was read regularly by most literate city residents, from teenagers to pensioners.

 

Critically, as an independent newspaper, its editorial positions were also independent. As with commercial newspapers everywhere, this independence was hardly perfect. After all, the Cambridge of 50 years ago—like the Cambridge of today—was a small city of around 100,000 people. The Chronicle relied on ad revenue from local businesses, from city government, and from the two universities that dominated (and still dominate) city life, Harvard and MIT. Many of whose leaders likely knew the paper’s editors personally. If the editorials it published were too pointed against those institutions, ad revenue could easily go down—hurting its bottom line. So the tendency would have been to publish more even-handed editorials than calls to arms.

 

But for all that, Chronicle editors staked out positions that were inimitably their own. And pretty much every city and town with a population of a few thousand or more in Massachusetts, and across the United States, had at least one paper just like it.

 

Then, in the ’80s and ’90s, along came companies like GateHouse’s predecessors. And they started talking with papers like the Chronicle—that were often owned by a single family or small group of local investors—and they said, “This business is changing in ways you can’t keep up with, and running a newspaper is a tough way to make money… so why not take our generous cash offer, and get out while the getting’s good?”

 

And papers started taking those deals. As for the owners that didn’t… the ones that liked running their own newspaper or small chain and refused to sell… well, over time, they found themselves surrounded by clusters of publications owned by companies like GateHouse. And those companies squeezed them, made doing business more expensive, and cut heavily into their ad revenue. Eventually forcing them to sell for sometimes less generous cash offers. Or risk losing everything.

 

So it went with the Cambridge Chronicle. Founded in 1846, the Dole family had bought it in the 1930s and merged it with rival Cambridge Sun in 1935. In 1991, they sold the paper to Fidelity Investments. Fidelity spun it off into its Community Newspaper Company division in 1996. That division was sold to the then Boston Herald owner Herald Media in 2001. And the Herald sold it to GateHouse in 2006.

 

Today, like most GateHouse newspapers, the remnant Chronicle no longer even has an office in Cambridge… the city it covers. Its staffer, Senior Multimedia Journalist Amy Salzman, has to work at a GateHouse office in Lexington and commute to Cambridge to do her reporting. The Chronicle no longer has its own editor. It shares an editor with other GateHouse papers—five per editor apparently being typical at the company these days, according to the local journalism grapevine.

 

It’s also worth mentioning that the official name of the People’s Republic periodical is Cambridge Chronicle & Tab. Reflecting Fidelty’s 1992 purchase of the Tab Communications Inc. chain of newsweeklies, and the eventual absorption of most of them into other local papers in the same group under GateHouse. Which finally happened in Cambridge with the internal merger of the Cambridge Chronicle and Cambridge Tab in 2012.

 

The damage done by such media consolidation to American journalism in general, and to Boston-area journalism in particular, has been catastrophic. Not just in terms of the quality of stories produced, but in terms of their quantity. Newspapers like the Chronicle can no longer cover their cities properly. One or two reporters simply cannot be everywhere at once, even assuming regular contributions from very poorly remunerated freelance writers. Meanwhile, the physical size of print newspapers has also been shrinking on cost grounds; so there is literally less space available to run more stories.

 

This is leading to wealthy cities like Cambridge and Somerville turning into “news deserts” of the type media scholars have come to expect in poor Midwestern and Southern cities that have long since lost most of their news outlets. Although both locales have seen efforts to fill the holes in coverage left by the winnowing of long-established newspapers. Most notably, the online-only Cambridge Day—run continuously by my colleague Marc Levy since 2009, and featuring some archived material dating as far back as 2003.

 

Worse still, eliminating local independent newspapers and shrinking their megacorp-owned replacements is leading not just to a crisis in journalism, but to a crisis for our democracy. Because the information monoculture bred of newspaper megaclusters eliminates much of the lively public debate on issues of the day that was once the hallmark of American journalism. Without that intellectual ferment, curated by independent editors in ways the current social media circus cannot replace, the local press is reduced to yet another mouthpiece for vast corporations that already have plenty of them. So, here in the Boston area, over 100 newspapers that were once independent and spoke with their own editorial voices are now owned by one company—GateHouse—and therefore can all be ordered to speak with the voice of its wealthy owners. At any moment.

 

In this context, the dilemma of GateHouse running the same questionable teen wage editorial in roughly 26 of its daily and weekly newspapers around the Boston area can be seen in its proper light. It is an abuse of corporate power. Because it was never made clear that the editorial was written by someone other than the staff of every paper that ran it. And it was definitely never stated that said editorial was run in a large number of other GateHouse publications simultaneously.

 

No matter who is directly responsible for writing the editorial and publishing it in so many newspapers, GateHouse execs (and the New Media Investment Group Inc. execs that control them, and the Fortress Investment Group LLC execs who control them, and the SoftBank Group Corp. [a Japanese multinational] execs who control them, according to Ken Doctor) are ultimately to blame for creating the conditions that allow for such a breach of the public trust to occur. Whether it was a matter of overworked local editors or reporters grabbing a teen wage piece written by another of their number to fill their editorial holes a couple of weeks ago without either vetting it or coordinating with each other, or those same overworked local editors or reporters running the editorial in tandem with malice aforethought, or company executives ordering them to run it, the end result is the same.

 

When considered together with the fact that the financial interests of GateHouse and the main statewide lobby group in support of lowering the minimum wage for teens, the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, align far too closely for comfort—as I demonstrated in my first column on this situation—it should be obvious that newspaper megaclusters are a bad idea for everyone but their owners… and any corporate or political interest they happen to ally with.

 

In the 1830s, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville in his landmark work Democracy in America said that the “power of the newspaper press” must “increase as the social conditions of men become more equal.” What, then, would he make of corporations like GateHouse Media? Whose power is increasing as the social conditions of Americans are now becoming more unequal year by year. And whose willingness to use that power against their own audiences in pursuit of ever greater profit is unraveling the great promise of news media as a bedrock democratic institution that de Tocqueville so presciently identified almost two centuries ago.

 

Nothing good, I imagine. He might well say that no private entity should be allowed to own so many local news outlets in such close proximity to each other. Which is certainly a point that Americans need to impress upon our elected officials. Who should move to ban this practice at speed. But are currently moving in the opposite deregulatory direction. And will not reverse course. Unless forced to do so by popular movements for what one might call information justice.

 

So let’s get going on that.

RADIO DAYS: HOW BILL LICHTENSTEIN GOT THE BAND BACK TOGETHER FOR A CRITICAL HUB HISTORY DOC

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Photo of WBCN Airstaff circa 1970 in record library at 312 Stuart Street studios in Boston by Peter Simon

 

At 39 years old I’ve come to terms with the fact that I missed out. Despite having protested and partied and seen hundreds of concerts, as a journalist I’ve also spent a lot of time with Baby Boomer mentors, and I more or less believe the subtext of their every anecdote and vignette: Their seminal era was much better, more fun, more inspirational, and certainly a lot more original than most others, mine included.

 

Filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein has delivered a stunning reminder of this intergenerational reality in his new project, WBCN & the American Revolution. The documentary linchpin of this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston, his film rips wide open a warp into the late 1960s and early ’70s. All with the familiar backdrop of sex, drugs, and music but with a Boston focus, funk, and flavor that you won’t get in a gratuitous CNN decade doc.

 

With his time capsule about to rock the IFFBoston after years in development, I asked Lichtenstein to share a couple of war stories—about the old days, sure, but also in regard to the challenge of summoning and interviewing an iconic alt media rogues’ gallery. Having landed on-air at WBCN as a 14-year-old in 1970, he started from the very beginning.

 

The genesis…

I always had a radio pressed against my ear—I used to put one under my pillow at night. … I grew up loving radio, but in those days loving radio meant Top 40 radio, which was literally 40 songs over and over again. …

 

Somewhere along the way, my class [from Brookline] had a field trip and we actually went to WBCN. It just seemed like the coolest place you could imagine. It was just so different—the way people talked. …

 

To be able to turn on the radio and to hear someone making reference to the head shops around town, to the anti-Vietnam War movement that was just taking off … it was this thing that really had no connection to anything that came before it. And it had arrived in Boston. … It really was something you hadn’t seen, and now to hear it on the radio was amazing. …

 

And so in ninth grade I was in this open educational program and they said, You have to go get a volunteer job one day a week. Some people went to volunteer at a hospital or lab or something, and I called [WBCN]. They had just started a listener line—it was like Google, ask a question and they’d answer it or find the answer—and they needed people to answer it, so I started answering the listener line on Wednesdays.

 

Within a month or two, Danny Schechter, who was doing news, said, Can you do me a favor? There was a demonstration at the Berkeley Street police station against the killing of [Black Panther] Fred Hampton in Chicago. He handed me this tape recorder and said, Just push the little red button. I brought it back and he showed me how to cut the tape, and [from there] I started producing radio spots.

 

The connection…

I’ve heard from people who have made movies about their families that you’ll find out things you never knew. I found out how I ended up with a show, which was I was at a meeting about [how WBCN could attract more high school students] … and Al Perry, who was the general manager and is in the film, says that I said, You don’t know anything about high school students. After the meeting, Al [told the program director], We should give him a show. Shortly thereafter I started doing a weekly all-night Saturday night radio show on ’BCN. That was my connection to the station.

 

The spark…

Initially, what made me want to do the film, it started during the 2000s. During the Iraq War, post-9/11 there was a sense that somehow artists, musicians, all of us somehow had lost the imperative to speak up about what’s going on in society. There was a moment in particular when Bruce Springsteen did a fundraiser for John Kerry and was attacked for being too political. Back in the day he would have been attacked for being too conservative for doing a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate.

 

Photo of Bill Lichtenstein at WBCN circa 1973 used courtesy of Don Sanford

 

The source…

Certainly Boston was on par [with San Francisco when it came to counterculture influence] … and very little of it was ever chronicled. I don’t know what that is, but there really was a missing chapter, a missing book from the ’60s about how you got from San Francisco to Watergate. Something happened in the middle there, and it didn’t happen in San Francisco. San Francisco burned out by ’68 or ’69, and New York became commercialized, so a lot of what happened was in Boston.

 

The process…

Boston was a central point of the ’60s and the counterculture, so everybody came through—every major musical figure, political figure—in some way and intersected in some way with ’BCN. So there was all of this archival stuff, most of which had been lost to the ages. …

 

We really thought it out. We had a white wall in an office we were in … with this overview of events that had happened in Boston. Then we had to gather the archives. … It was like archaeology. We would find something like a tape of Patti Smith at the Jazz Workshop and figure somebody must have some photos. …

 

Initially we thought about doing it as an ensemble, with like six people, but we decided that we couldn’t. … ’BCN was an extended family. … All of these people largely were successful because they were great storytellers. And so part of what helped make the film work was the ability to sit them all down. There are great moments in there because of it.

 

The bigger picture…

The belief was always that this told a story about social change and people speaking up for what is right. If it was just about Boston, it would have a limited appeal, so really from the beginning we looked at how ’BCN in fact had a much broader influence, and then we tried to tell that story. Some people who remember the station have this enduring love for it, but it’s also a story simply about how media can create social change. That’s a universal story.

 

WBCN & THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AT IFFBOSTON. SOMERVILLE THEATRE, 55 DAVIS SQUARE, SOMERVILLE. SAT 4.27. MORE INFO AT IFFBOSTON.ORG AND THEAMERICANREVOLUTION.FM

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GUNS IN MASS (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)

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Gun laws, limits, and licensing in Mass—in perception and reality

By Minh Do, Chris Faraone, Noel Gasca, Olin Hayes, James Kwon, Abigail Noyes, Alisha Parikh, Autumn Pattison, Selah Pomeranitz, Amanda Rasinski, Max Reyes, Madison Rogers, Riane Roldan, Adrien Salzberg, Tay Thai, Curtis Waltman

 

In Massachusetts, anyone from legislative insiders to casual 5 o’clock news watchers knows that the Bay State is hardly the proud beacon of progressive priorities that it is often cast as on Fox News. From environmental woes to large corporate handouts, there are countless strikes upon the blue-state image.

 

On the typically contentious issue of guns, however, Mass is almost always seen through a rose-colored liberal lens. Relative to over-the-top firearm fundamentalists in red states, even the most right-leaning Mass politicians are pacifist hippies. A recent public forum hosted by the Boston Globe and WBUR titled “Tackling Gun Violence” was a nod to that popular narrative and featured Republican Gov. Charlie Baker in conversation with Democratic House Speaker Robert DeLeo, among others. The event was advertised as a discussion about Mass having “the lowest firearm death and disability rate in the continental U.S.” … “the result of a set of policies that were implemented by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, working with local advocates and researchers to develop best practices that can set an example for the country.”

 

The dialogue around guns in this state is complicated, as are the positions of a lot of Massachusetts politicians. Baker, for example, has an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and keeps in the good graces of many Beacon Hill Democrats on the topic of guns, at least publicly. On the other hand, the governor has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from people affiliated with weapons sellers, manufacturers, and distributors. Bones he’s thrown to firearm enthusiasts have not helped his NRA report card grade, but in 2017 Baker appointed Ron Amidon, then-president of the Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL), the Commonwealth’s NRA affiliate group, to head the state’s Department of Fish and Game. GOAL lobbies aggressively and has advocated for, among other controversial measures, a repeal to the Bay State’s assault weapons ban.

 

Compared to every other state, the Commonwealth has undeniably made major strides on gun reform and safety. Especially since the late ’90s, Mass has been at the national legislative forefront and is often recognized as having some of the toughest restrictions anywhere in the US. In 2017, it was ranked as America’s fourth safest state, according to the annual study by the Gifford Law Center. While Mass is often portrayed as a mob-infested murderground in major motion pictures, it is simultaneously hailed in pop culture as a progressive exemplar and has been the subject of gushing national news coverage, like a 2018 puff piece in Vox headed, “Massachusetts offers a model for dealing with gun violence that the rest of the country could follow.”

 

Some of the reputation is deserved; laws here have been applauded by gun control advocates and protested, physically and legally, by gun rights groups. In 2014, state legislators passed a sweeping reform bill focused on increasing background checks, attending to mental health issues, tightening security in schools, and making punishment for gun crimes harsher. A more recent ban on bump stocks, a reaction to the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has drawn praise from the left as well as criticism and a lawsuit from the right. A “red flag” bill that enables court-approved removal of guns from people considered to pose a threat to themselves or others, also passed last year, has been similarly received.

 

Compared to the Bay State’s safety bona fides, there is relatively scant attention paid to firearms within our borders, licensed or otherwise. The same goes for gun dealers, ranges, taxpayer-subsidized police militarization, and lobbyists who push to deregulate all of the above. In part due to the common perception that Mass is a gun-free refuge, many of these tidbits go unnoticed—from the 262 firearm deaths that occurred in 2017 (the last year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have made statistics available), to politicians who speak out against violence but pocket campaign dollars from gun makers, to the fact that guns made in or distributed by Commonwealth companies have been used in mass shootings. According to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) statistics from 2016, Mass produced more than 3 million guns that year alone, far more than any other state (neighboring New Hampshire was a distant second) and accounting for approximately one-quarter of all guns made in the US.

 

Since 2018, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, in collaboration with MuckRock, the Emerson College Department of Journalism, and the Emerson College Engagement Lab, has thoroughly examined and reported on the unchecked nature of weapons procurement by state and municipal law enforcement agencies in Mass. In one discovery that emerged from documents secured via public records requests, our team revealed that certain law enforcement agencies continued doing business with companies that Attorney General Maura Healey found violated state law. In some cases, individuals from those businesses donated to pols including Gov. Baker while still under investigation.

 

In this all-encompassing installment, we explore beyond the fire power that is procured by police and focus on the weapons owned by members of the public—legally as well as illegally—that those very same departments are tasked with licensing and keeping tabs on. By looking past the myth and surveying the gun culture and economy across the Commonwealth, our intention is to portray a more accurate picture than popular perception provides and that, like our reporting on the millions of dollars that State Police have spent over budget on weapons, sidesteps the polarized politics of the national gun debate.

 

WHO BUYS?

In Alabama, which has one of the top 10 worst firearm death rates in the country, there is no substantial wait time for getting a gun. The licensing process begins when you fill out a form at the gun store, sort of like if you could get licensed to drive at a car dealership. It’s a similar scenario in Tennessee, where state law does not require owners to obtain a license, register their firearms, or report lost or stolen guns. There’s also no waiting period or limit on the number of firearms that may be purchased at one time. In March, police in Brockton found three young men from the Volunteer State sitting in a car holding a warrior’s trove that included several pistols and an AK-47, as well as ammunition, black gloves, and masks.

 

Though firearms from other states end up in Massachusetts often, as far as the Commonwealth’s own licensing affairs are concerned, things work differently here. People everywhere are required to fill out some form or another to purchase a gun; by contrast, the process here is comparatively longer, more thorough, and more selective than anyplace else by several measures. Reform crusaders say such differences are part of the reason that Mass has one of the lowest gun death rates in the nation; in 2017, according to CDC data, the number of deaths per 100,000 Commonwealth residents was 3.7. The only state where people were on average at less risk of being shot and killed was Hawaii (New York’s rate was also 3.7); in Mass, you were several times more likely to die from sepsis than on the wrong side of a gun barrel. Compare that to 2017 firearm death rates of 22.9 and 18.4 in Alabama and Tennessee, respectively.

 

Massachusetts resident Brian Yule applied for a license to carry in 2016 in Plymouth. Recounting the experience, he said the whole entire process took about six months after he successfully completed a safety course and was interviewed by local law enforcement. Yule, a Plymouth firefighter, described the procedure as “long and drawn out compared to other states,” and his observations match the data.

 

A “Review of the Commonwealth’s Firearms License Permitting Process”—released by Mass Auditor Suzanne Bump in 2017 and covering the period between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2016—showed that Plymouth had one of the longest waits in Mass, with the process taking an average of 116 days to complete—nearly three times the state’s designated 40-day limit.

 

According to that same report, municipal officials largely blame the elongated process on understaffing and a lack of communication with the statewide Department of Criminal Justice Information Services. Making things harder to track and synthesize, wait times fluctuate from town to town; per state law, municipalities have leeway when it comes to gun licensing, from specific application requirements to prescribed wait times.

 

In Cambridge, obtaining a firearms license is a lot like applying for a job. You need references—specifically, two letters of recommendation that are not from family members and that speak to your good character and intentions. You also need a cover letter detailing why you are seeking the license, plus the requisite ID, proof of residence, the statewide standard $100 fee, and a basic firearms safety course certificate.

 

Rather than make the process additionally onerous like Cambridge, others have streamlined applications. In Duxbury, the town proactively notes that returning applicants don’t need a safety course certificate; the policy applies statewide, but many local administrators leave it off their websites. Most police departments list requirements for firearms license applications online, but their checklists differ, in some cases dramatically. Newton, like Cambridge, requires two character references. Revere and Nantucket ask for three. In Western Mass, however, towns like Deerfield and Peru simply link to the state’s application website.

 

Our efforts to obtain gun license data for 2018 were ignored by the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services. One previous snapshot of Commonwealth ownership came in a comprehensive 2016 WBZ I-Team report that compiled information on active firearms licenses. That analysis, built on Massachusetts Department of Public Safety data and other primary sources, showed the most licenses in the most populated cities. When accounting for population, the hottest towns were largely found throughout the western half of Mass, as well as along the state’s northern and southern borders. More populated urban areas have less licenses per capita.

 

The aforementioned survey also explored license denials from 2006 to 2016, which paint a different picture. Cities mostly had the highest denial rates, with Boston having the most (468), followed by other large municipalities including Lawrence (142), Lowell (226), Lynn (146), Quincy (162), Revere (214), Springfield (116), Taunton (144), and Worcester (248). Besides being the biggest cities in the state, many also have the largest minority populations.

 

In addition to how particular city or town specifications factor into the licensing process, there are other wild cards in play. Under one federal law, any applicant convicted of a misdemeanor or a crime for which the sentence is two years or less is not exempt from owning a firearm. Which is problematic here because some Massachusetts laws are relatively strict, with certain misdemeanors carrying two-and-a-half-year sentences.

 

At the local level, no town’s firearm laws can override or be less stringent than those set by the state. Confusing matters even further than the baseline state and federal background and fingerprint checks, stringency is not always so black and white, or necessarily applied in accordance with Mass law. The licensing process is often drawn out longer than it is supposed to be, with the majority of municipalities failing to meet the state’s 40-day deadline for application processing. According to the Massachusetts auditor’s report from 2017, only 38 of 347 local licensing authorities had average wait times that were within the mandated limit. The average wait statewide was 65 days.

 

The Revere Police Department notes on its website that applicants need three letters of recommendation that are not from family members and that are written by people “of good moral character and must have known you for at least five years.” In periods for which numbers are available, Revere’s waiting period has been relatively long, in some cases up to more than 120 days, whereas the wait in some of its neighboring suburbs are on average one-quarter that long.

 

One Lynn resident who spoke with us applied for his license to carry last year. Jamie Rivera said he understands why towns have different policies and longer application processes. His deference appears to be in line with most Americans; in a Pew Research Center survey conducted last September, less than half of the respondents said the waiting period for buying a gun should be shortened.

 

“When you apply for a gun in a town that’s closer to a city,” Rivera said, “that’s a lot different than applying for one when you live near the woods.”

 

Rivera had to complete safety courses, interview with local cops, and pay a fee of $100 with his application. Authorities told him the process could take up to six months. In the end, it took half that long.

 

“With applying for a license in [dense cities] like Lynn, there’s more likelihood of gun negligence,” Rivera said. “Gun policy tries to combat that by making stricter processes.”

 

WHO TRIES?

In 1998, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, under the leadership of Republican Governor Paul Cellucci and Democratic honchos in the House and Senate, banned the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons like AKs, UZIs, AR-15s, revolving cylinder shotguns, and “any semiautomatic weapon that can hold a magazine of more than five rounds.” The Act Relative to Gun Control in the Commonwealth also banned certain high-volume magazines, slapped further restrictions on arms dealers, and granted broad powers to police departments to deny licenses to “unsuitable” applicants.

 

Over the following decade, the number of active gun licenses in Massachusetts plummeted from nearly 1.5 million in the late 1990s to just 200,000 less than 10 years later (that total has rebounded over the past half-decade and nearly hit 400,000 last year). Violent crime also decreased, which hasn’t stopped reform. Even in instances when bullet-ridden episodes erupted elsewhere, Bay State politicians have responded, with varying results.

 

Following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that left more than two dozen people dead, states across the country rushed to pass rigorous legislation aiming to prevent similar incidents in their own jurisdictions. Some failed, but policy makers in Mass, led by House Speaker DeLeo and then-Sen. President Therese Murray, assembled a committee to investigate gun laws, then delivered recommendations the following year to then-Gov. Deval Patrick, who signed an Act Relative to the Reduction of Gun Violence in 2014.

 

Among other changes, Patrick’s actions enhanced sentences for existing gun crimes and brought Massachusetts into compliance with the National Instant Background Check System, which raises red flags in the event that potential gun owners suffer from mental illness and substance abuse issues. Many of the tweaks were initially endorsed by voices on the gun violence prevention side of the national debate but have been criticized as ineffective in reflection. Summarizing various analyses, both statistical and anecdotal, last March WGBH political analyst David S. Bernstein noted that despite “new penalties for failing to safely secure firearms, failing to properly report the private sale or transfer of a firearm, and failing to report a lost or stolen gun,” an “[Executive Office of Public Safety and Security] report gives no indication … that law enforcement is making good on that threat. Neither does a report … from Northeastern University, assessing the implementation of the 2014 law.”

 

Assessments of the gun violence reduction act from people in communities that are the most impacted have been no more flattering.

 

“Look at the outpouring of everything when there’s a mass shooting,” Dr. Stephanie Shapiro Berkson, a strategist for the Mass Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, said. Also a professor of community health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Shapiro Berkson added, “Why don’t we have that outpouring in my neighborhood, in lower Roxbury? Why don’t we have the same outpouring and the same attention?”

 

Following the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, Attorney General Maura Healey issued a notice to all gun sellers and manufacturers in Massachusetts, warning that her office is “stepping up enforcement of the state’s assault weapons ban, including a crackdown on the sale of copycat weapons.” The AG’s letter led to more than 2,500 grudge buys in a single day and many more over the following months.

 

Another landmark Massachusetts gun reform came in 2018, in response to the killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The massacre spurred binding action nationwide, with Mass passing its version of a “Red Flag” law in an Act Further Regulating Certain Weapons. The measure allows relatives or mental health professionals to recommend the removal of a firearm from somebody who is considered to be a danger to themselves or people around them.

 

Such legislative developments—the response on Beacon Hill—have been touted locally as well as nationally. What’s less commonly acknowledged is the role that Massachusetts, from companies based here to many of its leading politicians, play in gun culture and the firearm economy. In the celebration of the Bay State’s statistical safety, it’s rarely noted that gun makers and distributors in our backyard have vended weapons that were used in some of the most horrendous bloodbaths in memory. Or that open markets in neighboring Second Amendment gracelands like New Hampshire stoke the fire.

 

 

WHO LIES?

In 2017, a Manchester, New Hampshire woman went to prison for purchasing a gun and ammunition in her state that was intended for a friend with felony convictions on his record. The woman lied to the clerk at the gun store where she bought the firearm, saying that it was for her personal use. It was later found out that she gave the piece, which was connected to a shooting in Leominster, to her friend in Massachusetts.

 

Two years earlier, another New Hampshire woman bought a gun in Plaistow, falsely claimed the firearm was for her, then proceeded to deliver the 9 mm handgun to a Commonwealth resident.

 

In one case fit for tabloid fodder, a Boston Police Department officer was convicted of lying about purchasing two firearms for himself when he was in fact buying for friends. The weapons were illegal for civilian use in Massachusetts, while one of the guns was later found in the possession of a reputed gang member.

 

 

Individual straw purchasing cases differ in specifics and their level of shock value. Generally, a straw purchaser is anybody who serves as the proxy in a firearm transaction, whether a friend, romantic partner, or even a stranger who’s connected to a trafficking ring. These situations involve guns being secured by somebody who qualifies under applicable laws for someone who doesn’t. And often lead to firepower flowing over borders into states like Massachusetts.

 

According to 2017 ATF data, less than a third of all guns recovered in Mass as part of police investigations were purchased in the state. Nearly 70 percent were from 43 other states, with the most guns coming from New Hampshire and Maine.

 

“The vast majority of people still get a gun [in Massachusetts] … but the NRA has made a lot of people believe that they can’t, so they try to go elsewhere to get it,” said Dr. Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice. He continues, “They will try to go to New Hampshire, or Maine, or Virginia, and ask somebody who lives there to buy a gun and you know, give them 50 bucks and let them go buy a $100 or $50 gun. And then they will do it for you.”

 

Unlike Massachusetts, which currently has an A- from Gifford Law Center’s Annual Gun Law Scorecard, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine all have an F rating. The center assigns positive points for gun safety policies like private background checks and risk protection orders, and negatively values black eyes like concealed carry. Since New Hampshire and Maine removed their requirements for a license to pack a concealed weapon, Mass has seen an influx of guns from those states.

 

In practice, when a person buys a firearm from a licensed dealer, they are required to fill out a form authorizing they are the actual buyer of the firearm, which does not apply if they are purchasing on behalf of another party. Straw purchasing is a federal crime and is punishable for both the dummy buyer and the person they pass goods to. Which hasn’t always been such a deterrent; according to an ATF study published in 2000, straw purchasing accounted for almost half (46 percent) of 1,530 firearms trafficking investigations reviewed and was used to procure nearly 26,000 trafficked firearms nationwide. A 2007 UPenn study found that “guns purchased in bulk were up to 64% more likely to be used for illegal purposes than guns purchased individually.”

 

In an effort to combat gun trafficking, some states have limited the number of guns that people can purchase in a short amount of time. Laws to that effect have been passed in New Jersey (2009), California (2000), and before those two states in Virginia, which adopted a one-gun-a-month measure in 1993, after the commonwealth was noted as the primary source of guns recovered in surrounding states used in a crime. Following the passage of that law, studies showed the odds of recovering a gun sourced from Virginia dropped for states all the way up to New England—71 percent in New York; 66 percent in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island; and 72 percent in Massachusetts.

 

In 2012, Republican Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell signed a repeal of the one-gun-a-month law.

 

WHO DIES?

According to the CDC, social determinants of health include “conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play.” Education, for example, impacts outcomes differently. One 10-year study by researchers at Columbia University published in 2010 shows what those conditions can look like across community lines: White Massachusetts residents had the lowest gun violence death rate in the country, while the state overall had the third largest divide in gun death rates between black and white people. Black people living in Massachusetts were four times more likely to die from gun violence than white people, according to CDC data.

 

Dr. McDevitt attributed a lot of homicides in Mass to street violence: “Most of our gangs are African American or Latin and that’s the majority of homicide in Massachusetts. Not all of them, but the majority.”

 

Dr. Shapiro Berkson of the University of Illinois at Chicago cautioned against blaming community members for homicides or gang violence. Factors outside a person’s immediate control, she said, like disparities in social determinants of health between neighborhoods, may play an active role in tragedy.

 

“To me,” Shapiro Berkson said, “homicide seemed to be a direct impact of segregation and racism.”

 

Speaking to the lasting impact of bigoted residential policies, one 24-year study that measured the impact of racial integration found that segregated neighborhoods may increase the black-white firearm homicide disparity. The study hypothesizes that living in a segregated neighborhood may increase levels of black deprivation and disadvantage, in turn leading to greater instances of violence in impoverished areas due to lack of resources, desperation, and gang violence. In short, growing up in a neighborhood impacted by homicides can affect someone’s life in ways beyond the immediately obvious, affecting the risk of other negative health outcomes.

 

“Think of physical activity,” Shapiro Berkson said. “If you live in a community where there’s not a lot of homicides, you’re gonna go out to the parks, you’re gonna exercise, you’re gonna be active. If you live in a community where there’s a lot of homicides, you’re gonna stay inside and play video games.”

 

Beneath the surface perception of Mass as a gun-free oasis, there is the real-life toll of violence. Working in response to that reality, the Mass Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence advocates for stronger gun laws at the state and local level. The organization was created in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 and has become something of a foil to GOAL on Beacon Hill.

 

Angus McQuilken, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention coalition, applauds Mass for its relatively ambitious state gun laws, but still calls for increased transparency and oversight.

 

“We have been working closely with police chiefs to improve our laws in this regard,” McQuilken said. “Our experience is that our police chiefs on a local level take their jobs … and the responsibility that they hold in the licensing process very seriously. But it’s important to know that even in the state with the most comprehensive and effective gun laws in the country, the percentage of licenses that are actually denied is very slim.”

 

Despite the Commonwealth’s progressive reputation, McQuilken sees gun advocacy groups as a force to be reckoned with. As an example of their influence, he points to Newburyport, where license applicants are directed to GOAL resources for information about safety procedures.

 

“They [GOAL] have, to my understating, 16,000 members, which is a very small percentage of our state’s population,” McQuilken said. “But they raise their voices and make a lot of noise whenever legislation is being considered on Beacon Hill … They have a good amount of influence because they advocate very vocally when new laws are being considered.”

 

In 2016, hundreds of Second Amendment activists, many of them GOAL-oriented, demonstrated outside of the State House after the attorney general moved to ban “copycat” semiautomatic assault rifles.

 

“I tend to think that we would all be well-served if police chiefs relied on objective information to share with applicants for gun licenses,” McQuilken said. “That doesn’t seem to me to be a proper role for an advocacy organization whose interest is to protect the interests of the firearms industry.”

 

GOAL did not respond to a request for comment.


Meanwhile, as Mass continues to set liberal standards for gun laws, its hodgepodge of municipal regulations has gone largely unscrutinized—by the media, lawmakers, and, as an apparent result, by the public as well.

 

 

WHO TITHES?

Last June, Gov. Baker’s administration urged local police chiefs across the state to rescind hundreds of gun licenses from individuals who had been previously cleared to carry. The move came after federal officials informed the state that its Firearm Licensing Review Board approved applicants who should have been turned away per federal guidelines. Several district courts have ordered those licenses reinstated, arguing that the state overstepped its bounds. The ordeal is likely one of many contributing factors to Baker’s low NRA approval score.

 

Despite disapproval from more radical conservatives and right-wing interest groups, Baker has managed to coddle and accept campaign donations from people tied to the gun industry. Stakeholders from the Westfield-based weapons supplier Camfour, which distributed the Remington Bushmaster rifle used in the killing of children and educators at Sandy Hook, have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito since 2015. As an earlier installment of this report about guns in Mass showed, Baker—as well as other Massachusetts politicians, from county sheriffs to state reps and Polito—has accepted contributions from the full gamut of gun givers, from employees and executives of major Mass-based distributors to proprietors of brick-and-mortar retailers.

 

The biggest business of the bunch, Springfield-based Smith & Wesson, recently announced a move of some of its Mass workforce to more gun-friendly Missouri. After news broke that the gunman in Parkland used one of the company’s AR-15 assault rifles to murder or maim more than 30 people, Smith & Wesson and its parent company, American Outdoor Brands, became the target of ongoing protests. Still, it remains a critical cog in the state’s large gun economy. The company employs about 1,600 people at its Western Mass plant and, according to federal data, manufactured 1.4 million pistols, 396,710 rifles, and 294,680 revolvers, as well as a smaller number of miscellaneous firearms and shotguns, in Springfield in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available.

 

Baker and a host of other top lawmakers are also connected in innumerable ways to investment firms that profit from firearm sales. Cornerstones of the Commonwealth economy, State Street Global Advisors and Fidelity Investments each have millions of shares in multiple funds that are exposed to firearm-related stock. Even the gun-wary Globe is reluctant to acknowledge these connections; though a viral page-one opinion piece that the newspaper ran in 2016 knocked both firms for their industry ties in the print edition, the condemnation of Fidelity and State Street was omitted from the online version.

 

In accordance with the chill repute that Mass enjoys at home as well as nationally, such unflattering activity on the firearm front hardly registers. Even in spaces where reformers are trying their best to navigate a state with leaders who talk a convincing game but lack the stats to match. Like at a symposium for first responders held in Quincy last September, when Gov. Baker sat in the crowd as Michele Gay, a founder of the group Safe and Sound Schools whose daughter Josephine Grace was killed in the shooting in Newtown, spoke about political efficacy and courage.

 

“Without strong leadership and leaders putting money where their mouth is, it’s like pushing a giant boulder uphill,” Gay said. “Safety is something we all say we want—the mission statement for every single school in America says something about providing a safe and secure environment. But when it comes down to the realities of what it takes to keep people safe, we often turn away because it’s uncomfortable, expensive, or may cause us to get into arguments.”


 

 

This is an installment of a multipart collaboration on weapons use and procurement in Massachusetts by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, Emerson College’s Department of Journalism, MuckRock, and the Engagement Lab. Support for this story was made possible by the Online News Association’s Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education. This project is administered by the Online News Association with support from Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, Rita Allen Foundation and the Scripps Howard Foundation.

DIRTY OLD BOSTON: THAT FUNKY SQUARE

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Remembering the Tasty and “bohemian free-for-alls”

 

Harvard Square has forever been a durable destination with a significant variety of coffee shops, bars, diners, boutiques, and music venues, not to mention some of the best new and used book and record shops in the region. That’s more or less the case these days, even though the area is a mere shadow of itself. Harvard Square, of course, saw its notoriety grow in the late ’60s, as hippies, hustlers, and everyone in between became part of the milieu and common culture.

 

You could pen a book about the legacy and the importance of this corner of the world, and indeed more than a few people have. One of them, writer Mo Lotman, noted in his 2009 book, Harvard Square: An Illustrated History Since 1950, “Beginning in 1968, [Cambridge] Common was transformed every warm Sunday afternoon into a bohemian free-for-all, with drum circles, bead-sellers, tranced-out dancers, and a ton of pot.”

 

As these things go, through the years old-timers have insisted that the Harvard Square of their day was the way it’s truly meant to be. The Boomer thesis typically goes, You should have seen Harvard Square when it was a square. Or, Today it’s a corporate wasteland. You should have seen it in the ’60s and ’70s, back in my day!

 

And of course boomers love telling their friends and family members all the tall tales that sprung out of so many legendary Cambridge locales that have left us: the Idler, the Oxford Ale House, the list goes on. There were daily double bills for a dollar at the Harvard Square Theatre, foreign films on JFK Street in another movie house that is no longer, cool used clothes at the Pennsylvania Company, and coffee at the Blue Parrot, where writers filled the tables. Let’s also not forget about Baileys Ice Cream or roast beef at Elsie’s Sandwich Shop. Oh, and of course the venerable Tasty…

 

Taken from this world in the late ’90s and turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch—a development that till this day peeves many square vets, the loss being one of those perfect early symbols of accelerated gentrification in retrospect—the Tasty was a one-room diner that was about 30 feet long and a quarter that wide. Customers ate burgers and dogs on a yellow linoleum counter that had 16 stools, and somehow busy nights managed to draw 60 to 80 people at a time. On those busy evenings, they could serve anywhere between 300 and 400 patties between midnight and 4 am.

 

The informal atmosphere and friendly staff at the Tasty drew in longtime residents, college students, and working people. Though it may not seem like such a big deal these days, back then it was one of the few places where locals and visitors from different social and economic classes easily mixed.

 

Around the mid-’90s, the owner of the building that housed the Tasty, Cambridge Savings Bank, decided to cash in on the chain store boom coming to Harvard Square. Higher rents and changing times forced the owner’s hand, and despite vocal protests from the Harvard Square Defense Fund—as well as from Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi—the joint shut its doors for good in 1997. Gone but always remembered as a spot where you could fill up for cheap around good people.

 

Today, it’s a row of ATM machines.

 

Parts of this throwback have been previously published by Dirty Old Boston. This Dirty Old Boston feature is a collaboration between DigBoston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and Dirty Old Boston. For more local history visit binjonline.org and dirtyoldboston.com.


SPECIAL FEATURE: THE NEW POLLUTANTS

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A growing body of research suggests that, in and around traffic, what you can’t see may be killing you

 


 

Every rush hour, thousands of cars belch out an invisible fog. Whenever a piston fires, a tire spins, or a car brakes, tiny flecks of soot, metal, and rubber are left behind, drifting in the air. Pedestrians on nearby streets, people by open windows, cyclists, and school kids breathe it in, unknowingly bathing their lungs in invisible pollution. Unlike dust or sand or smoke, this fog is too small for the body to notice or expel.

 

Boston’s terrible traffic is no secret. Every day thousands of cars, mostly from the suburbs, idle and crawl in near-gridlock on highways and “expressways.” A recent study bestowed Boston the dubious honor of “Worst Traffic in America.”

 

But stories about traffic tend to focus on the cost to drivers. While it is true that commutes have gotten longer and more stressful, focusing on commute times ignores the other costs of car-based transit. Research shows that living near highways and busy roads increases the risk of asthma, lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease. Highways are a health hazard. Vehicle emissions are sickening communities. People pay for traffic with their bodies.

 

A growing body of evidence suggests that a newly discovered pollutant might be partially responsible. Ultrafine particles made of carbon soot, metal, and abrated tire the size of viruses have gone unnoticed. They’re difficult to study not just because they are small. Highway ultrafines are highly local and unstable, only travelling about 1,000 feet from the source. 

 

The Environmental Protection Agency monitors air quality on a regional level, and Massachusetts is lumped in with New England. At that scale ultrafines, which are so volatile and unstable that only a network of local air monitors would be able to see them, disappear. Scientists study them using portable samplers mounted to vans, bikes, or exteriors of buildings, and what they’ve found is deeply troubling.

 

Fuel, pistons, and tires

In the early 2000s community researcher Wig Zamore unearthed a worrisome trend in Commonwealth public health records. At the time, Zamore was serving on the Steering Committee for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council as they developed a new regional plan. 

 

“It became immediately apparent that I93 was a large environmental health and justice issue. Everyone else got transit. Somerville got the Red Line T Stop in Davis, but mostly highway and diesel rail pollution,” he explained in an email.

 

Fourteen communities in the Boston metropolitan area had far higher rates of death by heart attack and lung cancer than average. Towns like Somerville, Chelsea, and Revere had 75% more deaths from heart attacks or lung cancer. The pattern held even when adjusted for age and other cofactors.

 

When Zamore mapped the data, a startling picture emerged.

 

“By and large it looked like a highway map,” he explained. People living near the highway were having heart attacks and contracting cancer more often than their neighbors. Zamore wasn’t alone. A study in Stockholm found that living near a highway increased heart attack risk by 69%.

 

When a car or truck drives a lot of things are happening at the same time. Fuel ignites. Pistons and other moving parts scrape each other. Tires rub the pavement. Brake pads rub against the rotor. Exhaust escapes the tailpipe. Ultrafines are made at every phase of this process, but the majority of them come from tailpipes. Hot gasses react with the cooler air outside and condense into tiny, invisible, particles made of mostly carbon, heavy metal oxides, sulphate, and nitrate.

 

The colder the temperature, the more ultrafine particles are made. These particles are so tiny that they don’t act like other particles; they diffuse like gasses.

 

“They don’t have enough mass to hit something,” said Doug Brugge Professor of Community Medicine and Healthcare at UConn. Brugge is one of the principal researchers in the Tufts Community Health Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) studies, which examine the effect of ultrafine pollution on people living by highways. He explained that ultrafines drift through the air and stick to whatever they touch. Once stuck to a hard surface, ultrafines aggregate into a sooty layer that you might see on a sound barrier by the highway.

 

When inhaled, ultrafines settle in primarily in the upper airways or deep within the lung. They diffuse through the protective mucus of your airways and are so small they avoid capture by immune cells. Some travel up the olfactory nerve into the brain. Some remain in lung cells. Others circulate in the blood and get embedded in vascular or organ tissue. Once inside and circulating, ultrafines collect near cellular mitochondria, which can kill or damage cells. They also release heavy metal contaminants that damage cells. Sensing widespread damage, the immune system activates, searching for an injury.

 

But there isn’t one. Unlike after an infection or injury, ultrafine inflammation never resolves. Chronic systemic inflammation ensues which increases the risk of lung cancer. Blood pressure increases. Veins and arteries are damaged. In the CAFEH study, Brugge and his colleagues found elevated blood pressure and increased inflammatory markers in people living by I-93 in Somerville and Chinatown. In animal studies, ultrafine exposure was found to cause atherosclerosis, and arterial plaques. Brugge likens it to chronic obesity.

 

“It [obesity] would be associated with a similar kind of low-grade chronic inflammation and lead to similar outcomes,” he explained. Like obesity you don’t necessarily experience symptoms but the damage to the heart and lungs accumulate slowly over time.

 

The degree of that damage isn’t completely clear. A soon-to-be-published study by the California Air Resources Board hopes to settle things. The study will include 20 years of health data correlated to ultrafine exposure models developed at UC Davis. A spokesman for CARB emphasized that demonstrating systemic inflammation wasn’t enough. “The actual endpoint is cardiovascular disease. We want to make that connection concrete.”

 

In the brain the effects are strange and more subtle. 

 

“Air pollution has been associated with cognitive decline,” said Debora Cory-Slechta, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester. She explained that many neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s had been associated with elevated iron levels in the brain.

 

“It might just be going up our noses over the course of our lifetimes,” she said.

 

 

The nerve

Cory-Slechta researches how ultrafine particles affect the brain. She exposes mice and rats to ultrafine pollution collected from a nearby highway to see how it changes brain development in the long term, and has traced the movement of ultrafine particles into the brain up the olfactory nerve. 

 

“You see brains loaded with iron, sulfur, and copper,” she said, “Once it gets in the brain it doesn’t appear to ever leave.” 

 

Long-term exposure causes neural cell death, degradation of the corpus callosum (the connection between the right and left halves of the brain) and markers of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

 

Cory-Slechta cautions that the precise relationship between ultrafine particles and the brain isn’t fully understood. There’s a lot that still needs to be clarified, but “there’d be nothing preventing the EPA from developing that regulation, other than the current administration,” she remarked.

 

At least one local lawmaker isn’t waiting for the EPA to step in. Massachusetts state Rep. Denise Provost filed two bills this year to address ultrafine pollution. HR 1989 would charge the Department of Public Health to review and map all particulates in the state; HR 1990 would require that schools and residential areas within 500 feet of a highway get mitigation through filters, retrofits, or barriers. The bill faces an uphill battle in the legislature.

 

“I’m not optimistic,” said Provost, who represents Somerville. “It’s very technical information and it’s hard to communicate it effectively.”

 

Other local lawmakers are also fighting to protect their constituents. Matt McLaughlin, the Ward 1 councilor in Somerville, has been pushing to get sound barriers installed. Sound barriers can catch a lot of ultrafine particles, but he too is facing trouble. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation only installs barriers in very specific circumstances and East Somerville, in spite of the noise and pollution complaints, doesn’t make the cut.

 

“I just don’t think they care,” McLaughlin said. “It’s not a priority for them. It’s easier to ignore it.” It’s a longstanding problem for Somerville.

 

“If you go back and look at the history of highways and trains everything was made to cut through us,” he said. 

 

Violent by design

Somerville and Chinatown face some of the worst congestion in the state: 262,000 vehicles pass through Somerville on I-93 and McGrath Highway daily, while more than 300,000 vehicles pass by Chinatown, which is ringed by I-90 and I-93. These are the most densely populated communities in Massachusetts, which makes them far more vulnerable to ultrafine pollution.

 

In some ways this is by design. Highways do not happen by accident. In The Folklore of the Freeway, professor Eric Alvia of UCLA writes, “Highway planners found the paths of least resistance, wiping out black commercial districts, Mexican barrios and Chinatowns.”

 

These highway projects were part of a broader movement of urban renewal and “slum clearance” that came from earlier patterns of housing discrimination. The Federal Housing Authority in 1935 formalized racial discrimination in home lending through a process called redlining, in which the presence of immigrants, African Americans, or poor people was often enough to disqualify the neighborhood from getting federally backed mortgages.

 

On maps, such areas were outlined in yellow for “declining,” or red for “hazardous.” In Boston, the West End, North End, South End, Chinatown, and Roxbury were redlined. Almost all of Somerville was marked as “declining” or “hazardous” aside from Tufts University, while the communities with the “lowest value” would face highway development and demolition for the next 80 years.

 

“This was not a natural or organic process,” explains LaDale Winling, professor of history at Virginia Tech. “What we think of as good neighborhoods had help. What we think of as bad neighborhoods had the power of the federal government against them.”

 

Somerville and Chinatown exemplify this trend. During the 1960s a coalition of activists protested and defeated the inner belt highway project that would have carved up Cambridge, Brookline, Roxbury, and the more affluent part of Somerville. In 1970, Governor Francis Sargent called a moratorium on highway construction and diverted the funding to expanding the Red and Orange lines. But the moratorium came too late for Chinatown, which lost half its land and one third of its businesses to the turnpike.

 

In Somerville, the I-93 was grandfathered in. Protestors rallied and demanded a safe highway be built, and under the provisions of the newly passed 1970 Clean Air Act, community advocates forced the Sargent administration to conduct an environmental impact assessment of the elevated highway plan. But while the study found that the elevated highway would violate the Clean Air Act, exposing Somervillians to lead, carbon monoxide, and toxic benzine, construction went on anyway. Further efforts by Somerville activists to mitigate noise or air pollution were stonewalled, and East Somerville became an island ringed by I-93 and McGrath Highway.

 

Fifty years later, the people of Somerville and Chinatown are still paying for I-93 and I-90. Ironically, gentrification, which threatens them in a different way, has spread the health burden of highway air pollution to the most affluent. Some of the most expensive developments are going up by highways. 

 

“It’s a very sad form of democracy,” Rep. Provost said.

 

“We do feel that MassDot owes the community,” explained Lydia Lowe, director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust. She explained that while calls for electric cars or expanded public transit were positive steps, more needed to be done in the short term to mitigate air pollution. The CAFEH study group, meanwhile, is working with the mayor of Somerville to develop air-filtration guidelines for homes by highways. They also hope to remodel highway-adjacent Foss Park to block pollution. In Chinatown, the Chinese Progressive Association is pushing for similar things, but these efforts will come to nothing if the state doesn’t step in.

 

The communities along the highway know what they need—barriers, protective green spaces, and air filters. They are not willing to wait for the rise of electric cars or decades-long investments in our decrepit transit infrastructure. Every day of exposure exacts a toll on their health. Every rush hour these communities shoulder the burden of our car dependence. 

 

“Now that we have ways to mitigate the impact of air pollution,” Lowe said, “we’d like to see a situation where government plays a stronger role in making that happen.”

 

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. To see more reporting like this, you can make a contribution at givetobinj.org.

THERE’S MUCH MORE TO THE MASS STATE POLICE SCANDAL THAN IS BEING REPORTED

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News broke this morning, via the Department of Justice US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, that “former President of the State Police Association of Massachusetts (SPAM) [Dana Pullman] and the union’s former Massachusetts lobbyist [Anne Lynch] were arrested today on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice,” and “charged in a criminal complaint with wire fraud, honest services wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and honest services wire fraud and obstruction of justice.” From the DOJ: 

 

SPAM acted as the exclusive bargaining agent between its members and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts regarding the terms and conditions of SPAM members’ employment … It is alleged that, from at least 2012 until Pullman resigned as the President of SPAM in September 2018, Pullman, Lynch and others were involved in a conspiracy to defraud SPAM members and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of their right to honest services from Pullman through fraud and deceit. This included illegal bribes and kickbacks that Pullman received from Lynch and her firm. 

 

It gets worse. According to the complaint, in 2014 Pullman negotiated for the state to pay SPAM $700,000 for expenses “SPAM claimed it had incurred in pursuing [a labor] grievance [against the state].” When a representative from the Commonwealth requested “documentation and receipts evidencing SPAM’s expenses” though, Pullman reportedly “told the representative that he was going to ‘stalk’ the Governor’s Deputy Chief of Staff about this issue.” Eventually, the state relented and agreed to pay SPAM $350,000 without having to provide any receipts. After SPAM received the full payment, its then-treasurer told investigators that Pullman demanded a check for $250,000 for Lynch Associates, pounding the table and yelling “Stop breaking my f**cking balls and give me the check!” when the treasurer questioned him. After the treasurer relented and handed one over, Anne Lynch allegedly received a $50,000 cut from her former lobbying firm, and the following day cut a check for $20,000 to Pullman’s spouse.

 

There’s also a much more salacious aspect of the charges, with prosecutors alleging, “Pullman used the SPAM debit card to pay for thousands of dollars of meals, flowers, travel, and gifts for an individual with whom Pullman was having a romantic relationship.” But beneath it all, there appears to be a lot more that is rotten than a single lobbyist and former union honcho. Since last year, our team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has examined hundreds of state purchasing agreements for everything from body armor and silencers to stun guns. So our ears perked up upon learning that the US attorney is additionally charging that “Pullman, Lynch and others were also allegedly involved in a scheme to defraud two different companies that sought to do business with the Commonwealth.”

 

A closer read of the complaint reveals who at least one of those companies are: “Between in or about April 2015 and Feruary 2016, a regional sales manager for an Arizona-based company whose primary product was a smart weapon attempted to market and sell smart weapons to both the MSP and the Massachusetts Department of Corrections [sic].” Now align that with our reporting from February:

 

As Taser’s business with the Commonwealth and its cities and towns began to run into the million-dollar range, the amount the company spent on lobbying started to hit six figures. In 2015, Taser spent $102,000 retaining Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, which was paid to provide services related to “Massachusetts government relations regarding public safety.” Additionally, in 2015 and 2016, Taser paid another firm, Lynch Associates, more than $100,000 for “relationship development in the Public Safety sector.”

 

In terms of the potential for peddling political influence, Taser apparently made prudent choices. In Lynch, it picked a firm that also happened to be lobbying for Taser’s biggest Massachusetts client, the state police. In Rasky, it was assigned a lobbyist who has personally given more than $30,000 to campaigns in Mass over the past 10 years, with gifts having gone to pols ranging from House Speaker Robert DeLeo to Gov. Charlie Baker. And that’s just at the state level.

 

Now we know why Taser brought on the second firm. As the criminal complaint states, “Despite the fact that [Taser] already had a Boston area lobbying firm on retainer, Pullman pressured [Taser] to also hire [Lynch]. Based on Pullman’s words and actions, [the Taser employee present at the meeting] believed [Taser] would not be able to sell smart weapons to the MSP.” 

 

The complaint also shows Pullman working with Gov. Charlie Baker’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, and allegedly taking various kickbacks along the way. Still, one has to wonder if this will be excused as another bad apple scenario, as opposed to a larger institutional problem. Should the public, or the media, or prosecutors wish to explore the depths of the problem, we recommend some of these threads we also began to unwind in our research:

 

  • Mass spends millions every year replenishing and bolstering its arsenals, plus adding advanced equipment and technology. As do municipal police and other taxpayer-funded public safety outfits. These purchases often have little to no oversight beyond the procuring departments, and have as a result spurred certain impropriety.

 

  • One dealer of military gear who has been entangled in two separate controversies involving giving questionable gifts—guns, as well as other favors—to state purchasing agents has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in goods to Mass in the last three years. Other active sellers include a shop that the AG recently caught selling guns that are banned in this state.

 

  • The state is spending more than it’s supposed to on these weapons. On one contract alone that was slated to total $1.5 million over its initial three-year term (2015-2018), or double that ($3 million) since its extension three more years through 2021, the state police, with some help from the Department of Correction and Environmental Police, spent more than $3 million—twice the initial allotment—in just the first three years, from 2015 to mid-2018. This is a theme that has repeatedly come up in our research.

 

According to the Department of Justice, the “charges of fraud and conspiracy each provide for a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and [a] fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater.” While “the charge of obstruction of justice provides for a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.” 

 

Whatever their fate, the alleged actions appear to have helped foster a costly flood of Tasers for law enforcement statewide. And those Tasers remain in place. As we reported, “Though MSP attorneys redacted descriptions and amounts from hundreds of pages of purchase orders and other documents they returned in response to Freedom of Information Act requests made for this story, BINJ was able to ascertain that over the past four and a half years, the department has spent in excess of $3 million on Taser ECWs and related consumables and accessories.”

 

This story is developing.

 

READ OUR REPORTING ON THE STATE POLICE AND TASER PROCUREMENT HERE

 

This is an installment of a multipart collaboration on weapons use and procurement in Massachusetts by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, Emerson College’s Department of JournalismMuckRock, and the Engagement Lab. Support for this story was made possible by the Online News Association’s Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education. This project is administered by the Online News Association with support from Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, Knight Foundation,the Democracy Fund, Rita Allen Foundation and the Scripps Howard Foundation.”

WHY REPARATIONS: AMERICA NEEDS TO PAY UP AND PAY FORWARD

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Photo by Rowland Scherman via National Archives

 

A year before the Mayflower arrived in 1620, the first group of enslaved Africans depicted as “20 and odd Negroes” arrived sometime during the final week of August to the Virginia colony of Jamestown. The fact that the exact date cannot be pinpointed assists in obfuscating the origins of slavery in the United States, but what is incontrovertible is the fact that this month marks the 400th anniversary of black bodies arriving at these shores against their will. Little could these “20 and odd Negroes” have fathomed millions more would come as huge cargoes of chattel slaves and not as human beings.

 

America keeps running away from this story, even as many Americans acknowledge slavery as the nation’s original sin. There are few accounts of an apology beyond the Southern Baptist Convention in 1995, former President Bill Clinton in 1998, the US House of Representatives in 2008 (H. RES. 194), and spiritual guru and presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson in 2018.

 

“On behalf of myself, and on behalf of my country, to you and all African Americans, from the beginning of our nation’s history, in honor of your ancestors and for the sake of your children, please hear this from my heart, I apologize, please forgive us,” Williamson told the audience during her “Love America Tour.”

 

One of the lingering impacts of 250 years of slavery followed by 90 years of Jim Crow and then 60 years of “separate but equal” is a seismic wealth gap between white and black Americans. It is estimated that approximately $12-14 trillion of unpaid black labor is owed for 400 years of economic inequality. Yet here in Greater Boston, which includes expensive Cambridge where I reside, for example, the median net worth for nonimmigrant blacks is $8, according to a 2015 study by Duke University, the New School, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

 

This year on Juneteenth (June 19, which commemorates the end of US slavery), the US House Committee on the Judiciary held a historic meeting on reparations, with economic initiatives discussed inside and outside the halls of Congress. Topics included remedies, consequences, and the disadvantages ensued as a result of the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans. 

 

These issues, of course, have been broached before and went nowhere—with civil rights activist James Forman in 1969 and also with former Michigan Rep. John Conyers Jr., who proposed a bill (H.R.40, in reference to the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to emancipated slaves) every year from 1989 until retirement in 2017. This session, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas continued the legacy of sponsoring the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.

 

If there are ever reparations in the form of monetary compensation for black farmland already confiscated or about to be seized by the government for back taxes, my spouse’s family would benefit. Her maternal side are Virginians from Upperville, a small unincorporated town known for horse breeding farms. They have been in Virginia since the 1600s, and with Ancestry.com may find their lineage points to one if not several of the “20 and odd Negroes” who first arrived.

 

My spouse’s Uncle Will died last year at the age of 102. He represents the second generation removed from slavery; my spouse’s mother is the last remaining sibling. Uncle Will’s grandmother, my spouse’s great-grandmother, was born into slavery and died as a free woman at the age of 108.  Sometime during Reconstruction (1863-1877), the great-grandmother accrued a small plot of farmland that now awaits its fate, as her brood scrape together enough money to keep it. 

 

By 1910, before Uncle Will’s mother gave birth to him on the family farm, black farmers operated approximately 213,000 farms, the height of black land ownership. However, soon after, black farmland was either forcefully taken by mob violence like the Klu Klux Klan, or gradually taken by state and federal governments through legal trickery or discriminatory lending practices. In 1916, the beginning of the Black Migration to northern cities, Uncle Will was born. When he grew up and wanted to go looking for a better life and wages, he left Upperville for Alexandria, and so, too, did his siblings, one by one, as they grew older.

 

Miraculously, the farm has stayed in the family despite the various machinations—legal and illegal—that government employees have fashioned to confiscate black farmland. The current outstanding back taxes are unattainable, though, especially with the deadline the state of Virginia gave the family to dispute or pay.

 

Reparations to African Americans are not a government handout. They are the “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963. “In a sense,” King said, “we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”

 

Reparations are due to my spouse’s family as to millions more. America needs to pay up and pay forward.

EXCERPT: FROM ‘BLACK LIVES, NATIVE LANDS, WHITE WORLDS: A HISTORY OF SLAVERY IN NEW ENGLAND’

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15 GEORGE STREET

 

Standing in the middle of a modern residential neighborhood in suburban Boston is an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion. These are not an uncommon site in New England, a region that embraces its history with placards, tourist attractions, and historic homes. Yet, the house at 15 George Street in Medford stands out—even by New England standards.

 

Well, not the house specifically but rather the building that stands in front, between the house and George Street. It is unique. Too many windows and not quite large enough to be a barn, its central chimney suggests a different purpose: a dwelling place for people. But why would a mansion, already three stories tall with many bedrooms, require additional living space?

 

This address was the home of the Royall family. Isaac Royall Sr. purchased the property, which included a two-story dwelling house and five hundred acres of surrounding land in 1732. Over the next five years, he remodeled and added on to the house extensively, transforming it into the mansion that still stands there today. He also had the unusual outbuilding constructed. Upon Isaac Sr.’s death in 1739, the property passed to his son Isaac Royall Jr.

 

The mansion house gives away much about the man who had it built. Adorned with a golden pineapple doorknocker and surrounded by a wall likewise adorned with pineapples, this home paid homage to the tropics. Although Isaac Sr. was born in Massachusetts, he had spent much of his life in the British West Indian colony of Antigua. There, Royall dealt in sugar, rum, and slaves. Eventually, after a devastating hurricane, pestilence, and a slave conspiracy struck the island, Royall decided to take his family and fortune back to New England.

 

Royall did not leave all his property behind in Antigua, however. Dwelling in that unusual outbuilding at 15 George Street were many of the twenty-two enslaved men and women Royall brought with him from the Caribbean. That building was a slave quarters. These men and women, most of them born in Africa, were trafficked by Royall to make his new country estate a success. Ripped from their homes for a second time, the people living in that outbuilding worked Royall’s farm, kept his house, and took care of his family. And they created a life of their own, demonstrated by the many artifacts they left behind.

 

The slave quarters standing at 15 George Street is the only freestanding slave quarters north of the Mason-Dixon Line still existing in the United States. Certainly there are many slave quarters in the South and Caribbean, but suburban Boston? This building suggests a different history of New England, one that is not only littered with Puritans and patriots but also enslaved Africans and Indians.

 

The slave quarters at 15 George Street opens a whole world of slavery in New England. It was deeply connected, culturally, socially, and economically, to slavery in the Caribbean. Enslaved men and women in New England clung to their cultures while crafting their own identities in the region. Dramatically outnumbered by the white population, they resisted slavery not through outright rebellion but through small challenges to the status quo.

 

And they demanded their labors and their struggles be recognized by the community. No resident of 15 George Street demonstrates this better than Belinda Sutton, a woman who lived under Isaac Sr. and Isaac Jr.’s tyranny. Years after being kidnapped and trafficked away from Africa, Sutton found her freedom. Her enslaver, Isaac Jr., was a loyalist and fled during the American Revolution. Although Royall freed Sutton in his will, she had already struck out on her own when the revolutionary commonwealth of Massachusetts seized the Royall estate.

 

And yet, Sutton struggled under freedom. She moved to Boston and worked menial jobs to support herself and her disabled daughter Prine. In 1783, she acted. With the help of free black activist Prince Hall, she filed a petition with the state government demanding payment from the seized Royall estate. Sutton reasoned that her labor had been stolen by the Royalls for five decades and that she was entitled to “one morsel” of the family’s “immense wealth,” which had been partially “accumulated by her own industry.” The legislature agreed, granted Sutton’s request, and awarded her an annual pension of fifteen pounds, twelve shillings to be paid out of Royall’s estate. She would later file four more petitions asking for further compensation. In short, Sutton demanded— and received— reparations for her years of bondage.

 

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds tells the story of people like Belinda Sutton. Although slaves comprised only about 4 percent of New England’s population on the eve of the American Revolution, this number does not reveal the importance of slavery to the region. Indeed, when looking at New England’s cities, such as Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, the percentage of slaves grows dramatically, to 12 and 25 percent, respectively. By the 1740s nearly one in four Boston households owned slaves. Likewise, in those towns, slave labor was vital to a number of industries, such as distilling and shipbuilding, and if historians do not account for slaves, the relative economic success and growth of these places in the long eighteenth century (1689– 1815) cannot be explained.

 

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England is now available from University of Massachusetts Press. There will be a round table discussion about the book on 10.15 at the Old North Church in Boston, and Jared Hardesty will read from his book at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford on 10.17. 

’80S GLORY DAYS AND THE GORY DEMISE OF THE CHANNEL

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A legendary venue, 1980s glory days, and the gory demise of Boston’s live music mecca

 

For 12 glorious years covering all of the ’80s, misfits and music fans looking for vibrant and diverse concerts in New England headed to the Channel in South Boston. The antithesis of discos and arenas of the roaring scene, the spot rocked a no-frills approach to decor and amenities. The result of which was one of the best-sounding rooms on the East Coast, as well as a rich selection of local, national, and international acts lined up to play.

 

For more than a decade the Channel brought in artists and audiences spanning all genres. Really, all genres. A weekly calendar might look like this: all-ages hardcore matinee on Sunday, up-and-coming rock showcase on Tuesday, Afro-pop extravaganza Wednesday, head-banging metal on Thursday, vintage blues on Friday, all topped off with a ’60s rock legend in town on Saturday night. All while major acts had big moments at the Channel—there’s still video footage floating around of everyone from the Ramones, the Misfits, and Agnostic Front, to Alice in Chains, to SS Decontrol, Sick of it All, 7 Seconds, Napalm Death, Devo, the Nor’easters, KYO, FarrenHeit, Murphy’s Law, the Bruisers, Wrecking Crew, Gang Green, Rollins Band, Ministry, and Black Flag

 

 

Looking back on the reign, and listening to interviews that have been done for a podcast, Boston Venue: The Channel Story, that I’m co-producing, it’s clear that diversity was the force driving the success of the place. Like the lineups, the audience was all over the place—dashikis, leather, chains, and anything else that was swinging. Punk and folk and prog. Martin acoustics and Marshall stacks—the scene was all scenes. Often mingling between shows on the same night. 

 

It was an iconic location, with accolades to show for it including a spot on VH1’s list of the Top 10 Most Legendary Heavy Metal Clubs. Notably, Metallica got its gear stolen from the parking lot behind the club in ’85, while Iggy Pop did a live album there in ’88. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five played in ’84; 2 Live Crew almost sparked a riot in ’90.

 

In the early ’90s, though, the business fell on hard times. Owner Harry Booras walked away, while the son of mob boss “Cadillac” Frank Salemme took, shall we say, interest in the venue. Through a series of intimidation and suspected bankruptcy fraud schemes, local gangsters did finally manage to take control of the Channel in early 1992. After a streak of misfortunes and failed rejuvenation efforts, the club was rebranded as Soiree, where the nightly acts were strippers, not singers. In short time, the spot was closed for good.

 

 

“It all started with a knock on my door by the FBI,” Booras recalls. “They assured me I wasn’t in trouble, but they wanted to talk to me about the Channel. They were investigating the cold case murder of who they said was the last manager of the Channel, Steven DiSarro. What followed was months of drama while Salemme was on trial for the disappearance and murder of Steven DiSarro, who was found buried in a Providence construction site 25 years later.”

 

Perhaps not unrelated, two cars mysteriously caught fire in the dead of night outside of the Booras family’s pizza shop in Hull the same week Salemme went on trial in 2018. As if the story of the Channel wasn’t wild enough already.

 

 

Boston Venue: The Channel Story is nominated for a 2019 Boston Music Award in the category of “Music Podcast of the Year.” The series already features stories from Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, Dicky Barrett of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, DJ and photographer Julie Kramer, Carter Alan of WZLX, Dan Vitalee, Charlie Farren, Sean McNally, Cosmo Macero, Jon Butcher, Bim Skala Bim, and scores of other entertainers and eye witnesses. Episodes are available on all podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and Radio Public.

CONSULTANTS TOLD STATE POLICE HOW TO AVOID TURMOIL. THE DEPARTMENT IGNORED THE ADVICE AND SPENT THE FOLLOWING DECADES SPIRALING TOWARD CORRUPTION.

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Image via the Leslie Jones Collection / Boston Public Library

 

Consultants told Mass State Police how to avoid turmoil. The department ignored the advice and spent the following two decades spiraling toward boundless corruption.

 


 

“The hallmark values of the operating culture are self-interest, resentment, and suspicion.”

 

“We have no defined mission; everything [goes] into a black hole.”

 

“The only standards around here are double standards.”

 

Bay State news watchers might guess the quotations above describe the scandal-plagued Mass State Police. They would be correct, but the critiques predate all of the current trooper trouble on the five o’clock news. Instead, the damning remarks come from officers themselves and were included in an eye-popping outside assessment done more than two decades ago that barely saw the light of day after some negative news blips.

 

With the future of the nation’s oldest motorized statewide police force unclear, and new ethical and legal lapses surfacing regularly, it seems important to attempt to understand how a department that has historically been considered one of the most elite law enforcement operations anywhere arrived at this juncture. For the effort, our research and hindsight has been illuminated by the aforementioned document, a 50-page “Cultural Diagnostic of the Massachusetts State Police” that, as far as we can tell, was buried and largely ignored (some researchers and representatives may have seen it, though, as we found a copy in the Mass State Library after learning about its existence). 

 

Between 2018 and 2019, along with our partners at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, MuckRock, and Emerson College, we exposed a litany of improprieties with MSP management. Our team showed how the department exceeds budgetary limits by millions of dollars buying weapons, has zero oversight of purchases, and in some cases procures goods from businesses that recently ran afoul of the law and were investigated and fined by Mass Attorney General Maura Healey. In February, we also identified questionable state police contracts with the Arizona-based Taser International for electronic control weapons and consumables, specifically calling attention to how “Taser paid [a lobbying] firm, Lynch Associates, more than $100,000 for ‘relationship development in the Public Safety sector.’” And how Lynch “also happened to be lobbying for Taser’s biggest Massachusetts client, the state police.”

 

Those and several other revelations turned up in the federal case brought against former State Police Association of Massachusetts President Dana Pullman and Lynch Associates namesake Anne Lynch in August. Both were arrested at their homes, with shocking subsequent headlines about caviar and campaign contributions, but the allegations of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and obstruction of justice in the Pullman case are just the latest potholes in a marathon of bad behavior. From several dozen troopers facing criminal charges in an expansive payroll fiasco, to drunk-driving drill instructors and other one-offs, the follies continue.

 

Despite bombshell after bombshell broken by reporters at various outlets, it’s difficult to see an end to MSP incompetence and corruption. As Boston Globe reporter Matt Rocheleau observed last week, “Even as new cases of misconduct emerge, including the indictment on Sept. 18 of a trooper who allegedly fired a rifle at an unarmed ATV rider on a Boston highway, the response on Beacon Hill has been roughly the same: crickets. … While lawmakers have wielded their bully pulpits to publicly bash other officials and closely scrutinize other agencies mired in controversy, the state’s largest law enforcement agency has remained virtually unchallenged.”

 

‘Institutional folklore’

The third-party evaluation that BINJ was recently made aware of and obtained was completed four years after the 1992 consolidation of the Division of State Police, the Metropolitan District Commission Police Force, the Registry of Motor Vehicle’s Law Enforcement Division, and the Capitol Police Department into the singular Department of State Police we have today (commonly referred to as Massachusetts State Police, or MSP). Designed and implemented by the New York-based organizational consultancy Linder & Associates, the diagnostic was commissioned by the Executive Office of Public Safety to ascertain the state of affairs in the wake of such a dramatic reorganization. The firm’s general finding: “The consolidated Department of State Police lacks a coherent, clear mission which can be articulated and measured. This condition has bred … a host of problems.” 

 

While it was researched, written, and buried more than 20 years ago, the Linder document may be as clear and relevant a window to date into the notoriously opaque MSP, which once received a Golden Padlock award for being the most secretive government agency in the United States, and was recently called “one of the most restrictive [departments in Mass] when it comes to access” by MuckRock. Almost every criticism in the 1996 report could apply to the turbulence at all levels of the state police today, from the union brass down to the street soldiers. Furthermore, to the extent the study was at least in part meant to serve as a warning and teaching mechanism for tomorrow’s troopers so they didn’t repeat the same tragic mistakes, the recommendations were demonstrably ignored.

 

The Metropolitan District Commission Police Force, or MDC, had not been a flawlessly ethical organization before getting absorbed by the state police. There was a major testing scandal in the ’80s that made national news, and enough day-to-day shenanigans to keep newspaper columnists busy. Per the Linder report, “An audit conducted at the request of the Division of Investigations and Intelligence by the Metropolitan District Commission in 1993 found that ‘there is a philosophy of letting things slide until they are forgotten.’”

 

Any number of factors fueled an inevitable clash of cultures between MDC cops and the staties. Troopers were more buttoned up and military-minded, while most of the former, as one retired metro officer explained for this article, “were street guys who actually walked a beat.” The Linder review notes, “Lapses in training … have reinforced … a fundamental difference between RTs (‘real troopers,’ in the words of those who graduated as recruits from the State Police Academy) and those who are not.”

 

All of the above considered, the merger was a mess. Per the 1996 report: “The particular cultural strengths of the absorbed Metropolitan, Capitol, and Registry entities have not been recognized and leveraged into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

 

In order to determine just how bad things were and how, Linder & Associates mailed “an eleven-page survey instrument” “to every uniformed member” of the department, plus sent separate one-page surveys to police chiefs and district attorneys across the state. In response it received 859 questionnaires out of 2,255 mailed, making for a 38.1% response rate that was “higher than expected; since this was a mailback survey which required at least 25 minutes of unpaid time to fill out.”

 

The consultants didn’t get much help from state police. “None of the materials provided by MSP indicate how many cruisers are at what locations and assigned to whom,” the researchers wrote. “No member of the Command Staff or Fleet administration appeared to possess this information.” Administrators wouldn’t even release “current and historical information on the rates of summonses for moving violations, arrests, investigative cases closed by arrest, etc.” The anonymous respondents, however, were open and explicit, identifying tragic shortcomings in every operational category:

 

  • Mission: “The vast majority of troopers and supervisors interviewed express disenchantment with a sense that the mission of their organization is not clear.” “No one has any idea what the leadership wants or what their priority is.”

 

  • Management: “A lack of standards applies to all facets of the job.” “Fairness and professionalism are organizational values receding into memory and institutional folklore.”

 

  • Equipment: “Radio systems were not and are not compatible.” “A number of those interviewed … agreed with the sentiment that ‘the installation of E-mail, even for Command Staff alone, would eliminate enormous amounts of paperwork, but no one wants anything [like] a traceable record of any kind.’”

 

  • Personnel: “The General Counsel indicated that only three MSP personnel have been fired since Consolidation, and those only because they were convicted felons. In one of these instances, the individual in question was promoted to sergeant with an indictment pending.” “The widespread impression exists in the Department that no action was taken against a trooper found to be harassing a female member, another stalking a former girlfriend, and others driving under the influence of alcohol.”

 

Then and now

There are a lot of recommendations and warnings in the Linder report. Judging by developments in the time since, few if any appear to have been followed or heeded.

 

Back then, researchers found that some respondents “maintain[ed] that [recruit training] is unnecessarily harsh, designed in part to drive out female candidates.” Yet throughout the early 2000s, the department was embroiled in a lawsuit over its unfair treatment of pregnant troopers and has continued in that tradition in the time since, according to public reports as well as inside sources.

 

In 1996, the Linder diagnostic found, “The Department of State Police will be hindered in the effort to become a high-performance organization by a lack of adequate budgetary, procurement, and financial controls.” This was a no-brainer, since in years prior the state auditor had found “improper authorization, delivery, and acceptance … of an estimated $990,000 worth of computer products … [and an] authorized payment of $454,535 to a third party vendor … who received payment for … computer equipment that it had not provided.” Despite that history, in 2019 MSP continues to procure without oversight, and as a result has been a hotbed of bribes and pay-to-play kickback schemes.

 

On the payroll front, back then, “a number of those interviewed [by Linder said] some troopers take ‘beeper days,’ for which they receive full duty pay while they are actually responding only to those calls directed to their beepers.” As anybody who has paid attention to the current payroll scandal can attest, that part of the culture hasn’t changed.

 

In the ’90s, Linder wrote, “the MSP Crime Lab is seriously understaffed, and unable to keep up with current case loads.” One lab staffer, speaking about the backlog of more than 5,000 unprocessed drug samples at the time, said, “If we never had a new piece of evidence brought in here, it would still take us at least two years to catch up to what we have backed up now.” Fast-forward to 2012, when the state police crime lab was shut down following reports of improper evidence handling.

 

All told, so much hostility against reform may seem harrowing, but it’s one that many respondents predicted. Quoting an especially cynical response to their survey, researchers wrote: “The perception of many members may be summarized by the remark of one made in the course of this study: ‘Nothing you can recommend or say in this report you’re doing will result in positive reform of any kind—the absolute only thing that will happen is management will comb through it trying to figure out who said what so they can mete out their usual vindictive, vicious, and arbitrary punishments; there is no interest whatsoever in progress or competence, and wherever the management can lash out and make people pay for telling the truth, believe me they will—as they have in the past, many times, without hesitation and without logic.’”

 

NEXT: Prior to 1992, the Division of State Police was largely scandal-free as far as the public was concerned. Internally, though, the department spent more than a century building an exclusive, abusive enterprise.

 

 

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Help fund more critical reporting like this by visiting givetobinj.org.

EXCERPT: EVERYBODY NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT MARIA BALDWIN

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The Cambridge icon played a major role in Black New England and the fight for racial justice

BY KATHLEEN WEILER

(Excerpted from Maria Baldwin’s Worlds: A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice, ©2019 University of Massachusetts Press.)

 

In 2000, Nathaniel Vogel, an eighth-grade student at the Agassiz Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began a campaign to change the name of his school to the Maria Baldwin School. The Agassiz School had been named for the nineteenth-century Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, an internationally known geologist and zoologist. But Agassiz was also a follower of the theory of polygenism, which claimed that race is a scientific reality and that different races have separate origins and inherently different abilities, a hierarchical theory that justifies white privilege and racism. When Nathaniel Vogel read Stephen Jay Gould’s condemnation of Agassiz’s racist views in The Mismeasure of Man, he became ashamed that his school bore Agassiz’s name. He already knew something about Maria Baldwin, who had once been his school’s principal. There was a plaque commemorating her at the entrance to the school, and an annual award to an outstanding student was still given in her name. After he read the brief entry on Baldwin in Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and contrasted Baldwin’s accomplishments with Agassiz’s scientific racism, he mobilized a campaign to change the name of the school. Cambridge and Boston newspapers and local television news programs publicized the story. After a number of open meetings, in 2002 the Cambridge School Committee voted to change the name of the school from the Agassiz to the Maria Baldwin School.

 

Maria Baldwin is now well known in Cambridge. But while she is recognized as an accomplished and pioneering educator, her accomplishments and role in the black freedom struggle have largely been forgotten. In fact, she was a central member of a group of African American activists in Boston and Cambridge who fought for full citizenship and civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Knowledge of the active resistance to racism of these northern African Americans brings to light the ways in which racist practices and beliefs were named and contested in the era of Jim Crow. The figure of Maria Baldwin herself shows how a single individual could negotiate and challenge dominant white ideas of black womanhood. Through her achievements and what W. E. B. Du Bois called her “quiet courage,” she both called into question racist cultural images and assumptions in the white community and supported resistance in the black world.

 

Born in Cambridge in 1856, Maria Baldwin attended local elementary schools and graduated from what was then Cambridge High School in 1874 and the Cambridge teacher training program a year later. In 1881 she began teaching at the Agassiz Elementary School, a well-regarded public school attended by the children of Cambridge’s academic and professional elite. The staff and the overwhelming majority of the children were white. In 1889 Baldwin was named principal of the school, and in 1916 was given the position of master, one of only two women in the Cambridge school system to hold this title. She was a progressive New England schoolmarm. She loved Dickens and Tennyson, was welcome in the parlors of the old abolitionists, belonged to socially elite and progressive organizations, and was a supporter of women’s suffrage. 

 

Acquaintances and former pupils spoke of her in glowing terms. The poet e. e. cummings, who had been her pupil at the Agassiz School, described her as “a lady if ever a lady existed . . . blessed with a delicious voice, charming manners, and a deep understanding of children. . . . From her I marvellingly learned that the truest power is gentleness.” 

 

Accounts of Maria Baldwin’s charismatic presence and abilities as an educator are remarkably consistent. Her accomplishments were unique. The African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called her “the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area” during her lifetime. Her friend W. E. B. Du Bois claimed in 1917 that she had gained “without doubt . . . the most distinguished position achieved by a person of Negro descent in the teaching world of America, outside cities where there are segregated schools.” For whites, Baldwin was a model citizen praised for her devotion to service and duty. For the African American community, she was a living example of the capabilities of the race. Throughout her life, she moved in and between these different worlds.

 

Baldwin was part of a small, closely connected Boston and Cambridge network of educated black professionals who denounced the growing violence against black people and the denial of black rights in the South, and who demanded full civil rights and social equality in the South as well as in the North. Boston’s educated black elite, similar to black groups and networks in other cities, included W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, Archibald Grimké, George and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Florida Ruffin Ridley, and Clement and Gertrude Morgan. There were disagreements and divisions in this group, which the sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called “the other Brahmins” of Boston, but all were civil rights activists who demanded full equality and justice for all African Americans and were leaders of black resistance to the growing racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As well as Du Bois, the leading black intellectual of this generation, the group also included writers, lawyers, newspaper editors, and leaders of black cultural and political organizations. Maria Baldwin’s life was intertwined with the lives of these black New Englanders. Her success in the white world was seen as proof of black ability, but it was also an example of the kind of non-racist society they all wanted to achieve.

 

Baldwin was a significant figure for both white and black publics, but her work as an activist seeking justice in a deeply divided society was unmentioned in the many testimonials to her by white observers. The black community, which celebrated her achievements as an educator, was well aware of the barriers she had to overcome and her engagement in the black freedom struggle. Historical memory of her, however, has been based on accounts by white contemporaries who never spoke of her involvement in black political organizations, and on a few brief biographical sketches by black historians who largely avoided mentioning the racism she faced or her involvement in black resistance. Maria Baldwin was a public figure whose activities were noted in the major Cambridge and Boston newspapers, in the black press, in the records of the organizations she belonged to, and in the memoirs of her contemporaries. Piecing together this documentation of her accomplishments in both the white and black worlds of Boston and Cambridge reveals a complicated woman who lived the contradictions of a country that defined itself as valuing justice, respect, and freedom but that in practice sanctioned inequality, racial oppression, and violence.

 

Although Maria Baldwin is now honored in Cambridge, she is less recognized in the broader context of African American history—in Boston and beyond. Her accomplishments are significant and alone are reason why she should be included in our understanding of the black experience in the United States, while the issues raised by her life— the ongoing power of racism and resistance to it, the complexity of identity, and the choices we are faced with in worlds not of our own making—continue to confront us today.


BOSTON RADIO ICON CHARLES LAQUIDARA RAPS HUB HISTORY AHEAD OF FAREWELL ENGAGEMENT

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Photo by Dan Busler

 

If you grew up anywhere in earshot to Boston rock, or went to school in these parts and had a radio sometime between the Vietnam quagmire and the US military’s march into Afghanistan and Iraq, then legendary Hub radio man Charles Laquidara probably showed up in the soundtrack of your life at some point. You may have caught his waves while the Milford native was holding down late nights or morning drive-times on WBCN, formerly 104.1FM, where his Big Mattress show bent boundaries for alt rock radio, or in his latter years at WZLX 100.7FM.

 

Laquidara is the last of a retiring breed, though his influence and imprint endure—through former colleagues such as top jock Matt Siegel, as well as much more generally, as his unpredictability and free-range creativity can be traced to the boundless and exploratory podcast-palooza that exists today. Thanks to the David Bieber Archives, whose videos and photos Laquidara used to curate Daze in the Life, his “multimedia memoir,” there’s also something of a proper record of his impact, the scope of which Laquidara will explore with a crowd of his closest friends and fans at the Wilbur on Dec 10.

 

With this being the last time he plans to engage such a large crowd on stage and in public, we asked about his strategy for the intimate evening, as well as his possible special guests plus all sorts of old memories, or at least the few that he can actually recall.

 

After decades of waking up early for drive time, are you automatically just awake before the roosters?

I’ve always only needed six hours of sleep. Which is great, but it’s also a problem, because if I go to bed at 10 then I wake up at some ungodly hour. Now being retired, it doesn’t really matter. You know how when you wake up at 2 in the morning and say, Oh shoot, I have to get up at 6, what am I gonna do? When you’re retired, you just get up and have coffee.

 

Back [during the drive time years], Matt Siegel and I would go out. We couldn’t go to concerts; if I went to a concert, I had to leave halfway through it because I had to get up at 3:30 the next morning. But Matt and I would go to do shooters at a club called Zanzibar. We’d walk in, and the girls would go up to Matt, and he would go, You know, this is Charles Laquidara, and they would go, Yeah, OK, so, Matt … But if we went to football games, the guys up in the rafters would say, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, and they would totally ignore him. He had all the women; I had all the guys.

 

Do you use the word retired for what you are? Considering you still do quite a bit of stuff, have an online station, stuff like that … 

I retired on Aug 5, 2000. I’ve done a bunch of things, like pushing my multimedia memoir. … It’s good because my memory is so horrible—I don’t even remember if I interviewed Pete Townshend. Seriously—that’s not from being smug or being an asshole, it’s like I just don’t remember stuff. You know how all these yoga people go on these retreats, and there’s no past or future, there is only the present; well, for me it’s always the present. People go, Charles, you don’t remember that I stayed in your house in Maui for a week? Now, I can just chalk it up to being old, but I’ve had a memory problem since I was born.

 

As an actor I couldn’t remember lines. The last thing I ever did as an actor was they cast me in a play at the Loeb [Drama Center at A.R.T.]. They cast me as an Italian-American womanizer from Binghamton. I had to remember my lines, and it was so stressful that even though I’m an atheist I said, God, if you’re up there, if you let me get through this and not screw anybody’s career up I promise I will never get on stage again. And I didn’t.

 

What about now?

This thing that’s happening on Dec 10 at the Wilbur will be the last time that I will get up in front of an audience. It’s just so much work—even though this gathering is going to be pretty informal.

 

How does somebody with such a shit memory go about putting together a time capsule? What toys and props do you bring?

I just try to go out there, and we’ll have one or two slides. I also heard that [Laquidara alter ego] Duane Glasscock might be there. Don’t forget—I’m going to be up there on stage and looking at people from my 30 years of radio. Some of these people will know who Duane Glasscock is, and some of them won’t.

 

You were probably one of the guys saying, Laquidara get the hell [off of WBCN], we want to hear [Howard Stern]. He was doing mornings at rock stations all across America, and I was still doing mornings at WBCN in Boston, and Howard would say, Man, when is Laquidara gonna die? All of his listeners would call and go, Get the eff off the air. 

 

Who do you like for radio or podcast personalities these days? Who really entertains you?

My son turned me on to Bill Burr. I like him. I don’t listen to that much radio anymore. I spend most of my time in Hawaii kind of just swimming and going on Facebook and yelling at people and watching sunsets.

 

WBCN daily morning writers meeting

 

Are younger radio personalities who look up to you jealous of the freedom you had to play what you wanted?

That’s what we did from ’68 through maybe ’76 or ’77 when the suits came in and bought the station. If you want good ratings, then you gotta have bad radio. You have to play the same songs over and over, because people are going to work in the morning and they want to hear five or six songs to get them going. If you’re going to have bad radio, then you’re going to have great ratings.

 

WBCN was really [more than one] station. … There’s a debate about what was the golden era of BCN. Was it ’68 to ’72, when announcers were turning people on to music? Or was it when BCN was kicking ass and not being political? That’s a debate. When I go on Facebook, when I do a political thing, which I do a lot, these guys are going, Charles, stick to music like you used to. How come you’re not doing what you used to do. You’re being a socialist. Which is crazy, because that’s what I was known for. Whether going after Nixon and talking about the Vietnam War or trying to get people to understand that corporations were taking over and we were slowly being taken over by big business.

 

With Duane Glasscock, I came up with the idea as the antithesis of PC. He was all the things that a lot of people think but don’t say. He came along on Saturdays and really kicked ass in the ratings. It had incredibly high ratings. Duane appealed to all of the deplorables out there.

 

How is Bill “Spaceman” Lee involved with this?

He’s going to be opening the show, and maybe he’ll come back somewhere in the middle. I asked him if he’s sure he could handle it, and he told me he was the emcee at a national comedy competition and that he was better than all of the comedians, so he can handle it.

 

So this is really the last time you are going to be doing this? 

Yeah, it’s just too stressful. I just don’t want to do it anymore. It will be a last gathering, and any of us who are still alive and remembers BCN and stuff, I just want to have a final reminiscing, knowing we were part of a generation that did radio back then. 

 

CHARLES LAQUIDARA’S THE FIRST FAREWELL TOUR. TUE 12.10 AT THE WILBUR THEATRE, 246 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. MORE INFO AND TICKETS AT DAZEINTHELIFE.COM AND THEWILBUR.COM. YOU CAN STREAM LAQUIDARA’S RADIO STATION 24/7 AT CHARLESLAQUIDARARADIO.COM.

IN FEAR OF LOSING THEIR VOICES, BOSTON FREEDOM TRAIL GUIDES UNITE AND SPEAK UP (WHILE THEY STILL CAN)

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Dressed in full-on 18th-century-style tricorn hats and bonnets, Freedom Trail tour guides can look out of place amid Boston’s skyscrapers and bumper-to-bumper traffic. They keep the city’s Revolutionary past alive, but in 21st-century conditions.

 

The costumes and official stops on the Freedom Trail—from Old North Church to Faneuil Hall—have basically stayed the same since the tours began decades ago. But the way the guides tell the story of the Revolution has changed dramatically.

 

Reflecting on her 12 years working on the trail, Margaret Ann Brady emphasizes how guides today focus not only on the famous patriots, but also on “giving voice to the voiceless—the untold stories of the vast majority.” She says, “We open the story up to include enslavement and oppression, shifting away from the heroic tale to something more nuanced.”

 

Portraying actual 18th-century figures—from all-female militia leader Prudence Cummings Wright to enslaved poet prodigy Phillis Wheatley—these guides help bring Revolutionary War-era history to life in a contemporary way, foregrounding the perspectives of historically marginalized groups—in particular women, African Americans, and enslaved populations.

 

And the context has been updated for the better as well. While guides still bring tours to the Old Granary Burial Ground, the third-oldest settler cemetery in Massachusetts, for example, these days they don’t simply point out the gravestone of John Hancock—Boston’s wealthiest man with the legendary signature—but also “Frank,” Hancock’s slave.

 

“I don’t know what Frank thought about the Revolution,” Chelsea Ruscio tells her tours, in character as Prudence Wright. “Did he think it was a step forward for freedom? Did he think it wasn’t his fight? Was he pulling for the British, since they were more likely to offer slaves freedom? I don’t know. But clearly John Hancock thought Frank was important.”

 

Her evidence? Unlike most enslaved people at the time, Frank got a marked grave.

 

Some guides, however, say the Freedom Trail Foundation—the nonprofit organization that runs the guided tours and employs the guides—isn’t always supportive of how the tours have evolved. Kelli Strong, who plays enslaved poet prodigy Phillis Wheatley on the trail, says, “They seem to want black faces, but not black voices.”

 

An American Studies graduate student at UMass Boston—where a major academic building is named after Wheatley—Strong is critical of the way guides are surveilled by Freedom Trail management. Strong says she has been ordered not to use terms like “white supremacy” on her tour, despite its historical accuracy. Several black guides also report being demeaned by Freedom Trail management, sometimes in response to complaints from customers who object that guides mentioned race or slavery on their tours.

 

“When most people think of 18th-century Boston, they don’t think of someone like me,” says Kathy Woods, a 14-year tour veteran who is both African American and a life-long Bostonian. On the trail, Kathy plays a freedwoman who bought herself out of slavery and now works at a tavern in the North End (relaying drunken British gossip to patriots).

 

“I try not to hammer people,” Woods adds, “but I slip the facts in.” 

 

Voices at work

Freedom Trail guides like Ruscio take pride in how they “give people a genuinely honest account of the history.” But while the historical narrative has improved over the years, tour guides say their working conditions have deteriorated.

 

“It used to be that you’d have tours of just a handful, and a tour of 20 people was considered big,” Woods explains. “Now a tour of 20 is considered small.”

 

Tours of over 50 are common, and during busy season, tour groups regularly swell to over a hundred. At the same time, decibel levels in downtown Boston and the North End—where the tours are concentrated—continue to rise due to traffic and construction.

 

“Imagine speaking in the midst of a throng of angry dock workers,” says Brady, “except each one is also holding a chainsaw.”

 

Emma Weigand highlights the challenge of addressing large crowds by the Old Statehouse, located at the busy intersection of State and Congress Street, where guides deliver the crucial history of the Boston Massacre: “It’s utter cacophony, virtually impossible for a natural voice to compete with.”

 

Weigand, who has been giving tours since 2015 as Lydia Milliken, fiancee of Paul Revere’s riding companion, Samuel Prescott, is also pursuing a career as a professional singer. But her voice has been damaged from years of touring. Weigand says she “used to be a very high soprano” but has seen her voice fall to an alto, and these days struggles to hit notes that once came easily.

 

Weigand isn’t alone. Several tour guides in recent years have developed documented medical problems as a result of this long-term vocal strain. Ruscio was diagnosed with vocal nodes in 2014.

 

“The doctor told me, ‘You’ve got to stop talking,’” Ruscio recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t. It’s my job.’”

 

Last February, when the tour guides of the Freedom Trail voted overwhelmingly to unionize, affiliating with UNITE HERE Local 26—a union that represents thousands of tourism and hospitality workers across Boston—they were quite literally voting to protect their voices at work.

 

The unionized guides now refer to themselves as the Bell Ringers Guild, after an 18th-century labor affiliation founded by Freedom Trail favorite Paul Revere.

 

Why “Bell-Ringers”? As Brady puts it: “A bell cuts through the noise.”

 

Noise to cut through

According to Boston University public health post-doctoral fellow Erica Walker, founder of Community Noise Lab, the area where the guides work, known as the “Tourism Corridor,” is one of the loudest in the city.

 

“There’s no place to escape the noise down there,” Walker explains, citing typical decibel readings in excess of 90 dB (the noise level of a food blender), and occasionally over 100 dB (equivalent to a garbage truck).

 

Amelia Broome, head of voice at Emerson College, agrees: “Voice production in a theater, acoustically built for the human voice, is completely different from what it takes to be heard in an open outside space. No human can sustain that level without danger of vocal injury that can in many cases be irreparable.”

 

Guides have made repeated requests to have unrestricted access to portable body microphones, but say their pleas have been resisted by management. 

 

Meanwhile, as background noise, vocal strain, and crowd sizes grow, tour guide pay has remained essentially flat. Base pay is still just $45 for a 12-stop, two-hour tour, plus $1 or $2 for each additional customer over the 10th person.

 

Guides also report being given demerits and suspensions if they fall ill and can’t find a replacement for their tour. In addition to portable microphones, the Bell Ringers are also demanding a raise and a new policy requiring Freedom Trail management to hire paid alternates to fill in for guides who can’t make their shift due to illness.

 

 

 

“Real” work

The right to use a microphone, to have sick-day coverage, and to earn a decent wage are all central Bell-Ringer demands. But the tour guides are also fighting for something less tangible—workplace respect and recognition of their artistic labor. At the heart of the BRG struggle is a fight to have what they do recognized as genuine work that deserves respect and fair compensation.

 

Guides describe their job as a delicate and strenuous mix: they must be historians, actors, improv comedians, vacation planners, and even unofficial stewards of public safety—protecting large crowds from Boston’s infamous traffic—all at the same time.

 

“It takes a very specific skill set to do this job,” says Ruscio. “But people don’t see it as knowledge or expertise because it seems effortless when someone does it well.”

 

“We write our own scripts too,” Woods says, echoing a common refrain. “My tour is essentially a one-woman show.” She would know. Woods is recognized up and down the East Coast for her traveling performances as famed black abolitionist and early feminist Sojourner Truth.

 

Many members of the BRG have years of training and experience—as actors, singers, educators. They’re passionate about history, about performance, about helping people connect to Boston.

 

“I live for those moments,” says Milo Stein, who plays French General Lafayette, “when a person comes up to me and says, ‘Wow, if you were my teacher I might have been a history major.’”

 

Such love can also be double-edged. As tour guide Tim Hoover points out, “Management weaponizes people’s love and care for what they do against them.” Hoover, who guides tours as Josiah Quincy, recalls the day a manager looked him up and down in the office, noting his dark suit and tie.

 

“What,” the manager scoffed, “are you interviewing for a real job or something?”

 

The remark stung doubly. Tim had dressed up to attend a wake; furthermore, for much of the previous decade, giving tours had been Tim’s real job.

 

The same goes for a lot of the guides: This is their real job. During busy season, many give two, sometimes three tours a day, often working for several weeks straight without a day off. It’s a schedule that is flexible enough to fit with those pursuing artistic careers—acting, music, writing—elsewhere in Boston’s cultural “gig” economy, but it’s demanding nonetheless.

 

In some cases, people say they wish it could be their full-time job, if only the conditions were better.

 

Trip advisors

 In a city that markets itself as a cultural and artistic hub, artists here nevertheless often struggle to earn a living wage, lack health insurance, and live in a state of anxiety as rents and prices rise faster than compensation. This as guides generate gobs of money for their parent organization, the nonprofit Freedom Trail Foundation, as well as the city of Boston and innumerable retail businesses.

 

With more than 4 million visitors a year, the FTF’s own website boasts, “the Freedom Trail is a signature Boston experience responsible for generating over $1 billion in annual spending.”

 

“If I had a dime for every meal or cup of coffee I’ve generated in the North End,” Weigand reflects, “I’d have a boat by now.”

 

Management seems far less appreciative. After seven months of negotiating, the foundation continues to resist the union’s demands (FTF management declined to comment on specifics regarding the ongoing negotiations). Still, the guides continue fighting and working; even as the increased intensity of their duties frays nerves and strains voices, it has also pushed them to see their work, and each other, in a reinvigorated light.

 

“We take care of each other,” is a common refrain among guides. The camaraderie is an added but essential obligation on top of already having to watch out for pack after pack of stray tourists through sun and sleet on Boston’s streets.

 

“For some folks, we are the only local contacts they have,” Woods says. 

 

“We are the ones who can tell them where they can get a good, affordable family meal.

 

“We help them find what they’re looking for.”

 

You can learn more about the Bell Ringers Guild at facebook.com/bellringersguild.

 

STILL SPINNING: HUB VINYL ICON SKIPPY WHITE AND THE TUNES BOSTON HAS HUMMED SINCE THE ’60S

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Photos courtesy of Brian Coleman

 

When the news came out last month that longtime Boston vinyl seller Skippy White was closing his last in a long line of Hub record shops, many well-meaning music heads posted about how they shopped in his stores for years but haven’t been back in a while for some reason. To each their own, but we wanted to hear from those who kept in touch. Fortunately, Boston music historians Brian Coleman, Noah Schaffer, and Mike Garth recorded a lengthy radio feature on White last year. What follows is an excerpt trimmed for print. -Dig editors

 

A VINYL LIFE

BY BRIAN COLEMAN, NOAH SCHAFFER, MIKE GARTH

 

It’s early afternoon on a sunny fall Saturday in Egleston Square. Traffic crawls and the occasional car horn blows as locals make their way up and down one of the Hub’s outlying thoroughfares.

 

Across the street, a local high-rise apartment complex is having a farmer’s market. Neighborhood friends greet each other as they pass, even across the street from one another.

 

At 1971 Columbus Ave, nestled in between the neighborhood liquor store and the Lawson Brothers Hair Salon, classic soul and gospel music spills out of one of Boston’s oldest and most revered record stores: Skippy White’s.

 

White has been here in Egleston for 15 years, but he opened his first Boston store all the way back in 1961, five and a half decades ago.

 

The Egleston store has never been likely to “wow” new customers. It might be most respectfully described as “lived in.” Decades-old promotional album posters cover the walls, alongside framed and laminated feature articles about White over the years.

 

Across from the main counter, a vinyl banner showing the exterior of one of his 1960s store locations is supported by grommets and frayed rope.

 

The long, narrow check-out counter is filled with random scraps of paper; 45 RPM records, stacked 15 or 20 copies high; flyers for upcoming gospel and R & B concerts; and an ancient desktop computer.

 

And, of course, there are thousands of vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs displayed, countless stacked in teetering piles.

 

 

Regular customers don’t mind the mess. They’re here to maybe buy some music but mostly come for White. The legend can usually be found behind the counter, ready to log special order requests in his notebook and to talk music with the customers he serves and loves.

 

“I don’t know what other stores do, I don’t know what the other people that have record stores do,” White says. “But here, I mean, the customer is … kind of king. And when they come in and they ask for something, first of all, if we have it in stock, great. That’s wonderful. If we don’t have it in stock, we always offer to order it for them and get it. And we look it up. And we’ll go the extra mile for our customers, to find whatever it is that they’re looking for. And sometimes that takes time. It takes a lot of time and a lot of patience to do that. Other stores, that we hear, kind of, we hear scuttlebutt from other people that go to other stores and come back and tell us about how they’re treated … most other stores just will not be bothered.”

 

In a world dominated by instant gratification, this is the opposite.

 

“You can’t ask any questions [online] if you just go online,” White adds. “If you find what you’re looking for online, you just order it and pay for it, and that’s it. But here you can ask questions. Obviously, we’ll play it for you and so forth. So, there’s a lot to ordering or coming in and picking up a record here, or having me order a record for you in the store. You know, we give you a lot of service behind it.”

 

Customers appreciate that personal touch.

 

“I can always rely on Skippy to have, as they would say, oldies but goodies,” says Al-J of the rap group Black Madeen. “Mom-and-pop record stores … are scarce in these days and times. I’ve been knowing Skippy for a little over 20 years, and a lot has changed. The demographic of the city has changed. 

 

“Things … change.”

Just hum it

Since the early ’60s, in addition to owning multiple record stores in Boston and one in Rhode Island, White has been an R&B and gospel radio DJ, a record producer and label owner, a concert promoter, a mentor, and a low-key community builder. In a city known for racial divisions, he’s a French-Canadian from Waltham whose decades of devotion to the music and musicians he loves has earned him significant respect and love from Boston’s black community.

 

The first Skippy White’s Records location, which opened in 1961, was at 1820 Washington St in the South End, near Northampton Street and not far from today’s Boston Medical Center. The neighborhood is still a mix of residential and commercial buildings, but it’s nowhere near as rough-and-tumble as it was during the ’60s. He moved across the street to 1763 Washington St later in the decade; from there, his store was an anchor of sorts for the music community until he gave up the location in 1987. After that, he moved to the border of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury.

 

1975 Skippy store ad. Kay Bourne Archives at Emerson College: Iwasaki Library, Special Collections.

“When I got here, to Egleston … I had people come in and they’d say to me, Skippy, how do you put up with all of this? How do you make it in this environment, with these crazy people? And I said, Hey, this is nothing compared to [the South End]. If I could make it in [the South End], with all that was going on there, this is a piece of cake. You had the pimps and prostitutes all the time. You had the drug dealers right in front of the store, making the drug deals. You had the winos.”

 

Today, the man who once ran a regional network of vinyl outposts has one modest store left, and that’s just fine with him. He isn’t a young man anymore, but he still works six days a week and produces two radio shows, on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

 

On a recent day on Columbus Avenue, William dropped in to buy tickets for an upcoming local performance by Johnny Gill of the group New Edition. “I come here every time I’m looking for some old music,” he says, “because this is basically the place you’re gonna find it.” William notes White’s longtime motto: If you don’t know the name of the song you’re looking for, “Just hum it.” 

 

Skippy White, the human prototype for the Shazam app.

 

“You can’t go to Walmart and places like that and find it [older music], you know,” William says. “This is the neighborhood, I have to frequent the businesses in the community, you know? If people don’t come to the businesses, the businesses will close, and they’d be gone. This is our neighborhood; you should spend your money in your own neighborhood.”

 

White has owned record stores over the decades in the South End, Mattapan, and Cambridge’s Central Square. Many of his customers, like Willy the Handyman, have followed him to each new location. “I have been here 57 years,” Willy says while shopping for gospel records on a Saturday. “So, basically, I’ve been … wherever he went, that’s where I went.

 

“When I came here [to White’s store, decades ago], he was down between Mass Ave and somewhere down there. So, that was the party town, all right? If you had any problem, or any dealings with the women, or dealing with society, you go to see Skippy, you buy your music, you get a little conversation going, and when you leave here you go take care of your problems.”

 

It’s not easy for any brick-and-mortar store to survive these days, and White isn’t unrealistic about buying habits—especially those of younger consumers. He made a lot of money selling rap CDs and vinyl in the ’80s and ’90s but doesn’t cater to the digital demo these days. White’s disconnect with younger music fans becomes apparent when you ask him to walk a couple of steps in their headphones.

 

“Why would I download an album?” he asks. “For what reason would I download it? Because I want to listen to it? Is that it? Yeah, I guess I don’t think in those terms. I think in terms of having a 45 or an LP in my hand, or a CD.”

 

Before you write White off as an old-timer who isn’t up with the online world—think again. Sales are sales, and White is aware that he is sitting on some valuable inventory. His online store on Discogs.com is full of around 1,500 items, some of them selling for upwards of $200 for a seven-inch single.

 

A fanatic

Aside from selling music since the early ’60s, White has also produced and released dozens of R&B, gospel, and even hip-hop records through a series of his own labels including Wild Records, Bluestown, Stop, and Silver Cross. While none of his records were national smashes, many are now highly regarded and coveted, including 45s by pioneering transgender soul singer Jackie Shane. Many Bostonians also thought Skippy had a star in vocalist Frank Lynch, until Lynch was tragically killed while in police custody in 1968, just as his song “Young Girl” was climbing the charts.

 

Meanwhile, gospel releases produced by White decades ago are sought after by collectors all around the world. He explains how the song “Master on High” by the locally based Crayton Singers, on his Silver Cross imprint, has come back around 50 years later.

 

“I put out two records by the Crayton Singers,” White says, holding up a copy of one of their singles. “[‘Master On High’] was not the best of the two … and barely sold at all. Back in the day, when we first put it out, I sold it for $0.98. [Now, another online seller has] a used copy … and he wants $100. This has never been played, never been touched by human hands … just mine. And I put it on for $49.99. Again, after I found out he had it on Ebay for $100, I went on Discogs and found out two people have it on for $100 each on Discogs. So I put it on both [Ebay and Discogs] for $49.99.”

 

White brings up another old pressing that he played a part in producing.

 

“I remember back in the day, having a record, a box of a record, 25 count, of “I Walk Alone” by the Vocaleers on Red Robin. I probably paid $0.15 apiece, so I sold them for $0.75 apiece.”

 

Jim Botticelli, a longtime area radio DJ and the blogger behind the website and Facebook page Dirty Old Boston, is in the store shopping and asks, “What is it worth today?”

 

“Probably a couple hundred dollars each,” White says.

 

The customers aren’t alone in their loyalty. Marc Siegel, a record industry vet and music collector himself, has been with White for 40 years. He started with the White-owned Mass Records Distribution company and has managed various retail locations for White in the time since, from Mattapan to Rhode Island.

 

“Feb 6, 1978—yes, that’s the day of the blizzard—I started working for Skippy,” Siegel says. “I started my job with a snow shovel and a push broom. We worked hard on getting that thing established, selling music to the local shops in the area, which many people thought were Skippy’s competition. But he viewed everyone as brothers in arms. We’re all selling the same kind of music, we all love the same kind of music. We all have the same customers, we’re all in the same neighborhood.”

 

Siegel rattles off a long list of record stores who used to compete with Skippy’s—Tower, HMV, Strawberries, Coconuts, plus the independents. All of them are long gone. Why did White out-last them? “He’s a fanatic,” Siegel explains. “A straight up fanatic. We don’t know anything else. So, what else would we do? Heaven only knows. Who else would put up with us? That’s another problem.”

 

“I don’t sell volume,” White says. “I mean, obviously this here was a very big gospel seller for me, I probably sold 200 of this [holds up CD] Tamela Mann. The one with the big hit on it called ‘Take Me to the King.’ Right now, the latest Luther Barnes is selling very well. But … you know, they don’t sell a lot all at one time. But they sell across the board. And we sell a lot of stuff like that.”

 

“You know what I get a lot?” White says. “[People asking], ‘Skippy, who is going to take over when you’re gone?’ I get that a lot, because they’re worried that if I’m not here, the store will not be here, and they will lose that source that they have now, of someone that will go that extra mile to find something for them.”

 

Loyal customers lament the idea of this place shutting down.

 

“It would be a devastation, I’m sure, to the community that he serves,” Hassan says. “I mean, Skippy’s been around since, what, 1961? Skippy is Boston history.”

 

“His music, his sense of humor,” Willy The Handyman says. “The ability to deal with people. He’s been around long enough [to be] a cornerstone.”

 

“I think it’s going to leave a big hole,” William adds. “Because some of the younger generation, if those that are left that know about a lot of these old recording artists are gone and passed on, the next generation is never going to hear about them, you know?

 

“As long as Skippy is around, you can come by and [he] can say, Look here, listen to this, son.”

 

Skippy is still open, though he may close any day now. Go and pay him a visit while you still can.

 

WHEN MASSACHUSETTS WAS SOCIALIST

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Harper's Magazine, August 11, 1877, Blockade of Engines at Martinsburg, West Virginia

Harper’s Magazine, August 11, 1877, Blockade of Engines at Martinsburg, West Virginia

 

Experiments in co-operative economics started in the colonial era

 

Sometimes I despair over the lack of social imagination in contemporary America. No matter how much we complain about the obscene and widening gap in income and wealth between the super rich and everyone else, we seem unable to imagine a society based on principles other than the ones that dominate our own: individual self-interest; cut-throat competition for jobs, status, money, and power; the desire for unlimited consumption; and the pursuit of profit as an end in itself. It wasn’t always so. In order to remind myself of that fact, I collect books, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets from the alternative movements and social experiments of America’s past.

 

I recently took a close look at a copy of a newspaper in my collection dated June 7, 1877, called the American Socialist. It was published by those involved in the famous and unusually successful experiment in communal living, common ownership, and cooperative work at Oneida, New York. An article on the front page of the paper, titled “Co-operation in Massachusetts,” is an excerpt from the eighth annual report, published in Boston, by the Commonwealth’s Bureau of Statistics of Labor. The report describes a surge since 1840 in attempts to establish a “system of Co-operation, especially in the distribution of goods” (more or less like the Oneida community, minus its controversial practice of “complex marriage,” i.e., polygamy and polyandry). The report goes on to connect this recent development with the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its author writes:

 

“Massachusetts, from her earliest settlement, ingrafted into her theory, practice and law the fundamental principles of Co-operative control. Her chief corner-stone is laid upon the enduring basis of equality of right, equity of dealing, unity of purpose…

 

“In the year 1620 nothing was known of the subdivisions of labor, nothing of machinery as at present understood. The home was the manufactory, the members of the family were the weavers, tailors and dressmakers. The carpenter and the shoemaker were at their door, needing but few tools, and those were easily made by their neighbor, the blacksmith. … 

 

“The first industry that demanded congregation of labor and aggregation of wealth was the fisheries; and here the Pilgrim completed the circle of his possibilities. These men, united in motive, method, and purpose, found mutual help the best self-help; found that equity in risk, responsibility, and profit, like honesty, was the best policy, as well as in unison with good morals and the previously formed habits of mutual government.

 

“The share system in the cod and mackerel fisheries was the first introduction of co-operation in industry, as the establishment of the township on the congregational principle was the inauguration of republican government. Here in this Commonwealth was planted by the Pilgrims the germ of co-operative enterprise.”

 

Although the author of the report does not mention him, the Pilgrim John Winthrop comes to mind. While still aboard a ship on its way from England to the Bay Colony, he articulated his celebrated vision of the future, that of a “Shining City upon a Hill.” Ronald Reagan, who appropriated the theme in his presidential campaign of 1980, radically misunderstood or misrepresented it. Unlike Reagan, Winthrop was no champion of unfettered capitalism. According to him, in that shining city, “the rich should not eat up the poor,” and “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” The city, of course, was Boston, and, in the vision of Winthrop, it was intended to be the capital of what we could call a socialist commonwealth. Even though his later actions against Native Americans and holding of captured Pequot combatants as slaves did not square with that vision.

 

The word “socialism” did not exist in the 1600s. It was invented in England in the early 1830s as a synonym for “cooperativism.” The word was applied initially to the writings of the Englishman Robert Owen and the Frenchman Charles Fourier who inspired and, in Owen’s case, directly financed many of the cooperative experiments to which the report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor alludes.

 

A great deal had changed between 1620 and the late 1800s when the government report was written. The country won its independence from England, of course. Closer to 1877, the Civil War resulted in both the abolition of slavery and the domination of the United States by the industrial capitalists of the North, a good number of whom owned factories in Massachusetts. Massive immigration was on its way to altering substantially the ethnic composition of the US population, especially its working class. Super-exploited industrial workers were starting to organize labor unions that would wield the strike weapon in order to improve their collective conditions of life. The suffragette movement that ultimately won the vote for women in 1920 was also in its early stages. During their best moments, the socialist developments of the early 20th century would take all of this into account. A dramatic example is the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, led by the revolutionary socialist union the Industrial Workers of the World. The multiethnic textile workers of Lawrence walked off the job in response to a cut in pay, with the militant participation of large numbers of women who worked in the factories.

 

What connects the Bay Colony of the 1600s, the cooperative experiments of the 1800s, and the labor and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in spite of the deep-going changes the Commonwealth experienced over the course of three centuries? It is the basic values they share. In the words I have already quoted, these values include the embrace of “co-operation” over competition, “mutual help” over the pursuit of narrow self-interest, “brotherly” (and sisterly) solidarity over acquisitive individualism, and the adamant refusal to allow “the rich to eat up the poor.”

 

In my more pessimistic moments, I remind myself that, while these values may be sleeping, they are not dead. They are only waiting for enough people to awaken them so they can play their indispensable, transformative role once again. 

 

Gary Zabel is a retired UMass Boston philosophy professor.

FUNDAMENTAL CIVICS: HOW A BOSTON TEEN CHANGED THE WAY TEACHERS APPROACH IMMIGRATION HISTORY

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In the summer of 2017, before her senior year of high school, Isabelle Doerre-Torres met Carlos,* a Salvadoran immigrant on the verge of deportation. Doerre-Torres was an intern at a legal rights organization. She soon learned that Carlos came to Boston nearly two decades ago after he fled gang violence. He’d put down roots in a working class community, where his two daughters were born.

 

But like millions of immigrants in the United States, Carlos was undocumented, making his future in the US precarious. When Carlos went to a routine immigration check-in that summer, he was told he had two options: buy a plane ticket and leave or be deported.

 

Through Carlos, Doerre-Torres discovered a part of history that her textbooks were eerily silent about: El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 to 1992 that killed more than 75,000 people-and the depths of US involvement. The US funneled more than $4.5 billion to the right-wing Salvadoran government in the name of fighting communism. Salvadoran troops trained by the US military carried out brutal massacres and caused the disappearance of alleged dissidents. All the while, the US government, mainly under the Reagan administration, ignored human rights abuses in favor of carrying out their own limited foreign policy goals: containing the spread of communism.

 

Doerre-Torres was shocked by what she learned. She was further astounded that she had never studied this history in high school, particularly at a time when immigration debates fill the news.

 

“You hear about deportations and detention all the time-but along the border in Texas,” Doerre-Torres says. “But it’s happening in Boston, and that made me realize that people do in fact need to know about why people are coming here and why it’s unsafe for people to go back.”

 

Immigrants fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala frequently fill the headlines. Central Americans are one of the largest immigrant communities in the US. An estimated 2 million Salvadorans, 1.3 million Guatemalans, and nearly 800,000 Hondurans were living in the US as of 2013, according to demographic information compiled by the Pew Research Center. This number has likely grown in recent years. From October 2018 to July 2019, more than 560,000 people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were apprehended at the US border. But the history of Central America, where the US staged or supported dozens of coups and military interventions in the 20th century, rarely makes it into history textbooks, leaving students to graduate without a basic knowledge of a region inextricably linked to the US.

 

“There’s definitely a gap in knowledge and understanding how we got here and in understanding the situation in each of the three countries,” says Daniella Burgi-Palomino, a senior associate at Latin American Working Group, who also advises an initiative called Teaching Central America that focuses on including these topics in US classrooms. That gap includes “the US role in supporting right-wing dictatorships and military in those countries in the 1980s and fueling internal conflict,” Burgi-Palomino says. “That was a precursor to some of the conditions that we are seeing now.”

 

Designing a Curriculum 

Teachers at Boston Latin School are rethinking their history classes, figuring out ways to incorporate Central America into their lesson plans for the first time. They are doing so in part because of Doerre-Torres’ efforts to bring this gap in the history curriculum to the school’s attention. When she returned to Boston Latin School for her senior year in fall 2017, Doerre-Torres was inspired by her experience with Carlos and her own experience as the daughter of an immigrant from Colombia, another Latin American country whose history is often overlooked in Eurocentric curriculums. As her senior capstone project, she designed a six-part curriculum about US intervention in Latin America, with a particular focus on Central America and the Cold War.

 

“How are we going to have comprehensive discussions on immigration when the only facts we’re armed with are about the Maya, the Inca, and Pitbull?” Doerre-Torres says to an auditorium full of her classmates and teachers during her capstone project presentation. “What are the real reasons for people coming here? What are the real reasons for people leaving there? What is the historical context for this influx in migration? Lastly, do we as the US have a role in all this?”

 

The sample lessons of Doerre-Torres’ curriculum cover “containment,” the US foreign policy goal of preventing the spread of communism and policies that the US supported as a result, such as a campaign of state-funded repression, torture, disappearances and killings of presumed leftists in South America called Operation Condor. The curriculum pays particular attention to Central America, where the US funded state repression, massacres, and even genocide. An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in the country’s civil war from 1960 to 1996. Most of the victims were indigenous Mayans. As New York University History professor Greg Grandin wrote in the New York Times in 2013, “genocide was indeed an option in Guatemala, supported materially and morally by Ronald Reagan’s White House.”

 

During the 1980s, the US sent thousands of troops to Honduras and used the country as a base for their “containment” goals in the region. Over the past 100 years, the US has supported, carried out, or enabled multiple coups in Honduras, most recently the 2009 coup of democratically elected Manuel Zelaya, which ushered the country into an era of increased militarization and political instability. In El Salvador, US-trained troops carried out the worst massacre in modern Latin American history, the 1981 slaughter of unarmed peasants in El Mozote. As Ray Bonner, one of the first journalists to report on the massacre, wrote in 2018, “one might think the United States owes the country’s citizens an apology, rather than disparaging epithets.”

 

The sample curriculum ends with a lesson on immigration, in which students can exchange their ideas-but only after learning about the history of the countries’ migrants flee.

 

From Theory to Practice

All around the US, educators are discussing how to address the national immigration debate. At a time when immigration has become such a polarizing issue, these teachers are finding ways to build understanding of immigrants’ experiences among high school students to humanize the debate and build common ground.

 

“If you talk to a school, they often think that talking about immigration is something for immigrant kids. They don’t recognize that this is actually important for all of us,” says Adam Strom, director of Re-imagining Migration, a project started by two UCLA professors to develop lesson plans on immigration for high school students. “We see immigration as an opportunity to start to think about the narratives that connect all of us.”

 

Janna Ramadan, a former Boston Latin School student who graduated in 2018, says that with the curriculum she learned, it’s easy to see how some people buy into the stereotypes about immigrants. “You can see how people become misinformed easily because you only see gangs, and illicit drug trade and immigrants, but you don’t understand where they are coming from, why this is happening, the history behind it and how the US actually created [this] situation,” Ramadan says.

 

Teachers at BLS have adapted their lesson plans to add important historical context to the current immigration narrative and prepare their students to think critically about immigration policy.

 

“I have 180 days to make sure that when they leave here, they’re not walking out of here misinformed, first and foremost, or not understanding how to navigate through all that is coming their way, either news stories or historical events,” says history teacher Cheralyn Pinchem.

 

In the last six weeks of her AP history course, when she had more freedom to digress from a history textbook because her students have already taken the AP exam, Pinchem allows students to decide what topics, countries, or issues interest them. Last school year, students were particularly interested in learning about the history of immigration after reading about children in cages and hearing comments from the president that all Mexicans are drug dealers.

 

“They hear about it in the news, so they want to know what has really happened and historically how have we treated people from other countries,” Pinchem says. Each year, she also covers a few Latin American countries in depth that are not required by the curriculum. In the past, she has discussed Puerto Rico, El Salvador, and Colombia, per her students’ requests.

 

Another teacher at Boston Latin School, Judi Freeman, has started incorporating an assignment in her class that requires students to document their own families’ migration story using an app developed by Re-Imagining Migration called Moving Stories.

 

“It deepened the students’ understanding of the fact that everyone in the classroom had an immigration story at one point or another no matter where in the world their family hailed from,” Freeman says. “It definitely connected the kids to understanding what was happening at the border with more interest than they would have brought to it otherwise.”

 

Her class, Facing History and Ourselves, an elective that teaches past injustices with a focus on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, also covers genocides such as Rwanda, the Belgian Congo, Guatemala, and the effects of colonialism around the world. According to Ramadan, who took the Facing History course, Doerre-Torres’ project has started an important conversation, but she worries the school’s curriculum still remains Eurocentric.

 

Teaching Central America

BLS is not the first to grapple with these issues. Since the early 1990s, when many Central American countries were transitioning out of times of intense conflict, the nonprofit Teaching for Change launched an initiative called Teaching Central America to advocate for Central American history to be included in high school curriculums. The initiative includes lesson plans, book suggestions, and other educational materials about the history of Central America and root causes of migration.

 

Teachers, who are often the first point of contact for newly arrived students from Central America, can use the material in their classes, or to educate themselves.

 

Wendy Bermudez, a Teaching Central America adviser, works as a bilingual resource teacher for the gifted at Claremont Immersion Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia where the student body is half native English speakers and half native Spanish speakers, including many students newly arrived from Central America. She herself fled El Salvador during the civil war when she was 8 years old. In high school, she remembers feeling like an outcast. She didn’t often see herself reflected in textbooks or lessons, except for the occasional mention of gang violence in El Salvador. Now, Bermudez works to make sure all her students feel seen and included, whether that means talking about Central American history during class or just introducing herself to a new student from Central America.

 

“Our job as educators is to learn about our students and where they come from. We create lessons that will interest them, lessons about their life experiences,” Bermudez says. “That’s how we get our students to learn because they are more interested when you make connections to their personal life.”

 

These experiences are crucial for the growing number of students from Central America in US school systems.

 

Elmer Vivas Portillo, the son of Salvadoran immigrants living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mainly learned about the Salvadoran civil war through the stories from his parents who fled the violence. But his history classes at Cambridge Rindge and Latin were mainly silent about Central American history.

 

“The possibility of learning more about your own history in an academic setting means that maybe you’re more engaged in class and more likely to show up to school the next day to continue learning about that topic,” Vivas Portillo says. He finally had that opportunity during his first semester at Harvard College when he enrolled in a Latin American history class.

 

“I remember feeling so happy taking that class because I just felt a feeling for the first time that, Oh, wow. I can learn something that’s so close to me in an academic setting,” says Portillo, now a senior sociology major.

 

Still, students such as Portillo emphasize that teachers who are going to address this history with their students need to make sure they themselves fully understand what happened. Students can share their family’s stories to enhance class discussion if they choose, but it’s unfair to single one student out as the “representative” of that country, Portillo says. Plus, it could make them feel uncomfortable.

 

“To be honest, for much of high school, I didn’t have a full understanding of where I was coming from,” Portillo says. He hopes more students have the opportunity to explore this history in an academic setting, whether that be in high school or college. “It would be a great disservice to overlook the role that the US played in putting these countries in the positions that they are now.”

 

“This is fundamental civics,” says Strom of Re-Imagining Migration. “We can’t make good thoughtful decisions around refugee policy and around migration if we actually don’t know our own stories.”

 

*Name is changed because the work Doerre-Torres did was confidential. 


This story was produced with original reporting from Anna-Cat Brigida for YES! Magazine, with support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

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