Stories
At the end of Boston’s Long Wharf is a glass and metal slab that tells a story of the city’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The monument stands to remind those walking along the waterfront that Boston was a hub for ships carrying African people who were sold into slavery. The marker could be seen as a…
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ATLANTA — Kyle Wells, 49, grew up in Boston’s Mattapan near the intersection of Morton Street and Blue Hill Avenue. By the end of his senior year at Boston Latin School, he was itching to leave town. “My kind of high school goal was to move out of Boston,” said Wells, who headed southward to…
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Cedric Turner was 16 years old when bell bottoms were polyester and “The Bump” filled radio airwaves, moving young people to knock their hips together to the beat. It was the dawn of the disco era, with colored lights flashing in nightclubs as music blasted away. A street-wise kid from Mattapan, Turner was Black, six-foot-two…
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The pandemic is waning, but the mental health crisis for children isn’t. And for many children of color, the full impact of the last 15 months — against a backdrop of longstanding systemic racism and inequities — may just be coming into focus. Mahailya Effee, a 15-year-old who lives in Roxbury, Mass., says from the…
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Vermont is about to embark on a new effort to address racial and other disparities in the health care system. Over the last two years, the life expectancy of Black men in the United States has dropped by three years. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the racial gap in life expectancy is now wider than…
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Tanoah Pierre didn’t tell her family when she headed out to join demonstrators in downtown Boston late last May. She knew her relatives would be concerned about the coronavirus or the possibility that violence might break out and try to discourage her from going. But with the video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s…
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How should we remember painful events in our history? There are more than 70 Witness Stones installed throughout our state. The markers commemorate the lives of the enslaved people that lived in Connecticut. This hour, we talk to the founder of this project and hear about a potential Witness Stone to remember an enslaved woman…
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At first, Rebecca Carroll’s childhood in rural New Hampshire seemed idyllic. But as a Black child raised by adoptive white parents, her life became much more complicated. “It essentially was the white gaze,” Carroll told NEXT . “It was the world my parents created, the way they wanted it to look, without any indication of…
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Cities around New England have declared racism a public health crisis. Scholar-activist Katharine “Kat” Morris is especially interested in the intersection between racism, health and environmental justice — something she talked about in her 2019 TEDxUConn talk . Morris noted that a fifth of Connecticut’s pollution is concentrated in five cities where the majority of…
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Fear opens with the front door for Lisa Wong. It walks her down the street, and it follows her into the grocery store. Fear is a strange voice calling out from a passing car. It lurks around every corner. Fear is in her Zoom calls when she works as town manager of Winchester. That fear…
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