editorial

In our country, there are thousands of politicians and appointed government officials who claim to work hard for their constituents. But here in Massachusetts, we have a history of public servants who have made a real difference in the lives of the people they serve. From Ed Brooke and Ruth Batson to Mel King and Ayanna Pressley, many local public officials have fought long and hard to create real positive change in our community. None has worked harder than Rachael Rollins.

So here we are once again, looking at the death of an unarmed Black man at the hands of a white man. And once again, our justice system was slow to react when it came to holding accountable the white man for the seemingly senseless murder.

When a college reaches 50 years old it is customary the talk about it in glowing terms, using phrases like “beacon of education” and “cherished asset of the community.”

The times we live in are challenging to our minds, bodies and spirits. For our spirits to survive, we as a people have to do what we have always done. We must focus on our art and culture for the strength to keep going in the face of this kind of unspeakable brutality.

For decades, we have relied on Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed systemic discrimination in public schools, and the 1966 decision to ban poll taxes in state elections to keep our country’s moral arc bending towards justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said.

When I received the call from my good friend Mike King informing me his dad had left us after 94 years of life, I was hit with many emotions. But my sadness soon gave way to gratitude for the measure of this man we lost.

For young basketball fans like my sons, Ja Morant is a symbol of hope, an under-recruited kid out of high school who comes from a two-parent household in the small town of Dalzell, South Carolina.

While it is important to celebrate women’s place in history and all the contributions they have made in the past, it is also important to understand the national observance has activist roots.

History is the way that we remember and come to understand past mistakes, so we don’t repeat them. Our American history, our Black history, isn’t always easy to remember. It is filled with oppression, turmoil, hate and self-loathing. But the future is what we make it.

My partner Andre Stark and I have purchased the Banner to preserve its legacy as a voice for people of color and expand its operations to better serve its readers in the 21st century.

No one old enough to have been in Boston during the school discrimination of the 1970s would be likely to support the return of the elected school committee. Back then, the school committee functioned as a bigoted bloc to prevent the mayor from complying with the laws that opposed racial discrimination in education.

The recently appointed members of the Boston Reparations Task Force now have the report commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry (UUUM) to guide their inquiry on slavery in colonial Roxbury.