As the battle for voting rights surges across the nation, the contest for electoral justice in Massachusetts is reaching a high pitch. This year alone, nearly four hundreds bills have been filed in approximately 38 states that could effectively suppress the vote in states that range from Georgia to Texas. Late last month U.S. Senate republicans rebuffed efforts among democrats to pass a popular and expansive voters rights measure, called the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that would have put the federal government in charge of elections.
Against the backdrop of the republican-led voter suppression campaign, states are now delving…
Comments Made During A Global Panel Discussion on the One Year Anniversary of the Lynching of George Floyd
Rev. Kevin C. Peterson
It was a year ago today — in the proximity of this present hour — that George Floyd, a gregarious and large middle-aged Black man, adorned in a black halter top tee-shirt, entered a local convenience store to make purchases with 20 dollars in cash that a store accountant deemed dubious money.
Moments later, Floyd lay prostrate on the street, and in the presence of irate onlookers, with the right knee of a local law enforcement officer on…
Precisely because the current generation of Americans barely recognize the seismic impact of her overarching, protean talent, her name is seldom mentioned as being among those artists who definitively and powerfully shaped the parameters of spiritual life in our nation. So, when the name of Mahalia Jackson is evoked either in conversation or during the course of comparisons about whose contributions to high culture is worthy of valued designation, listeners are likely befuddled or made inquisitive: Asking who was Mahalia Jackson? And then they query, what discrete demands did she impose upon the our aesthetic sensibilities?
Mahalia Jackson gave Black…
If the theory exists that an inevitable advance toward fuller democracy is often offset by periodic reversals that threaten to plunge the body politic into veritable civic chaos, then we are witnessing that kind of upheaval in our country currently.
When President Trump lost the presidency late last year, he left office on unequivocally belligerent terms. Trump swore he had been victimized by a conspiratorial voter cabal whose malfeasance proved his contention that corruption was endemic to our election process. …
Perhaps what we are witnessing in the aftermath of yesterday’s double Georgia U.S. Senate election run-offs is a political parable. Parables are stories that lead to revelation — or narratives that disclose elusive truths, but which make understanding more lucid. Political parables can tell us who we are as citizens and anticipate what possibilities are ahead.
The senate races in Georgia have, since the November 2020 elections, captured the attention of the nation in the soon to be post-Trump presidency. Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have functioned in their state — and across the nation — as representative…
The curious among us have assuredly asked: what is violence? Is it an obvious thing requiring no deep thinking to define it? Or is it more complex than that — more like an ideology marked by intractable worldviews, group histories, differing perspectives or the source of disparate social and political hierachies?
Some argue that violence is embedded in our DNA. Others contend its a learned behavior. The political philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his classic text, Moral Man and Immoral Society, has said that the quest humans have for elite status motivates violent propensities, contending also that: “The moral attitudes of…
The city of Boston was recently confronted with an opportunity to clear the racially toxic air that hovers over Faneuil Hall and its adjacent Market Place in Boston. What did the city do? It punted.
Earlier this month, the city cashed a 2.1 million check from the New York-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation. The corporation was two years late on its annual payment in-lieu-of-taxes agreement. The city had threatened to break the lease. Instead, they pressured the company and took the money.
Given the symbolic shame that Faneuil Hall brings to the city, there certainly was an opportunity to do more…
On a warm April day in 1899 W.E.B Dubois — the great scholar and Civil Rights advocate — waned in lugubrious despair as he glared through the widow of a grocery store in Atlanta to see the detached knuckles of Sam Hose on display in a jar. Hose had been lynched.
In 1998, James Byrd’s body parts were found splayed across the roads near Jasper, Texas after a trio of white men dragged his body three miles while in molten states of racial hatred. Byrd’s right arm and head were severed from his body.
In 2015, Freddie Gray, a Black…
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was fooling no one yesterday— especially Blacks in the city — when he stepped to the podium at city hall to suggest he was interested in addressing systemic racism.
Implicit in Walsh’s latest policy ploy is the intimation he has long been concerned about the festering presence of systemic racism that has been a fixture in his administration. Yesterday’s faux press conference focused on police department reform that stemmed from a stinging Boston Globe report this week that found the city woefully wanting around the issue of equity within the department’s ranks. At the hastily called…
Last night’s presidential debate was not a presidential debate at all. Instead it was cacophonous sound and fury signifying nothing. It was a 90-minute forum full of dispiriting pontifications where two candidates purporting a desire to lead the free world rolled in the mire before the media klieg lights, reducing themselves to acerbic chortling and noxious name calling. It was supposed to be a measured discourse between worthy opponents — an extended dignified discussion over national policies and statecraft. It was anything but that.
The millions of Americans who tuned in last night hoping to finalize their decision-making before November’s…
Kevin C. Peterson
Kevin Peterson is founder of the New Democracy Coalition and Convener of the Fanueil Hall Race and Reconciliation Project. He is a social and cultural critic.
