Latest news with #BlackBostonians
Axios
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Museum of African American History uses AI to share Black history
The Museum of African American History is using AI to share the stories of iconic Black Bostonians. Why it matters: The museum is expanding its use of AI beyond its Frederick Douglass hologram in hopes of bringing new life to the museum's artifacts — and thus to the telling of African American history in Massachusetts. State of play: The "Black Voices of the Revolution" exhibit opened Tuesday in the Abiel Smith School with two interactive, AI-based displays. One lets visitors hear from historic Black women, including Elizabeth Freeman, one of the first enslaved people to successfully sue for their freedom in Massachusetts. The other lets visitors interview the museum's collection of primary sources, pulling details from the collection to answer questions and prompts like a chatbot. What they're saying: The exhibit "is an opportunity for us to tell a unique story of the American Revolution from the African American perspective," Noelle Trent, the museum's president and CEO, tells Axios. Trent says the partnership with TimeLooper has enabled the museum to use AI in an ethical manner to share these stories. Zoom in: The exhibit examines six topics, ranging from slavery to relationships with indigenous people to Black print culture, per a press release. The exhibit not only shares African American perspectives around the American Revolution, but also highlights other issues African Americans faced at the time, whether as enslaved people or freed communities. If you go: The museum is open the rest of the week, including July Fourth.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Yahoo
Passenger who survived fatal Mass. plane crash dies day after pilot
A passenger who was injured when a small plane crashed in Beverly Thursday morning has died after initially surviving the crash, the Essex County District Attorney's Office confirmed Monday. The district attorney's office declined to identify the passenger, who was taken to a hospital after the crash. The plane's pilot — MIT aerospace engineer Geoffrey Andrews — died in the crash. Read more: 'Catastrophic loss': Family mourns pilot killed in Beverly plane crash The plane crash happened on June 19 around 7:45 a.m. near Beverly Regional Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said previously. The plane — a Mooney M20 — came to rest on a roadway next to a utility pole. The plane 'experienced engine issues' after leaving the airport, according to an FAA report about the crash. Andrews tried to fly the plane back to the airport, but it crashed before he could land safely. Read more: GoFundMe collecting funds for wife of pilot killed in Mass. plane crash Andrews' wife is expecting their first child in October, his family said in a statement on Sunday. A GoFundMe campaign is raising money to benefit her and the Andrews' unborn child. The district attorney's office, the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash. No further information has been released. City man arrested on assault and battery with serious injury after altercation last week Overdose deaths of Black Bostonians dropped significantly in 2024. Here's why Dear Gov. Healey: Here's how to make Mass. a manufacturing powerhouse — again Powerball: See the winning numbers in Monday's $128 million drawing Mass. State Police trooper in critical condition after hit-and-run motorcycle crash Read the original article on MassLive.
Boston Globe
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
At Embrace Ideas Festival, Black Bostonians discussed politics, art, business
Advertisement Margaret Breeden, daughter of Boston civil rights leader Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'My parents really ingrained social justice in me every day at the kitchen table, so I came here to figure out what I could do to help,' she said. In the first panel of the day, State Senator Liz Miranda and Segun Idowu, chief of economic opportunity and inclusion for the City of Boston discussed how they were using government policy to uplift Black Bostonians in light of the new presidential administration. Miranda represents the 2nd Suffolk district which includes parts of Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester and Northeastern University or 'the Blackest district in the Commonwealth' in her words. Idowu, a member of Mayor Wu's cabinet, Advertisement Idowu said that Trump's tariffs and executive orders would impact the 'five pillars' of Massachusetts' and the city of Boston's economy — medical institutions, educational institutions, life science research, tourism and climate technology. Idowu also said Trump's tariffs were impacting community projects in the city like the P3 project, a plan to build affordable housing and a research lab on the site of a vacant lot in Roxbury. Miranda was critical of the Trump administration's rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. She said Trump's actions would hurt sectors like medical research. 'It's not just symbolic, it's sidelining brilliant people,' Miranda said. Miranda also said that even when DEI policies were not under attack, Massachusetts' government was not representative. 'I'm one of four Black women in the entire legislature of 200 people … we're not even represented in the bluest state in the country,' Miranda said. Miranda encouraged attendees to boycott companies that rolled back DEI efforts and to contact their alma maters if the institutions were abandoning programs to foster diversity. The politicians also told the audience policy wins they're proud of. Miranda said that she's proud of a bill she passed last year that addresses the higher morbidity rate that Black mothers face compared to white mothers. 'Six years ago when I first started talking about this issue, everyone told me 'there's no problem here,' here in the public health Mecca of the world,' Miranda said sarcastically. Advertisement Idowu said that he felt proud that people of color have started businesses in almost every neighborhood in the city and no longer feel limited to Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury. 'The whole city belongs to us … we can go to establishments in other neighborhoods now and not feel policed,' Idowu said. Priscilla Douglas, an executive coach and author who recently stepped down from the board of the Boston Public Library, attended the Embrace Ideas Festival. She is a lifelong resident of the city who went to Northeastern University and worked at the Roxbury YMCA and the Urban League growing up, but said the festival was eye-opening. 'Listening to the policy panel, I had no idea that 17 percent of Boston residents live in poverty,' Douglas said. At the last panel of the day, Jeneé Osterheldt, deputy managing editor for culture, talent and development at The Boston Globe interviewed entrepreneur Morgan DeBaun about her new self-help book and her career. DeBaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity Inc., a digital media company geared to Black millennials. DeBaun said that she had the idea to start a company focused on Black people when she was working for Intuit in Silicon Valley because she didn't see anyone building technology with Black users as the primary customer they were targeting. DeBaun, who is originally from Missouri, said that the murder of Ferguson teenager Mike Brown at the hands of the police in 2014 also led to her wanting to work with Black people. Advertisement 'I was sitting in a cubicle in San Francisco after Mike Brown and the people around me were asking 'what's for lunch,' they just were not seeing what I was seeing,' DeBaun said. In the audience, Laurie Nicolas resonated with DeBaun's experiences of working in predominantly white offices. Nicolas works in the healthcare space but started her own nonprofit called Pink Sunday which focuses on physical fitness for women. Nicolas learned about the Embrace festival after the inauguration of the Embrace statue in Boston Commons in 2023. She said she appreciated the diversity of the speakers at the festival. 'I want to focus on cultivating spaces where people feel included, not just people who look like me, but all kinds of diversity and I learned a lot from this event,' Nicolas. This story was produced by the Globe's team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter . Angela Mathew can be reached at
Boston Globe
09-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
‘It's beautiful to see': Black Bostonians react to the pope's Creole ancestry
On Friday, Chambers was among Black Bostonians to react with warmth and pride to the revelation that Advertisement Chambers, who is a parishioner at at St. Katharine Drexel in Dorchester, said the pope appears to be a man of humility and worldliness, someone who cares about justice and someone who wants people to care about one another. He was elated when he heard about the pope's lineage, saying it was 'a matter of pride.' 'It's going to be a matter of healing pride because there's been some tough times, politically,' he said. 'We're living in tough times.' Multiple outlets, The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, lived in New Orleans and eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope's mother, according to the Times. Advertisement In Boston, the genealogical discovery of Leo XIV, which is the name the new pope chose, was broadly welcomed. M. Shawn Copeland, a professor emerita at Boston College's department of theology, said, 'Such a discovery ought not to be surprising to anyone in the Americas.' 'Nearly all of us are racially and culturally mixed; sadly, we either do not know our interwoven roots or sometimes choose to ignore and forget them,' she said. Copeland said as 'an African American, a practicing Roman Catholic, and a professional theologian, this discovery of the pope's background strikes a chord of joy and pride.' 'Yet what is most important is that Leo XIV already has extended himself to all human persons, especially those whom our society marginalizes and demeans,' she said. 'The pope forcefully reminded the world of God's unconditional love for all of us, for humanity, and he assured us that 'evil will not prevail.'' State Senator Lydia Edwards, a Black Democrat from East Boston and practicing Catholic, said Black Catholics in the US are often overlooked and considered by some within the American Black community to be 'an anomaly.' 'He couldn't be more American than to have come from that particular ancestry in the United States,' said Edwards. About 6 percent of Black adults in the US are Catholic, Edwards noted that the pope's family did not identify as Black while he was growing up and that the pope would not have the same lived experience as someone who identified as Black. Advertisement But still, for her, Leo XIV is technically the first 'African American pope.' 'It's beautiful to see and I wish him well,' Edwards said. She added, 'He is probably related to some people in Louisiana who are Black. That's a big deal that you are related to pope.' Boston resident Lorna DesRoses, a multicultural ministry consultant at the Archdiocese of Boston, said the pope's roots speak to the history of the US, and the hardships faced by people of color. DesRoses learned of the pontiff's lineage through social media, where she said it spread quickly through local Black Catholic and Haitian threads. ( 'It's a complicated history,' she said. Creoles, also known as 'Creole people of color,' have a history almost as old as Louisiana, the Times reported this week. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent who were born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color, according to that newspaper. DesRoses, who is of Haitian descent, called the pope's heritage 'a blessing for the church.' 'This is historic,' she said. 'It's a historic moment in the life of the church, in the life of this country.' Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, who is the first Haitian American to lead the city's legislative body, said the pope's heritage is 'deeply meaningful for lots of different communities.' Advertisement 'There's a lot to be proud of here,' she said. The news comes at a particularly painful time for Haitians living in Greater Boston, as bloody civil strife and unrest continues in Haiti, said Louijeune, who is not Catholic but whose father is. Given so much ongoing suffering there, the pope's connection to the island nation 'is pretty uplifting,' she said. Material from Globe wire services was used in this report. Danny McDonald can be reached at
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
5-Year-Old Sarah Roberts Resisted Segregation 100 Years Before Brown v. Board of Education
When learning about integration in American public schools, most of our education starts with the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This landmark decision declared that legally segregated schools were unconstitutional, and was a giant stride for equal access to a proper public school education for many Americans. However, the fight for school desegregation had actually been in the works for over 100 years. In 1849, one family took on segregation in Boston, laying early groundwork for that Supreme Court victory nearly a century later. Five-year-old Sarah Roberts, the daughter of a local printer, had to walk past five white schools on her way to the one Black school every morning due to Boston's school segregation laws — and her family decided to fight back. Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take Massachusetts was one of the first states to abolish slavery in its Constitution, and by 1790, there was no record of any enslaved people living there. This newly freed Black community settled onto the northern slope of Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Although they lived a couple blocks from the state's capital and opposite some of Boston's wealthier residents, the Black community lived a more modest life. Many Black Bostonians worked jobs on the city's harbor as mariners. As they obtained more wealth, Boston's Black residents put down roots in their Beacon Hill community, building homes and gathering spaces, like the African Meeting House, which doubled as a church and community center. As Boston's Black community grew, they were excluded from many public institutions, including the public school system. Prince Hall, a prominent abolitionist and African American Freemason, founded the African School in 1798 with his son, Primus, to serve Black students. The African School was a community-led education initiative teaching people of all ages in the area. As the school attracted more students, it outgrew the Hall's home and moved to the African Meeting House in 1808. The school could now accommodate more students, but as a community-led institution, it received minimal funding and, therefore, had a shortage of books and materials. Over two decades later, a public school finally opened for Boston's Black community. Abiel Smith, a wealthy white businessman, left $4,000 in his will for the education of Boston's African American children. With this donation, the Abiel Smith School opened its doors in 1835. While the Abiel Smith School filled an urgent need for Black children in Boston, many of the same challenges that had existed at the African School, such as overcrowding, limited resources, and poorer conditions than white schools, continued at the Abiel Smith School. Students were mistreated by the majority white teachers and administrators, who neglected the building and its need for extensive repairs. Between 1844 and 1846, over 80 Black residents of Boston's Northern Slope petitioned the Boston Primary School Committee to correct the injustices at Abiel Smith School. Despite the problems at the Abiel Smith School, it remained the only public school for Black children. Students like Sarah Roberts, who lived roughly half a mile from the Abiel Smith School in Boston's West End neighborhood, had to pass five all-white schools on her walk to the Smith School. In 1847, Sarah's father, Benjamin Roberts, a local printer, had enough and petitioned the Boston Primary School Committee to send Sarah to the school closest to their home, which was only open to white children. The committee denied his petition four times. The Boston School Committee argued that because his daughter could attend Smith School, she did not need to be admitted into a school closest to her home. In 1848, Roberts ignored the committee and enrolled his daughter in the school closest to her home, but she was promptly ejected and told to attend the Smith School. Roberts, furious at the treatment of his daughter, enlisted the help of attorney Robert Morris, the first Black man to pass the Massachusetts bar. Morris then recruited Charles Sumner, a white abolitionist and future Massachusetts Senator, to file a lawsuit against the City of Boston. Morris and Sumner claimed that segregated schooling violated an 1854 statute stating, "Any child, unlawfully excluded from public school instruction, in this Commonwealth, shall recover damages therefor [sic]...against the city or town by which such public school instruction is supported.' In other words, any child in Massachusetts who is illegally left out of any public school can collect any money from the city or town supporting the school they have not been allowed to attend. In a statement drafted by Morris, Sumner argued in court that 'all men and women were equal under Massachusetts law and that, according to the law, there is no discrimination of color or race inside the public school system." Sumner and Morris also argued that by excluding Black children from the majority-white school system, the city would continue to uphold a caste system that denied racial equality. Unlike Black children who had to leave their neighborhoods to seek an education, white children in Boston had the option to attend quality schools within their communities. Sumner closed his argument by stating that the Boston Public School Committee had no power to segregate the school system based upon race and that the Massachusetts Constitution had abolished slavery and, therefore, had no authority to uphold a school system based upon race and caste. Despite Morris and Sumner's compelling argument, Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Boston Public School Committee. While the state of Massachusetts had equality under the law, Shaw argued, it did not prevent the Boston Public School Committee from separating the schools based on race. The state's law could not fix any of the prejudice or discrimination against African Americans if it did exist; the law itself did not create any of the alleged discrimination. In Shaw's opinion, 'as long as schools segregated based upon race remain equal, they could remain segregated.' Shaw's decision helped set the legal precedent for 'separate but equal' — or the idea that Black and white people could be segregated so long as the facilities were equal in quality, which they rarely were — in the United States. In 1896, 'separate but equal' would be used in the Supreme Court Case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation nationwide. Although the Roberts family's case was unsuccessful, it inspired many activists and the community along the Northern Slope. In 1849, led by abolitionist speaker and writer William Cooper Nell, Boston's Black community began to boycott the Smith School. The boycott and continued lobbying in the statehouse throughout the first half of the 1850s finally led to change. In April 1855, lawmakers banned legally segregated schoolhouses in Massachusetts. The Roberts family's courage sparked a significant movement for racial equality in Boston and across this country. While Sarah herself was young and may not have been the one arguing against the city in court, she became the face of this lawsuit and of school desegregation. She is an example of the larger, and at times unspoken, role that Black women and girls played in the school desegregation movement. After the court case, Sarah Roberts and her family moved around the greater Boston area throughout her childhood. In 1865, at 22 years old, she settled back into Boston. After the Civil War and with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Boston's Black community continued the fight for equality, building on the legacy of people like Roberts. Simultaneously, the Roberts case also started a chain reaction that shaped the future of segregation — from the 'separate but equal' clause of Plessy v. Ferguson to the toppling of Brown v. Board of Education over 100 years later. Today, the Museum of African American History in Boston, Massachusetts, continues to do more research on the life of Sarah Roberts and other Black women who played pivotal roles in the fight for equality. This article was produced with Made By Us, a coalition of more than 400 history museums working to connect with today's youth. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Check out more Teen Vogue education coverage: Affirmative Action Benefits White Women Most How Our Obsession With Trauma Took Over College Essays So Many People With Student Debt Never Graduated College The Modern American University Is a Right-Wing Institution
