Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America By Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick Boston, Beacon Press, 291 pages. In 1850, 46 years before the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal facilities did not violate the United States […]
Civil and Constitutional Rights
Posted inEducation, Politics
Wrong answer on school finances
In the first week of October, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in the Hancock school finance case. The arguments addressed the opinion issued last April by Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford that funding is constitutionally inadequate in the districts of those who brought the suit and, by extension, in high-poverty districts across the […]
Posted inEducation, Politics
The state still doesnt provide equal education
June 15, 1993: an important day for education in Massachusetts. On that day, the Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education and defined the Commonwealth’s duty to educate all public school students, without regard to their personal wealth or poverty, and without regard to their district’s fiscal capacity. The SJC […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Sociologist Thomas Shapiro says that a lack of assets, not income, is holding African-Americans back
On the issue of economic inequality, Americans are of two minds. On the one hand, we value opportunity over security, balancing a meager safety net (compared with other developed countries) with the promise of upward mobility for those with ability, gumption, and tolerance for hard work. The idea of opportunity itself suggests variability of outcomes, […]
Posted inPolitics
Popping the Question
One almost certain consequence of Goodridge, et al v. Department of Public Health, the decision by the Supreme Judicial Court last November to allow gay marriage, will be an increase in Massachusetts tourism; imagine the number of weddings in Provincetown next summer! But the national implications of the state court’s actions, for politics and society, […]