politics – Page 2 – Ben Jacques Stories

Protect the Babies We Have

Let’s see if I get this right. The Trump administration wants us to have more babies. What with Covid and a declining birth rate, we need more young people to offset those of us with gray hair. We need them to replenish our communities and pay our bills. Trump recently talked of giving a bonus of $5,000 to each new mother.

At the same time his administration is deporting mothers, fathers, and, yes, babies. He is rounding up immigrants, including those who are paying taxes and contributing to Social Security and Medicare. He is breaking up families.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ICE recently took a mother away from her 1-year-old girl and deported her to Cuba, separating them indefinitely. ICE also deported three children ages 2, 4 and 7 along with their mothers to Honduras. The children are U.S. citizens. The 4-year old has a rare form of cancer.

It’s become clear that Trump’s pro-baby, pro-family approach is meant for one type of family, one type of baby–white families and white babies. And that all this talk about encouraging women to give birth and to stay at home to raise their children is rooted in white nationalist ideology.

What is white nationalism? White nationalism is “advocacy of or support for the perceived political interests of the white population within a particular country, especially to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups.”

White nationalism, along with white supremacy, has always been around. It was behind the enslavement of millions of African Americans. It was behind the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was behind the “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision that affirmed racial apartheid in Southern states. It was given new energy with the re-election of Donald Trump.

Consider the makeup of Trump’s cabinet and advisors. Consider his history of demeaning comments and slurs. Consider the attacks on DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—and the government’s punitive policies directed towards racial and ethnic minorities. Consider Trump’s revoking of “temporary protected status” for asylum seekers from Haiti and Venezuela.

Consider his shutting down of our refugee resettlement program, stranding thousands of already approved refugees from Africa and the Middle East. At the same time, he has put out the welcome mat for Afrikaners in South Africa, whom he claims are victims of “white genocide.”

Last week 59 white South African “refugees” arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D. C. A photo of them shows young families holding babies in their arms. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told them: “We’re excited to welcome you here to our country where we think you will bloom.”

All this, while Trump denies a haven to black and brown families fleeing famine, war and persecution.

So what do we do about it? First, we need a stop to the deportations of non-violent immigrants—full stop—and the affording of due process to all. And we need a resumption of our long-standing refugee-resettlement program, applied fairly to everyone.

Second, we need immigration reform. For too many decades, we have let Congress off the hook. The last significant immigration reform came during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when millions of immigrants were granted pathways to citizenship. The failure of Congress and past administrations to legislate common-sense reform has victimized millions of our neighbors, who want nothing more than to build lives for their families in a safe and free country.

As for the Administration’s push to have more babies, I say let’s protect the babies we have, and their parents and siblings–refugees, asylum seekers, DACA enrollees, immigrants. They are part of our communities. We need them. Diverse, multi-cultural, hardworking, creative, they, with us, can build an American future based not on white-nationalist ideology, but on equal opportunity for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or religion. A future aligned with our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Let’s hold the babies we have.

What’s Happening to Our Language?

I was wondering about this when I heard that federal and school programs labeled as DEI—that’s diversity, equity and inclusion—are being defunded.

I’ve always been taught that diversity, equity and inclusion are good things, that they are fundamentally American things. DEI has made us who we are, a nation of and built by immigrants, unlike any other, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

As Americans, we brag about our diversity—our inventors, scientists, athletes, musicians and artists. Without diversity, we become a monoculture, and monocultures aren’t healthy, as all farmers know. Monocultures may bring quick profits from scale, but leave the soil depleted. Cotton, for example. Or potatoes. Reliance on one variety of potatoes in Ireland led to disease and starvation.

It’s the same with people. Homogeneous societies flourish for a time, then grow stale. Institutions lose their vitality. Birth rates decline. Meanwhile, societies that welcome diversity, that plan for diversity, advance, benefiting from the rich cross fertilization of talents and ideas.

DEI is also expressed in our religious beliefs. We celebrate a God who creates diversity, who loves all equally, and leaves no one out.

So, what’s up with this anti-DEI stuff?

Other words long considered positive, like “science” and “education,” are also suspect. It’s becoming dangerous to look at things too closely, like climate, for one. Or history.

Which brings us to the word “woke.” Despite its mainstream use today, it’s been around for at least a century. It stems from African-American vernacular, meaning awake. It was used to describe those with a heightened awareness of social and political issues, especially race and inequality.

Today it’s used in derision. To be woke is to be part of the radical left, if not communist. You are “woke” if you advocate for minorities, including women and LGBTQ. You are woke if you teach your students how to think critically. You are “woke” if you pay attention to global warming.

Then there is the word “empathy,” a necessary capability for living in community. Without empathy individuals look out only for themselves. They ignore the suffering of others and tolerate systems of abuse. Yet, even this word has taken on negative connotations.

According to the political right, having too much empathy, or empathy for the wrong people, is a problem. It’s called “toxic empathy.” When the Rev. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Cathedral on Jan. 21 called on President Trump to have empathy for immigrants and LGBTQ community, she was accused of expressing toxic empathy.

I recently visited a web site that offers support for those suffering from toxic empathy. Having empathy can be stressful and wear you out. It can keep you from taking care of yourself.

The underlying message is, learn to control your empathy. Unchecked, it will deter you from your own goals and may bring you into conflict with your religious or political beliefs.

Meanwhile, some words considered bad are now heard as good. Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation enforcer, talks of “bringing hell to Boston.” Trump tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” He calls African countries “shitholes,” and women who oppose him, “nasty.”

No wonder public discourse has become so polluted.

Words are important, as is the way we use them. I propose that we continue to celebrate DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. And that we make it our business to stay woke, that is, awake to the world around us. As for empathy, we need it now more than ever.

Protecting our Neighbors

Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts, is grabbed off the street and flown to a prison in Louisiana. In Boston a man is nabbed while leaving the courthouse. In New Bedford, ICE agents smash the windows of a car to arrest someone with no criminal history. In Chelsea, Boston, Worcester, Medford, Wakefield and other cities, hundreds have gone missing, picked up by ICE in raids.

Meanwhile, immigrants, including those with temporary protected status (TPS), are afraid. Children don’t want to go to school for fear their parents won’t be there when they return home. Community leaders talk of a siege mentality.

Since a 2017 ruling by the state Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts has limited its cooperation with the federal government’s deportation efforts. As Stoneham Police Chief James O’Connor puts it: “Being in this country without legal documentation is a civil offense. Massachusetts police officers do not have the jurisdiction to enforce civil immigration law.” The only exceptions are in cases of criminal activity or threats to public safety.

In a policy statement, Chief O’Connor stated: “Stoneham Police will afford all residents all civil rights, due process, and equal protection safeguards available under the U. S. Constitution, the Massachusetts Constitution and Town laws, ‘irrespective of the person’s immigration and/or documentation status.’”

Regardless of state and local policies, our immigrant neighbors are increasingly threatened by a Trump administration that has shown no regard for rules or, for that matter, First Amendment rights.

For this reason, four bills are now at the State House that would increase protections for immigrants in Massachusetts. They are sponsored by various state reps and senators and supported by the ACLU, MIRA and numerous organizations.

The first is the Safe Communities Act. It would prohibit voluntary involvement of local police and courts in civil immigration matters and require “informed consent” before any ICE interview can take place.

The second bill is the Immigrant Legal Defense Act. Studies show that immigrants are five times more likely to win relief from deportation if they are represented by a lawyer. This act would provide funds for free legal defense for at-risk immigrants, especially those in federal detention.

A third bill at the State House, the Language Access and Inclusion Bill, would expand translation and interpretation for Massachusetts residents. This is especially important as the federal government is pulling back from communications except in English.

A fourth bill in Boston would prohibit contracts with the federal government for detention facilities in the Commonwealth, such as the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, which currently holds hundreds of immigrants awaiting deportation.Fact sheets on all four legislative proposals can be found online at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition at miracoalition.org.

This week, members of Stoneham for Social Justice, a network of concerned citizens, endorsed these four bills and called on state legislators to support and fast track them.

In Massachusetts there are an estimated 250,000 undocumented immigrants, individuals and families who have sought a safe place to work and live. Thousands more have fled oppression and disasters under programs that grant them protective status. For many, including Venezuelans and Haitians, this status is being revoked.

Immigrants among us, our families, our neighbors, those we work with, those who provide services to us, are part of our daily lives. They play an integral and productive role in our communities. At the very least, they deserve the rights guaranteed to all in our Constitution, including the right to fair hearings and due process. When these are threatened, they deserve our protection.

A Turning Point?

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home. Keeping God’s law was a big thing, especially the Ten Commandments. So when I hear Christians today talk about how all these undocumented immigrants are law breakers who must be deported, I know where they’re coming from.

For many Christians, especially white Christians, it doesn’t seem to matter that being in this country without documentation is a civil infraction, not a crime. To them, it’s criminal, deserving of the harshest punishment. It doesn’t matter that parents are taken from children, or that asylum seekers find themselves in prisons in another country.

Neither are many religious people bothered that most immigrants, including families, are here for one reason: poverty, war or threats to their safety in their country of origin.

They should have come in the right way, they say. Yet, within our broken immigration system, we know there is no right way. And now we see that even those here legally, such as those under temporary protected status (TPS), are ordered to leave the country. These include immigrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Even those with green cards, authorizing them as permanent residents, are being singled out and deported.

Yet not all Christians support President Trump’s orders and policies. And there is increasing evidence that many who voted for Trump are now recoiling from his cruelty.

Meanwhile, others are calling for a return to the commandment of Jesus in the New Testament: “A new command I give you: Love one another.” Sometimes called Matthew 25 Christians, they turn to the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Last Judgement to stand up against Trump’s cruel policies.

Whatever happened to “I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me”? they ask. What about, “In as much as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me”?

They are joining those from other religions or none to demand a stop to the indiscriminate deportation of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. They are insisting on safe homes and communities for millions threatened by arrest and detention.

And they are a calling for a new law, such as one filed last week by Representative Sylvia Garcia of Texas. Co-sponsored by 201 members of Congress, the Dream and Promise Act would provide a pathway to US citizenship for most DACA recipients, other Dreamers, and those on Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure. In short, it would allow millions of our friends and neighbors to continue living, working and going to school in our country.

In a democracy, it is the duty of all to obey the laws. Yet, when a law is unjust, when it goes against our most deeply held beliefs and convictions, it is the duty of citizens to create a better law. For too many years, that has not happened. Now is the time to stop mass deportations. Now is the time to craft new immigration laws. Now, even in the midst of the storm.

How will we respond?

It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt. In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.

Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.

“Stalin has died,” her father said.

A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.

I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.

Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”

In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.

As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?

Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.

In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.

After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.

Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.

Deportation of Jews from Muenster, Germany, Dec. 13, 1941.

As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.

In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?

Who would you honor?

January 4, 2025

Today President Joseph Biden honored 19 Americans with the highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. The recipients ranged from human rights workers to basketball stars, philanthropists to actors.

Although critics will snipe that some of the names were political choices, who among us did not cheer when our nation’s highest civilian award went to the José Andrés, World Kitchen chef, or Jane Goodall, animal biologist, or Michael J. Fox, actor and voice for Parkinson’s research.

Who didn’t chuckle when a towering Earvin “Magic” Johnson stooped down so the president could fasten the pendant around his neck? Or cheer when Bono, the U2 rock star who has fought for debt relief for poor nations, got the award.

The ceremony got me to thinking about the word “freedom” itself. What is freedom? Are there more than one? What freedoms are we talking about?

In a State of the Union address given 84 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”

He continued: “The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.”

He defined the third as “freedom from want” and called for “economic understandings that will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.”

The fourth freedom, Roosevelt stated, was “freedom from fear.” He called for a reduction in global armaments to the degree that that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”

Articulated eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Four Freedoms theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter and later became part of the Charter of the United Nations.

Although the three-term president was now defining freedom in global terms, his administration had from the start applied them to domestic policy and public programs.

In 1943 in four Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Normal Rockwell, the Four Freedoms showed us what freedom looks like at home, at the table, in moments of worship, and at a town meeting. You can see the original paintings today at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

Thinking about the recent Medal of Freedom ceremony, I realized that each person honored had in some way contributed to expanding one of the Four Freedoms.

And that got me to wondering, if I were to pick individuals in Stoneham who exemplified these freedoms, who would they be?

What my choices would have in common is the desire to realize freedom not only in their own lives, but in the lives of others as well. I would look for people who lift others up. A teacher who teaches compassion as well as calculus. A banker who helps small businesses gain a foothold. A town moderator who keeps democracy on track. An artist who teaches seniors to paint. A tutor who helps immigrants learn English. A food bank or community dinner director. A legislator, coach, librarian, nurse, police or fire fighter, pastor, and more.

Who would you choose? Look around you. In the New Year, we will be challenged to honor and uphold the freedoms we cherish. It’s something each of us, in our own way, can do.

Being thankful for our immigrant neighbors

Last week Becky and I attended the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards celebration in Cambridge. It is held each year by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden to honor immigrants for their outstanding achievements in business and community enrichment.

The first honoree this year is Erdem Kaya from Turkey, who started a community-oriented jewelry business in Newburyport. The second is Krenar Komoni from Kosovo. Komoni founded a company that designed a new system for tracking shipping around the world. His innovations produce savings for everyone on the supply chain.

The third honoree is Mariana Matus from Mexico. Based on her research at MIT, she founded and became CEO of BioBot Analytics in Cambridge, which uses wastewater analysis to improve public health. During the COVID-19 epidemic, her company was the first in the world to provide data on COVID-19 levels, based on wastewater monitoring. This information saved countless lives.

Matus’ company continues to monitor for other public health threats, including influenza, RSV, monkey pox and high-risk substances such as opioids.

Listening to awardees’ inspiring stories, we couldn’t help but think of the thousands of immigrants in Massachusetts and how they benefit and enrich our towns and communities. Like the three above, they bring not only economic benefits, but engagement in civic life, mentoring and culture that enriches all our lives.

At the ceremony, we also learned a few “fun facts” about immigrants. For example, that 31 percent of all new businesses in America are started by immigrants. Immigrants also have a higher workforce participation rate than U.S.-born residents, as well as a higher self-employment rate. And, despite what you have heard, immigrants have a lower crime rate than other Americans.

Attending the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards program, we are left with the realization that immigrants have always made our country better. And that the current hype that immigrants are to blame for our woes, is not only wrong but terribly short-sighted. We need immigrants, not only like Kaya, Komoni and Matus, but the people who grow and pick our food, who feed us in their restaurants, who care for us in hospitals and nursing homes, who build our houses, and bring their stories and art to remind us of our own humanity.

Looking at the big picture, we see a continued need for newcomers to replenish and support us. Recent dips in fertility rates have pushed us below the population-replacement level. A 2024 study by the University of Pennsylvania projects that as we grow older, the U.S. population growth will decline. Also, the worker-to-retiree ratio is expected to drop from 3-1 to 2-1 by 2075. Both factors signal dire outcomes. Preventing these outcomes “will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.”

The simple truth is that we need immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, to keep building our societies. We need workers, but we also need imagination and ideas. We need problem solvers, like the honorees named above.

As the descendant of immigrants, I would like to say to my immigrant friends and neighbors, Thank you.

Note: The awards program was sponsored by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden. It honors Barry Portnoy, the entrepreneur and philanthropist, late husband of the school’s founder, Diane Portnoy.

A Song for our Time, too

Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, It’s been sung by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and a dozen others, including Arlo Guthrie.
The ballad tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.

The year was 1948, six years after the start of Operation Bracero, a government program which recruited Mexican laborers to work in American fields. Now the braceros were being rounded up and flown back to Mexico. At the same time, to keep prices high, the government was paying growers to leave their crops in the field. Peaches were rotting and oranges piling up in dumps.

The song is called “Deportee.” Guthrie wrote it after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” Unlike the four Americans, the braceros were buried in a mass grave without names, marked
“Mexican Nationals.” As the song goes,

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans from American soil. Mass deportations began during the Great Depression and continued through the 1940s. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used military-like tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including some American citizens.

In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112
degree heat.

In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports in conditions comparable with those on slave ships. Others were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease- bearing and irresponsible. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials planning and conducting raids. Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In 2012 the state of California formally apologized for its role in deporting hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers, 25 men and three women, killed in Los Gatos Canyon. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.

Next week American voters will choose a new president. One of the candidates has promised to resurrect Operation Wetback, only under his plan the government, in a military-style operation, will deport 11 million undocumented immigrants (Trump put the figure at 18 million).

Trump would also end deferrals for children (DACA) and temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Such a massive deportation would throw our country into financial, legal and social chaos. As Slate authors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander have written, “To return to the era of Operation Wetback would be to return to an America ruled not by law but by terror.”

Perhaps worst of all, it would perpetuate the big lie that immigrants, asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are not like us, that they are less than human. That they don’t deserve names.

Once that lie is believed, we become silent to the cruel treatment of others.

Photo: Lance Canales & the Flood

An Unholy Convergence

By Ben Jacques

In the fall of 1919, just three months after the Versailles Treaty marked Germany’s defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow army soldier. It is considered the first printed expression of his antisemitism. Composed most likely on an army typewriter, the letter lays out Hitler’s belief that Jews are not just people of a different religion. Rather, they are an “alien race,” intent on destroying society.

To counter their influence, Hitler proposed a “rational antisemitism,” a political movement to systematically take away their “privileges,” culminating in their “irrevocable removal” from Germany.

In time, their “irrevocable removal” became the “final solution,” the murder of six million Jews throughout Europe.

It’s not difficult to see in the candidacy of Donald J. Trump a similar convergence of nationalism and racism. Substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” and you see the same calculated dehumanization of a sector of the population.

Trump’s targeting of immigrants is built on racism. In 2018 he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” that is, from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Then he added, “We should have more people from Norway.”

In following years, Trump has ramped up his attacks. In 2023 he said “illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Hitler’s statement that “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.”

At the 2024 Republican Convention, Trump promised the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants—a figure he put at 18 million. In September he said the mass roundup would be a “bloody story.”

Since then, Trump’s attacks have intensified, including the assertion, repeated by his running mate and other followers, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Targeting immigrants, legal or otherwise, is not new in America, nor is “white nationalism.” The nation that opened its doors to European immigrants also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, denying citizenship to Chinese workers who built our railroads.

During World War II we imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. In the 1950s we deported a million Mexicans, legal and undocumented, who had harvested our crops. From 2017-21 under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, 3,900 children were taken from their parents.

We are also the nation that in 1939 prevented the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, from docking in Miami. Anchored offshore, the ship waited. On deck that night, children joined parents to gaze at the city lights sparkling in the distance.

When permission was denied, the St. Louis returned to Europe. For many it was a death sentence. Two-hundred-fifty-four perished in Nazi concentration camps.

As November 5 approaches, we again see an unholy convergence of racism and nationalism. A nation of immigrants, we are told to fear immigrants. We are urged to accept slander and misinformation as truth.

How we vote this year will affect the safety and well-being of millions. It will also determine our character.

Note: In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to the survivors of the St. Louis. In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.

Happy Juneteenth!

As we celebrate our newest national holiday, the day enslaved folk in Texas finally learned of their freedom, we recall our own history of slavery and abolition:

1754—A census of enslaved people in Massachusetts that year shows there were eight slaves above the age of 16 in Stoneham. They were among at least three dozen slaves in our town during the Colonial period—men like Cato, belonging to Deacon Green, and women like Dinah, a slave of the teacher James Toler, “who waited upon him to the end of his days” (Silas Dean). And they were children, like the unnamed 8-year-old mulatto purchased by Captain Peter Hay in 1744, the same year the Rev. James Osgood paid £75 for a woman named Phebe.

1775—Six Black men from Stoneham, three enslaved and three free, fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, joining white colonists in the struggle for freedom from Great Britain.

1780—Four years after the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts voters ratify the Massachusetts Constitution, authored mainly by John Adams.

1781—A slave called Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman) and another named Brom sue their Sheffield owner for their freedom and win. This and other court cases bring about the eventual freedom of all slaves in Massachusetts based on the Massachusetts Constitution.

1790—The first federal census lists no enslaved people living in Stoneham.

1823—A former slave from Virginia named Randolph is seized in New Bedford. The state Supreme Judicial Court upholds the property rights of his owner, and he is returned to slavery.

1837—After an abolitionist meeting in Stoneham, a fight breaks out in the street, and a Stoneham man, Timothy Wheeler, is knifed and killed. He leaves a wife and four children.

1838-9—Sarah Richardson Gerry leads 27 women in founding the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men also create a chapter.

1839—Church deacons pass a resolution calling on all ministers of the Gospel to “bear faithful witness against the sin of slavery.”

1850—A thirty-year-old minister of First Congregational Church, the Rev. William Whitcomb, preaches a fiery sermon against the federal Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. He calls on his parishioners to aid all fugitives, even at the expense of their property and lives.

1850—Deacon Abijah Bryant’s home on Main Street becomes a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering fugitive slaves and enabling their safe passage to Canada.

1854—Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old former slave from Virginia is arrested in Boston and brought to trial. Thousands of abolitionists attempt to free Burns from the courthouse, but fail. In a widely reported trial, Burns is convicted and ordered sent back to his owner. Thousands line the streets as Burns is led in shackles to the docks and shipped back to his owner.

1861—Hundreds of Stoneham men join Massachusetts regiments responding to President Lincoln’s call for a voluntary army to defend the Union.

1864—54 Stoneham men die in the War of Rebellion: 11 killed in battle, 9 from wounds, 9 while in Confederate prisons, 25 from disease. These include Col J. Parker Gould, with others buried in Lindenwood Cemetery.

1862—Rev. William Whitcomb, is commissioned as a chaplain in the Union Army. He serves in hospitals in North Carolina until his death from malaria.

Over time we have learned to extend the human rights we hold so dear, those spelled out so eloquently in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender. From our Constitution we read:

“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

Happy Juneteenth!