Charges of racism erupted this week at the Tisbury police department, with the town's only African-American year-round officer saying he has been the subject of harassment, jokes and even an offens
It’s past time for Americans to have a conversation about race, a panel of cultural and academic luminaries agreed at a crowded Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center on Wednesday. What the rules of that conversation are, who the participants are and where the conversation will take place is less certain.
Just a year ago, we had what President Obama called a “teachable moment” in race relations. That was in the wake of the arrest of Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr., a well known Vineyard summer resident.
You remember it, of course. Professor Gates, probably the nation’s foremost black academic, was arrested in his own home after Cambridge police responded to a suspected break-in.
Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. uses the quiet entrance, through the corridors of the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School to a backstage area of the performing arts center, no doubt the sort of precaution he regularly takes since his arrest and high profile beer with the President last month.
But as he enters, he bellows with a theatrical gesture of his walking cane in the direction of his friend and legal counsel, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the man he calls Tree.
Most of us have been plagued by the “origin sin” of racism, which has been a burden on our conscience since before our nation was formed. Throughout our history this disease of racial prejudice has cursed our nation and prevented us from reaching the lofty ideals of human equality on which America was founded. This sin compromised the Declaration of Independence and almost divided the nation in 1776.
Two young girls from New Jersey got their first exposure to overt racism this week when they returned from a morning walk into downtown Vineyard Haven and found a racial slur spray-painted in letters two feet tall in the street by the house their family was renting at Clough Lane and Pine street.
Tisbury police are investigating the vandalism that happened Wednesday — possibly in broad daylight — and police chief John McCarthy is looking into whether the incident should be considered a hate crime.
Attorneys on both sides of a bitter, four-year dispute which centers on painful charges of racism against the town of Tisbury and its police department announced yesterday that a settlement has been reached in the case.
Attorneys for Theopholis M. (T.M.) Silvia 3rd and the town of Tisbury said yesterday that the terms of the settlement are extremely complicated and will not be disclosed until the agreement is approved by both the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and a Superior Court judge.
