Thread by @gabrielpiemonte

Since we are celebrating a new sculpture in Boston which some suggest means the city left its racist past behind in the '70s, let me tell you about when the whites of Boston came together to thwart the will of Roxbury in the '80s. #thread

As a young undergraduate going to my Nonno's alma mater, Suffolk University, I quickly identified the most deeply and broadly knowledgeable professor in the political science department: Mudavanha Patterson. We hit it off, and he let me hang out after classes, and we talked about

politics from the local to the global. He was a former Black Panther and a Pan-Africanist (and, I would argue, an Afro-pessimist). He got me involved in what would become known as the Mandela project. Put simply, Roxbury wanted out of Boston, and in Massachusetts, there was a way

to do that. In broad strokes, incorporation only required the support of a majority of people in the area (which actually included a handful of Black neighborhoods, but the hub was Roxbury) via referendum. The white folks begged, pleaded, argued, threatened, & talked a lot about

how Black people wouldn't know how to run their own city. In the white neighborhoods, there was a deep ambivalence: The idea of a much more white Boston with almost no Black folks was appealing, but there was something that stopped these racists from endorsing the plan. What?

They never put it into words, but the necessity of an underclass is nowhere as keenly felt as in the clannish cities of the Northeast, where so many white people live in poverty but have their self-described superiority to Black folks to cling to. Lose the people on the bottom,

and guess who's left? Boston, unlike most American cities, has a visceral memory of indentured servitude, and the deep class divisions of England are woven into the fabric of the city. No, the least among Boston's whites couldn't bear to be the ones at the actual bottom of the

ladder. What to do?
The way the original referendum worked (and what the commonwealth intended) was that people could determine their governance for themselves. So the vote was for people inside of the proposed Mandela, Massachusetts, to say yay or nay about the idea. Advance

polls suggested that Black folks were as happy to leave as some white folks were happy to be rid of them. Seeing autonomy for the Black community in Boston was very close to assured, the white ppl changed the rules: Everyone in Boston got to vote.
And vote they did. White

people voted to keep Mandela in Boston, and even after a second effort, it was clear that the city would not release its underclass from bondage.
Black America will never be free until every descendant of enslaved Black American citizens has the wealth that has been stolen across

the centuries. Only lineage-based, cash #Reparations can do that. Statues and sculptures are nice, there is no doubt about it. But they don't pay the bills, and they don't scrub clean the hearts of the people who put them up. Boston JUST tried to derail the local #Reparations

movement and it was only because of the heroic efforts of a local #Reparationist and the support she organized that there is any chance of the movement inspiring some real local economic justice there for #Freedmen.
#ReparationsNow