As Boston and the nation recognized Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday Monday, activist Monica Cannon Grant urged a crowd of 200 people to do more than post a quote on social media.
“I know everybody felt real good about their post and their quotes this morning,” Cannon-Grant said, standing on a truck bed outside the Madison Park High School in Roxbury. “But the truth is, society didn’t like Martin Luther King, he had a 66 percent disapproval rating. When he died, nobody gave a damn, and they'll do the same thing to all of us activists.”
Cannon-Grant, who says she has faced threats and harassment after leading Black Lives Matter marches throughout Boston over the past year, called on the crowd to support the redistribution of funds from police; elect local politicians who will work towards racial equality; and remember Black victims who were killed by Boston Police, including Burrell Ramsey-White in 2012 and Terrence Coleman in 2016.
“Let me explain to you all what racism looks like in Boston,” Cannon-Grant said. “Racism looks like [Governor] Charlie Baker vetoing women's rights. Racism looks like not having adequate housing. Racism looks like when you pass Mass Ave, your life expectancy drops 30 percent. That's what racism looks like.”
On Christmas Eve, Baker vetoed a bill to expand access to abortion in Massachusetts, only to have the legislature override his veto.
Cannon-Grant also criticized Gov. Baker for the final version of the state police reform bill, which she says was “watered down to nothing.” The bill creates a police certification system and an independent board that can investigate allegations of police misconduct.
Cannon-Grant emphasized the importance of electing not just politicians of color, but ensuring that any person in a position of power will continue the fight for equality.
"We have a mayoral election coming around and I get it, they're Black, that's great... and? What else you got?" she said. "Because [Kentucky Attorney General] Daniel Cameron ran his election on being the first Black person in that seat, and Breonna Taylor still does not have justice. I'm tired of people being the first Black anything and we don't see nothing Black come to the table." Taylor was killed by police in her Louisville, Ky. apartment last March.
Organizers of Monday's rally had originally planned to march to the State House, which is currently under close police surveillance as the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden approaches, a day that some alt-right extremists have vowed will result in riots and violence.
“We’re in the middle of the fight for our lives, and it’s going to get real dangerous in these next couple of days,” Cannon-Grant said. “Anybody who doesn’t believe that these people are angry and that this is based off of racism is not paying attention, and we can’t afford for no more Black lives to die.”
Cannon-Grant was joined by Sean Ellis, whose conviction for killing a police officer was overturned in 2015 after he had spent 22 years in prison, and Darrell Jones, who served 32 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
“We’re out here protesting Black Lives Matter, but there are Black lives behind bars that matter,” Ellis told the crowd. “We can’t forget the people who are incarcerated, being affected by COVID-19, being put in an 8 x10 cell with two or three other people — their lives matter too.”
Jones rejected “platitudes” around MLK Day, referencing King’s famous “I have a dream” speech.
"Let's not keep talking about Martin Luther King's dream, let's wake up and go where we are supposed to go and do something we can do," Jones told GBH News. "We have to look out for each other."
The King holiday came less than two weeks after thousands of extremists supporting President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. That attack came as no surprise to Roxbury activist Kristen Halbert.
“I am a little bit gobsmacked that there are some people who actually are surprised, who look at what happened and are actually in disbelief, but that just speaks to the chasm between those of us that cannot escape the system and those who are simply watching or are adjacent to the system,” Halbert said. “It seems like everyone is finally understanding things that we as a community have been shouting at the top of our lungs, not for weeks or months or years, but for decades.”
Halbert says she’s frustrated to see people pay attention to racism on one day and then become complacent in their inaction the next.
"These social media posts and hashtags are not enough, we need to get the policy," she said. But she said she believes Boston can make racial progress. “We need to have the hard conversations and do the hard work. It is going to be wildly uncomfortable, but everyone is going to have to sit in that discomfort so that we can move forward.”
