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🌂Morning showers with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:42 p.m.
If you applied for a mail-in ballot for the Sept. 1 primary, odds are it has already arrived. And when you open it, most Massachusetts voters will notice a conspicuous lack of competition in the state Legislature. GBH’s Amanda Keane did the math and found that just 14% of incumbents are facing a primary challenger, and only 25% will face a challenger in November’s general election.
“We have fewer candidates running for statewide office than other states,” Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor advocating for Question 3 in November, told Keane. Question 3 would replace our current primary system with all-party ballots, in which every candidate, regardless of party, appears on the same primary ballot and the top two vote-getters move on to the general election. “That includes fewer members of the state Legislature who try for higher office because it’s so restrictive. That means fewer open seats, right? And then that means you’re not drawing candidates into the pool, and the whole sort of ethos of competition just declines.” You can read more about the lack of competition, and what politics experts want to do about it, here.
Four Things to Know
1. Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena was arrested Friday on federal fraud charges. He’s accused of obtaining $1.5 million in COVID-19 small-business loans for his tire sales company, Tenares Tire Services Inc. Federal prosecutors said he instead used the money for his campaign and to pay personal taxes and mortgages on properties he owned in Lawrence.
DePena was in court for a brief hearing Friday. He didn’t enter a plea and was released without bond.
2. Groups counting the number of homeless people on the Cape found about 500 during their point in time count in January, including 100 children — about a 40% increase compared to 10 years ago.
“If you look at the 10 year trend, the numbers in general are increasing,” said Cassie Danzl, COO of the nonprofit Housing Assistance. “I know that this last year a lot of agencies went into the red, making sure that no one was left outside because the risk of death was so high with what the weather was like this year.”
3. Two years after Gov. Maura Healey rejected a plan to build a military shooting range on the Cape, it appears the project is being resuscitated. Researchers with the National Academies are studying the potential environmental impacts of the gun range.
And people who were against the gun range last time — because of concerns over pollution to the environment and the local water supply — said they haven’t changed their minds. “The United States taxpayers shouldn’t have to be funding yet another review of a project that’s been rejected repeatedly since 1989,” said Andrew Gottlieb, president of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod. “So yeah, we don’t like the fact that it’s ongoing.”
4. Massachusetts has a new law addressing attempts at book bans in schools and libraries. It says teachers and librarians can decide to include or exclude a book in their collection and should consider whether it serves an educational purpose and its target age demographic. The law also says the decision should be made “based on the teacher’s or employee’s professional training and not on personal, political or doctrinal view.”
“It’s a very nice support to the library’s work of bringing people books and other materials of all kinds so that all of our patrons and all of our citizens can access information,” said Laura Bovee, director of the Chicopee Public Library.
A grim footnote illuminates a harsh reality for Black Bostonians during the revolution
Paul Revere’s retelling of his midnight ride has a passing reference to a man named Mark: “After I passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains,” he wrote.
So who was Mark, and what can we learn from his story today? Renuka Balakrishnan spoke with historians to find out.
Mark was an enslaved man who lived in Boston in the 18th century, one of roughly 900 enslaved people living in the city at the time. Historians told Balakrishnan they believe he lived with his wife in Boston and worked in the city, but was required to send the money he earned to his enslaver, John Codman, in Charlestown. Author and independent historian Catherine Sasanov said there are secondary sources saying Codman would rape women he had enslaved in his home.
Mark was accused of plotting to burn down Codman’s barn with two women enslaved in Codman’s house, Phillis and Phoebe. They hoped the financial hardship would persuade Codman to sell them to a less brutal enslaver. When Codman did not sell them, they decided to poison him. Codman died, and the three were caught.
Their punishment was a brutal practice called gibbetting. Mark was put to death, and his executioners left his body in a metal cage at what is now the intersection of Washington Street and Inner Belt Road in Somerville. The body remained there for more than a decade, likely 12 to 15 years, University of Utah professor Jaimie Crumley told Balakrishnan.
“It was so compelling to me that at this moment that we think about Paul Revere, and this moment in which the United States was really becoming a nation and breaking away from British tyranny, that at the same time we also see this story of really profound unfreedom,” Crumley said.
You can read more about Mark’s life here.
Dig deeper:
-Were Paul Revere’s political cartoons more influential than his midnight ride?
-Reexamining the literal roots of the American Revolution
-Pushing a ‘sacred rebellion,’ American colonists justified revolt with religion
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