Editor-in-Chief, The Emancipator

The Boston Globe and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research are collaborating to resurrect abolitionist-era newspapers via a new multimedia platform for opinion journalism, called The Emancipator. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antislavery journals published in greater Boston, including William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Frederick Douglass's The North Star, were the nation’s most influential megaphones for antislavery commentary and helped to bring about Emancipation. Today, we envision The Emancipator as a leading megaphone for commentary and ideas that are grounded in both scholarly research and journalistic reporting and that will reframe the national conversation on racial justice.

The Emancipator is named after the first antislavery newspaper in the United States, founded 200 years ago. Just as antislavery commentary and ideas were needed then to help bring about abolition in the United States, new ideas, debates, commentary, and solutions are needed now to bring about a racially just society. And the city of Boston yet again stands to lead the way through this historic collaboration between the Boston Globe opinion team and the BU Center for Antiracist Research. With this new initiative, Globe Opinion and the BU Center for Antiracist Research will take inspiration from a powerful chapter in Boston’s history to showcase powerful voices and ideas before the nation and the world today.