Drick Boyd's Blog
A Sinner and A Saint Pass Away
This past week saw the passing of two notable figures from the Civil Rights and Watergate eras. On Monday, May 19 Vincent Harding passed away at the age of 82. He was a long time Civil Rights activist, speechwriter and friend of Martin Luther King Jr.,...
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: What Donald Sterling Unwittingly Teaches Us
A lot of ink and media time has been taken up covering, debating, condemning and trying to make sense of Donald Sterling’s tape recorded message in which he made clearly racially disparaging remarks. Despite the questionable nature of the...
The Politics of Easter
On Good Friday for the last five years I have attended an ecumenical service/witness against gun violence sponsored by the interfaith gun violence prevention organization Heeding God’s Call. Five years ago, along with 11 others, I participated in...
Supreme Court Shame
During the Civil Rights Movement, the court system, particularly the Supreme Court was regarded as the one branch of government that could largely be counted on to protect the rights of African-Americans when Congress and the Executive Branch were stymied by...
Implicit Racism: Wisdom from the Wise
Recently I had the privilege of hearing anti-racist writer and speaker Tim Wise speak at Messiah College’s urban campus. While ostensibly focusing on four major points, Wise covered a range of topics all pertaining to the reality of racism in the 21st century. One...
The M.A in Urban Studies Program
For the past seven years I have had the privilege of teaching in the M.A. in Urban Studies program at Eastern University. Our program has concentrations in Community Development, Youth Development and Community Arts, where students are trained to use tools to...
Dog Whistle Racism and the Defeat of Debo Adegbile
Last weekend during a long 2 ½ day drive from Minnesota to Philadelphia I listened to a podcast of the renowned PBS journalist and former White House staffer Bill Moyers interviewing legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez who has recently published a book entitled...
Seeking Deeper Power
Just over five years ago on a very cold January afternoon I was arrested along with six others for blocking the entrance to Colisimo's gun shop on Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. We were there to call attention to the store’s complicity in the straw purchasing...
Eating Ourselves Alive
When I was about 7 or 8 years old I went to visit my cousins who lived in the Chicago area. They had some guinea pigs who had just had babies. After the babies were born they took the adult guinea pigs out of the cage because as my aunt explained if the adult guinea...
What It Feels Like to be an Oxymoron
“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction” – Kris Kristofferson “The Pilgrim”Recently, I came across an open letter written by Asian-American Activist Kil Ja Kim entitled “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron.” I encourage you to read it for...
Why I Have Hope
About a month ago a good friend called me and informed me that my blogs were depressing him and that he needed to stop reading them for a while. I was bit taken back because despite a frequent focus on the injustices in so many facets of our public life, on a...
Thank You, Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela passed away yesterday (Dec 5) and I was informed of this death as fittingly I was talking about the effects of racism in our society with a group of young adults involved in a program called Mission Year. As has been and will be repeated many...
"Twelve Years a Slave" and the Banality of Evil
Last night my wife and went to see the film “12 Years a Slave,” the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black from Saratoga, NY who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Eventually, thru the help of friends he was discovered and freed after 12...
Spiritual Crisis
My good friend Mary Wade, an urban peacemaker, formerly working at the U.N. offers this response to my last posting "Disgusted." She is far more eloquent than I and gets to the heart of the issue: a spiritual crisis. Here is Mary's response.More and more in my...
Disgusted
I’m disgusted.After several weeks of stymieing the government’s ability to operate by causing a shutdown and complaining about the expense of the Affordable Health Care Act (which unfortunately has not been launched all that effectively), House Republicans have now...