Francis Prince Clary is the 1800s Black chemist written out of Harvard and Cambridge history
Francis Prince Clary was known by some as a “character” – a person at Harvard but not considered by lore-keepers to be of Harvard. Yet Clary played an unusual and historic role at the university, and off campus he was a well-recognized figure in the Black abolitionist community.
Meet one of the area’s top transportation experts, an effective advocate not quite old enough to vote
Based on his command of traffic safety principles and technical design standards, it’s easy to assume Petru Sofio is a transportation professional. He’s in high school.
Project grapples with ‘Pandemic Experience,’ turning students’ emotions into clay tile art
As the world continued to grapple this spring with the repercussions of living through a pandemic, Emily Newmann, Liana Trail and the fifth-graders of Graham & Parks School turned art into a mechanism for channeling emotion.
Just A Start leader and son to ride cross-country fundraising for Rindge Commons programming
The head of affordable housing developer Just a Start and his 18-year-old son will ride bicycles across the country in a fundraiser for Just a Start’s Rindge Commons project and two organizations targeting homelessness.
Much of Cambridge’s white entrepreneurial class was financed by this Black ‘laborer’ at Harvard
To give some notion how much trust Cambridge men must have invested in Charles Lenox, then officially just a “laborer” at Harvard, the list of Lenox loan recipients when he died included Sidney Willard, the son of a Harvard president and a man who had held a number of elected offices – including mayor.
Charles Lenox sold pies to Harvard undergrads but had a far greater value to their professors
Wealthy Charles Lenox was identified as a “laborer.” But lending money and charging interest on it – much more than selling pies, blacking boots, or reselling cigar ends and empty bottles – is, properly managed, a way to build a fortune.
How Charles Lenox, Black financier of the 1800s, became a hidden figure in history of Cambridge
Unlike a number of Black contemporaries, Charles Lenox seems not to have appeared in newspaper articles during his lifetime. With his death in 1852, he suddenly hit the news – the fact of a Black man amassing such a fortune being newsworthy enough to make it to New York papers such as the Times and Tribune.
Period Equity Bank provides take-home products in an expansion of work by Bowman for students
Free menstrual sanitary products can now be taken home by students through family liaisons, nurses or The Spot Cambridge, a clothing swap, through a Period Equity Bank program, School Committee vice chair Manikka Bowman said Tuesday. The products are also given out at school resource and community fairs.
More wheel good people: Bicyclist help goes on, including an Oct. 24 Halloween party in The Port
A year ago we cast the spotlight on efforts by bicyclists to help those at risk from Covid-19 and to confront racism. Those ills persist, but so does the work by the Bike Delivery Program and the Cambridge Bike Give Back initiative.
On the ground in New York City during 9/11, jolted from the mundane by growing terror
Emerging from the subway, someone said the towers had been hit by airplanes, but it looked like the fires were dying down. “Well, they’ll go out and maybe I’ll be going back to work tomorrow,” Marlene Lundberg remembers thinking. Then the flames started spreading.
