Insights

As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we often overlook the significance of a place central to our ongoing struggle for liberty and justice. That place, the Boston Common, has been revolutionary since its establishment nearly 400 years ago.

Each May, Jewish American Heritage Month invites Jews to pause and tell stories from our shared history. But history, at its best, is not only about what came before us. It is a guide for how we show up today and how we imagine the future we are building together.

This past week, Boston’s Haitian community celebrated Haitian Heritage Month with flag-raisings at Boston City Hall and parades down Blue Hill Avenue. But what Greater Boston’s vast Haitian diaspora honored is more than a flag or a country of origin.

We have now lived through multiple pandemics—and each time, the outcome has been the same. Black and Brown communities are hit first, suffer more, and recover last.

This is what the Court has often done when our freedom got out ahead of the country’s appetite for it. It reaches back. It calls our undoing a vindication of principle.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg popularized the term “third place” in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, arguing that informal gathering spaces are essential to civic life and healthy communities. A third space is what exists beyond home and work: the places where people gather, build trust, exchange ideas, and create culture in real time. It is where community stops being abstract and becomes something lived.