VIRTUAL EVENT

**Click HERE to register for a ZOOM link!**

Join author Jan Brogan for a presentation on her new book, The Combat Zone: Murder, Race, and Boston's Struggle For Justice, via Zoom. 

About The Book: It’s hard to remember just how poor and how violent Boston was in the 1970s: violence in the schools, where kids got stabbed; violence in the neighborhoods, where houses got firebombed, even violence at the city’s tourist attractions, where members of a Black school group from Pennsylvania visiting the Bunker Hill monument were beaten by three whites with hockey sticks. In an overwhelmingly white criminal justice system, from police to prosecutors to judges, all white juries in Massachusetts, and the nation, routinely decided the fates of Black defendants and what constituted as justice for Black victims. 

In discussing Combat Zone: Murder, Race and Boston’s Struggle for Justice, Brogan will explain how the 1976 murder of a Harvard football player in Boston’s old Combat Zone left a lasting imprint. The tragedy led to the cleanup and eventual demise of Boston’s troubled red light district and changed the way juries were chosen Massachusetts and the nation—a small, but significant step in a criminal justice system that still needs reform.

About The Author: Jan Brogan is a journalist and novelist living in Boston. A former staff writer for the Providence Journal and the Worcester Telegram, her freelance work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, and Forbes. 

 Sponsored by the Corning Foundation. Presented in collaboration with Libraries Working Towards Social Justice.