“See me. Hear me. And trust me. Because all the books in the world can’t tell you what my body is feeling or what I’m going through.”

“Now I understand why a lot patients scaring to trust the doctors, to go to the hospital, to deliver a baby. They ask me: Can you come with me?”

“Don’t look at every Black person that comes in there like they’re a drug addict. I’m coming to you because I’m telling you: I’m hurting.”

“A lot of my appointments are with doctors I’ve known a long time. But if I’m referred to a different doctor, believe it or not, I pray before I go.”

“I do believe that if I were a white woman, my questions, my concerns, everything would have been taken more seriously. And the road to discovery would have been a shorter one.”

“I was rushed to the hospital, and I was there before a few other people, and they was white. And the receptionist kept saying, ‘The doctor will see you now.’ And I said, ‘Well, what about me?’”

“Why should you think that you’re better than the person over there? You’re no better. You are the same.”

“I think one of the biggest things that always feels the heaviest is that we all feel so disconnected.”

“I didn’t think that the day would come that I would see somebody who looked like me take office. It just seemed unimaginable, honestly.”

A conversation with three members of Everyday Boston’s Bridge Project about their experiences with police and prisons.

“You had to use the back door, and you couldn’t mix in, or you couldn’t drink at the same fountain. And you know, they fought for it as the years went by, but lookin’ back, it didn’t bother me ‘cause I didn’t know any better. You get older, you learn, and realize that wasn’t nice, you know.”

“I had a recollection back to an incident that happened in Norton, when my brother was shot at by a local police officer. So I wrote up the story and I called my brother to say, ‘Was I imagining? Did this really happen?’ And he had forgotten, too.”

A conversation with three members of Everyday Boston’s Bridge Project about their experiences with school and the streets.

“When my grandmother died, my mother was really, really all alone. So she showed up one day, and she rang the doorbell, and I opened the door, and there she was! She had a suitcase and her little portable TV in her hand, and she said, “I’m coming to live with you.”

“You can’t sit and lament and cry over things. Honey, I am legally blind. I have to wear hearing aides and everything else. You think I let that bother me? Don’t. Let. Things. Get you down.”

In this historic moment, this is our tribute to Black graduates of the Boston Public Schools- and beyond- featuring life advice from their neighbors in the city.

“Being a part of these protests has honestly uplifted my soul in a way that I can’t even begin to explain.”

“They were almost all of them white students. And it made me happy. It made me strong on what I believe, of unity between people of all races.”