Educators and students applaud winners of Human and Civil Rights Awards
By Jean Conley
M ore than 130 educators and students gathered on June 17 to applaud the presentation of the 2016 MTA Human
and Civil Rights Awards.
This year’s awards banquet was held at the
Westin Waltham Boston Hotel. Such ceremonies
have taken place annually for 34 years to honor
“those who have shown extraordinary dedication to
civil rights and human relations.”
Representative Ellen Story (D-Amherst)
received the Louise Gaskins Lifetime Civil Rights
Award. Story, who is serving her 12th full term
representing the Third Hampshire District, will retire
at the end of the current legislative session.
Those receiving this year’s Kathleen Roberts
Creative Leadership Awards were Lois Ahrens, the
founder of the Northampton-based Real Cost of
Prisons Project; the late Rosemary “Betsy” Sawyer, a
Groton-Dunstable teacher who inspired her students
to create the biggest book on Earth dedicated to
world peace; and Frederik Bommer, who has worked
as a volunteer math assistant in the Barnstable Public
Schools for more than 20 years.
Roberts and Gaskins, the educators for whom the
awards are named, were on hand for the festivities.
MTA Human Relations Committee Chair Dale
Forest told the crowd — which included family
members and friends of the honorees, as well as
social justice students from Concord-Carlisle High
School — that the award recipients were chosen
for their efforts to make the world “a more just and
He called for a moment of silence for people
who died in the past year after dedicating their lives
to fighting for human and civil rights. They included
Sawyer, who died in April after a battle with
leukemia, and Gladys Durant, a former member of
the committee who passed away recently.
MTA President Barbara Madeloni welcomed
the crowd and made note of the recent killings of
49 nightclub patrons in Orlando, as well as violence
in the workplace and the oppressive forces that are
perhaps less obvious but no less insidious in society
today — those that, she said, “narrow our capacity to
know one another.”
Despite such tragedies and issues, she said,
those who fight for human and civil rights go out
every day “and do the work to build relationships —
making a place for peace and for justice.”
“As educators, we do this every day,”
Madeloni continued. “Tonight we honor specific
individuals, but together, all of us, as we knit the
fabric of a better world, will overcome violence and
Story, the first woman to represent Amherst in
the Legislature, said she was thrilled to be receiving
the Louise Gaskins award, especially after meeting
Gaskins in person.
“This is a big deal for me,” Story said as she
accepted her award. She noted that she had attended
public schools throughout her education. “Public
education is the cornerstone of democracy,” she
added. “We can’t forget that.”
Before becoming a legislator, Story spent 17
years at the Family Planning Council of Western
Massachusetts, eventually becoming associate
executive director. She was also a member of the
Amherst-Pelham School Committee.
Ahrens has been an organizer for social justice
for more than 50 years. In 2000, she founded the Real
Cost of Prisons Project, which advocates for an end
to extreme sentencing, supports the humane treatment
of incarcerated people and educates policymakers and
the public about the cruel conditions of confinement
that still exist in our nation’s prisons.
“I’ve tried to do all I can so that each of us
can live up to our potential. Up until this moment
— literally — my work has come with no official
award, but it has come with great rewards: working
with, learning from and occasionally teaching
thousands of occasionally brilliant, often inspiring,
visionary, resilient, persevering women and men
— many of whom are incarcerated and formerly
incarcerated people.”
She said that she was recently speaking to
a class and was asked by a student about her
philosophy of organizing.
“It isn’t complex,” she responded, “and it isn’t
glamorous — but it does help to be relentless. I said,
‘Be informed. Think of every single thing you can
do, every person you can call, everyone to connect
Sawyer, for her part, was so committed to
teaching and to peace that the two fit together
perfectly when students in her after-school club said
they wanted to make the biggest book in the world.
The result was the “Big Book: Pages for Peace.”
The book weighs more than a ton and is 12 feet
long and 10 feet wide. Contributors include the Dalai
In top photo, MTA activist Louise Gaskins, left, greets Representative Ellen Story, who received
the Lifetime Civil Rights Award. From left to right above are honoree Lois Ahrens; Ali Sawyer,
who accepted an award on behalf of her late mother, Rosemary “Betsy” Sawyer; and honoree
Frederik Bommer, who is pictured with his wife, Dolores.
Photos by Jean Conley
Please turn to Winners/Page 21
