BOSTON — Ibram X. Kendi and Bina Venkataraman met last summer when their big Boston institutions, Boston University and The Boston Globe, were grappling with protests over racial justice.
Ms. Venkataraman, the editor of The Globe’s editorial page, asked Dr. Kendi, the author of a book called “How to Be an Antiracist,” why he decided to found the Center for Antiracist Research in a city known for the backlash to busing and “where sports fans boo athletes of color,” she recalled in an interview. They started talking about their shared obsession with a different Boston history, 19th century abolitionist newspapers. Then they wondered what it would mean to found, in 2021, a newspaper in the spirit of William Lloyd Garrison’s legendary The Liberator.
