State’s lone black senator defeated in primary

Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson lost in Tuesday’s primary to Sonia Chang-Díaz, a 30-year-old former Jamaica Plain schoolteacher. Wilkerson was the sole black senator in Massachusetts and was backed by several top Democrats, including Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

Chang-Díaz defeated Wilkerson by 228 votes, 50.57 percent of the vote to 49.29 percent. Chang-Díaz will face Socialist Workers Party candidate, William Theodore Leonard, in the Nov. 4 general election. If elected, Chang-Díaz would become the first Hispanic woman in the state Senate.

Staff Writer, BlackPoliticsontheWeb.com

Harvard Police Face Internal Probe After Racial Incident

JAMISON A HILL, Harvard Crimson

- An incident earlier this month has raised concerns about Harvard University Police Department’s treatment of racial minorities on campus, leading University President Drew G. Faust to announce the creation of a six-member committee to review HUPD’s practices.

“The review will include consideration of HUPD’s diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard’s past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice,” Faust wrote in an e-mail to faculty and senior-level administration.

The committee will be led by Ralph C. Martin II, the former Suffolk County district attorney and currently a managing partner at the Boston law firm, Bingham McCutchen.

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Boston civil rights leader dies

UPI

- Thomas Atkins, Boston’s first black at-large city councilor, who faced off against school busing opponents as an NAACP leader in the 1970s, has died. He was 69.

Atkins, a Harvard Law School graduate, died Friday at a nursing home in Brooklyn, N.Y., after struggling for years with the degenerative muscular disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, The Boston Globe reported Sunday.

“He was clearly the most brilliant and insightful civil rights lawyer, both in and beyond Boston, to take on the challenges of school desegregation,” said Ted Landsmark, who worked with Atkins in the late ’70s as a lawyer at Atkins’ Boston law firm, Atkins and Brown.

Atkins received repeated death threats during his time on the Boston City Council, prompting him to fortify his Roxbury, Mass., home.

He ran chicken wire over windows to block Molotov cocktails and installed spigots throughout the seven- bedroom house to connect hoses for fighting fires, said his son Thomas Jr.

“He was pretty instrumental in what became a pretty tumultuous time in Boston,” Thomas Atkins said.

Atkins served as president of Boston’s NAACP chapter, was a Boston mayoral candidate and lead lawyer for the NAACP nationwide, the newspaper said.