In 1979, Viola Osgood and two Globe colleagues asked an editor if they could write about six Black women and girls, ranging in age from 15 to 29, who were murdered in a three-mile radius in Dorchester and Roxbury within a few weeks.
Boston’s media mostly ignored their deaths at a time when a “big deal was made of white women murders — all systems go,” recalled Carmen Fields, who cowrote the Globe story with Ms. Osgood and Gayle Pollard.
The city’s Black community is “a victim of a double standard used by police to handle white and Black deaths,” the women wrote, and the victims were “further devalued by news media labeling of the first two as ‘ladies of the night.’ “
“Viola was one of the important driving forces in making that happen,” Fields said of the article, and of the three Black reporters’ insistence “that these women had lives of value, and that they were entitled to more coverage than just the back pages with a paragraph or two.”
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