Below you well find a collection of featured testimonials in support of Chuck Turner. Please voice your support of Chuck by sending in your own. Click here to write your own testimonial.
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Chuck Turner represents all of us
I can’t remember when I first met Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, since it was so long ago, before he was a city councilor. What I do remember is that he was always out there, standing with the community, serving as a creative resource and seasoned facilitator of the community’s own efforts at change. I know that when I worked at a mutual empowerment, long-term career planning program for women on welfare, we consulted with Turner about ways to break through the poverty-level training and job options that the system imposed upon the women.
Later, when we established the Next-Step Readiness program, we benefited from his efforts to open up job and training opportunities in the higher-wage trades; in the area of cooperative economic development; and from his work with Emerge, which does counseling and education of abusers to stop domestic violence. For years, he has been the only public official who has relentlessly fought to improve the Boston Public Schools and helped to establish the Work4Quality/Fight4Equity network.
In all of this work, Turner has never been a “man on the make,” a self-serving “cutter of deals.” Instead, he has opposed all such corrupt politics-as-usual and taken the higher ground of principled politics, while remaining at a modest financial position himself.
It is for this politics of principle and courageous confrontation of systemic injustice that Turner is paying today. He has been facing a torrent of character assassination and presumption of guilt in the wake of a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting operation, in an attempt to destroy Turner, his steadfast integrity and his effectiveness in the community. As they destroy Turner, they destroy all of us who struggle for desperately needed change, because our struggles are inextricably interwoven, whether or not we know Turner personally. Despite this assault on his character, they have been able to point to nothing in Turner’s history prior to recent allegations that would provide even the slightest hint of deliberate financial malfeasance or desire for selfish gain.
Many truly good people are saying, “Let’s step aside and see how the legal process plays out,” but by then his reputation and the solidarity of the progressive community will have been destroyed. At that point we will have no one to blame but ourselves for not standing up for and with Turner, for and with ourselves when it counted. I am reminded of the Nazi-era poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, a concentration camp survivor: Speaking of a series of groups of people of which he was not a part, he wrote, “First they came for… and I didn’t speak up… Then they came for… The last line is, “Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.”
What does a human being have to do in this world to earn and keep the respect and support of his fellow human beings? If Turner can be picked off and destroyed at this critical juncture in history, when we need each other more than ever to move the change process forward, who will be next?
Mary Jo Hetzel
Jamaica Plain
The city, state and federal insinuations and attacks against Mr. Chuck Turner represent hateful, dishonest and reprehensible political positions against our long-serving, fair-minded and conscientious city councilor.
Those who have constructed the attacks are the ones who should be judged by the people and then kicked out of government, for the consequences, if allowed to go through against Mr. Turner, will be racist, sexist, anti-working class and anti-LGBT.
These attacks will be viewed as part of the wider economic crisis affecting those of us losing our homes to foreclosure, our jobs to CORI retribution and to the war-time budget and our heat and lights to the profit-making greed of the fuel companies. Chuck Turner has defended our rights to housing, jobs, heat and lights, among other necessities of living. An attack against him translates to an attack on all of us.
I am outraged. Drop all charges against Mr. Turner, clear his name in the courts and the media and prosecute those who have developed this criminal campaign against Chuck Turner!
I have known Chuck Turner for over 17 years, long before he became a Boston City Councilor. Chuck has always been an inspiration to my faith in community organizers and politicians. I have known him always to be an honest and decent human being who cares passionately about his community and has a keen sense of justice. I have found him to be a wise, compassionate, humble, and firm advocate for those with less privilege in our society.
I was a reporter for WGBH public radio in the 1970’s, and for the WGBH TV’s The Ten O’Clock News in the 1980’s. I covered a number of events which Chuck Turner helped to organize, and at which he spoke. He always struck me as an advocate who was deeply concerned about communities of color in Boston, and I thought it was a good thing for those communities and for the city as a whole when he was elected City Councilor. Most of all, I saw that he was clearly an honest and principled man. I do not believe he is now a corrupt politician. His arrest raises questions for me about government entrapment, and about racial inequities in law enforcement.
Aimee Sands, Jamaica Plan
while i have know Chuck personally for at least 40-years–way back to the stop-the-highway campaign–i want to focus on the last 8-years, or since he was elected District-7 Councilor. i’m a founding-member of the D7 Roundtable, which was launched in 1999 to provide the Counselor-elect with an independent vehicle for feedback, accountability, and communication. however, the Roundtable quickly evolved into something more: a grassroots think-tank and public policy forum, convened monthly (until Feb.’08) to discuss, debate, and strategize on the range of issues affecting residents of Greater Roxbury.
It is my deepest hope that your paper will have the fairness to publish this letter. A letter that has been written with no intention other than to speak the truth as I know it, and as thousands of others not only in District 7, but the entire Greater Boston Area know it to be – a truth that has been very disturbingly kept from the media in the past month.
We, members of Community Church of Boston, are writing to express our support for Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner. Many of us have worked with Chuck and his staff for more then 10 years. Some of us have attended his monthly round table meetings. Some of us live in his district. We have worked with Chuck to oppose Boston University’s proposed level IV Bio-lab for the South End and Roxbury. We have marched with Councilor Turner in anti-war demonstrations and rallies. We see and hear him at public meeting representing our interests on a variety of issues including: CORI reform; rights for tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure; rights and services for prisoners and formally incarcerated people; jobs and basic services for low-income people; improvement of public education; rejection of ROTC in the public schools; and misplace priories such as our bloated military budget.
The first time I met Chuck was on a hot august night in 1965 over by camden-lennox projects. Chuck and some other men were loading a truck full of garbage that had, once again, not been picked up. He told me and other folks i was with that the next morning they were going to dump it on the front lawn of the old city hall. This they did, and were arrested. when it was announced by Chuck, upon release from jail, that they would be back the following day, and the day after - until Roxbury got regular garbage pickup. Then the city authorities had a meeting with him.
Since that time garbage has been picked up on a regular basis in Roxbury including on holidays. Chuck has been on one simple mission all these years - and that is simple justice.
Every American has the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. Last Friday US Attorney Michael Sullivan tried to take those rights away from Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner. Engaging in “trial by media,” Sullivan released prejudicial evidence and tried to convict Councilor Turner in the public’s mind before he has his day in court.
