The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown all of us onto an uncertain path forward to health and well-being. We do not know how and when the residents of our state will enjoy a world without this public health threat. We do know that, despite our collective best efforts to keep safe, people are suffering physically, emotionally and financially.

June 10, 1983, Tracey Thurman received one last beating from her estranged husband, Charles “Buck” Thurman, as the Torrington police officer she’d summoned waited in his car across the street. Connecticut law has evolved in the decades since, nudged by events local and national, but there remains more to be done.

Throughout the era of Jim Crow and until the late 1960s, African American travelers were never assured that they would be served at restaurants, allowed to rent rooms at hotels or motels, or be allowed to purchase gasoline. In 1936 Victor H. Green, an African American mailman in New York City, published The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide to businesses that would serve black customers. By 1940 The Green Book included seven cities in Connecticut.

A long standing, pre-COVID-19 observation about cycling and pedestrian advocacy across our nation is that there has not been enough attention and focus on the issues of those with the most needs. One place to start is the safety and welfare of those persons who walk and bicycle, especially when it is all or a large part of their essential transportation.

2020 has certainly brought its fair share of loss, grief, and shock. But unfortunately, the most threatening atrocity to our society hasn’t been the coronavirus itself; instead, it is the viral spread of confusion and misinformation that has made a difficult situation into an epic global failure.

In some sense, American higher education has faced its “Digital Dunkirk Moment” and marshalled a heroic response to an incredibly difficult situation. We must now proactively “ready the force” for the possibility of recurring challenges—and to harness opportunities that the future of digital learning presents.

One hundred years ago, on Aug. 18, 1920, the U.S. Congress ratified the 19th Amendment, granting women the long-overdue legal right to vote. But honoring women’s contributions to politics has been obscured by the latest onslaught of violence against women, right here, close to home.

“Minorities” were characterized as a group of people at the bottom of society’s shoe, in need of handouts by the generosity of the establishment, the white majority. I have spent the better part of my professional life in championing for the fair treatment of Hispanics-Latinos in newsrooms and news coverage. The time has come to stop labeling people of color as “minorities.”

Thirty years ago this week, by votes of 377 to 28 in the House and 91 to 6 in the Senate, the United States Congress passed, and President George Herbert Walker Bush signed, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), among the most significant pieces of legislation since the Second World War. The principal author of the legislation was former Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker.

Congressman John Lewis gave the commencement address at the University of Connecticut School of Law and received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 2012. Rep. Lewis, described as the Conscience of Congress, lived a remarkable life, one which inspired the graduates that day in Hartford.