"Seeking more than a ‘symbolic gesture’: Around 200 join anti-racism protest in Easthampton"

“EASTHAMPTON — When Stephany Marryshow and her family moved into the Treehouse Foundation community in the city in 2005, it was because her mother wanted to provide her four children with the best opportunities possible.

But Marryshow stood on the lawn outside of the building that houses the city’s police station on Saturday afternoon and recounted some of the ways she and her loved ones experienced racism while living in the city: A seventh grade teacher asking her brother if he was in a gang or had ever been shot at, a postman asking her mother if she lived in the ‘projects on Pleasant Street’ and being pulled over, herself, by the police ‘way too many times.’”