In the News

The Nesto Gallery opened on January 10, 1974, and has since brought in scores of professional artists from New England and beyond, offering the community access to accomplished works of painting, photography, sculpture, and much more. The gallery’s presence on campus also enriches Milton’s visual arts program, giving students opportunities to meet and learn from a diverse range of talented creators.

This year’s gallery schedule culminates in a special event involving all the gallery directors and chairs since the Nesto opened. Past directors will curate an exhibition that will open with a reception on April 24.

The 50 Years of the Nesto Gallery exhibition will remain open until Reunion weekend and close with a reception on June 14.

Full Circle Moment: In 1986—the year the United States first observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday, Lamont Gordon ’87 was a student listening to Milton’s first-ever MLK speaker. Gordon returned to campus as the 2025 MLK speaker. That 1986 assembly left quite an impression on Gordon.

The speaker was Reverend Charles R. Stith. According to Gordon, “Over the past 30 years or so, Stith has been a pretty major figure in promoting economic and political development in Africa, both as an investor and as U.S. ambassador to Tanzania in the late 1990s. In 1986, when Stith was invited to speak at Milton, he was a minister and community leader in Boston who had recently founded a nonprofit organization called ONE, Organization for a New Equality.” Gordon was so moved and inspired by the assembly that later that year, he and a classmate reached out to Reverend Stith to ask if they could do their senior project at ONE. Stith accepted their proposal. For their project, they conducted research, analyzed data, participated in focus groups, and contributed to the organization’s work in tangible ways.

“It was one of the best experiences that I had at Milton,” Gordon said. “As I reflect back on that time, I’m reminded of the pivotal role that Milton played in my personal and intellectual development. It was a time when I was beginning to figure out who I was, my place in the world, my values, and what was important to me.” As a first-generation college graduate and firm believer in the power of education, Gordon has dedicated his career to creating pathways to college for students from underrepresented communities. Currently, he is the executive director of College Visions, an organization empowering low-income and first-generation college students in Rhode Island to reap the benefits of higher education. He also serves on Milton’s Board of Trustees.

Solid preparation is the key to success in high-stakes situations, Army veteran Dan Kim ’09 told Upper School students during this year’s Veterans Day Assembly.

“All kinds of things can go wrong, all sorts of bad things,” Kim said. “But that’s why you train. You study, you plan, and you prepare ahead of time. And when it’s time to execute, it’s time to stop worrying about the unknown and the hypotheticals. It’s time to rely on your preparations, your own abilities to rise to the challenge. Focus on the problem at hand that actually exists instead of all the could-be problems at this point. What will be will be, and worrying about the outcome is not going to change anything. Things are stressful enough without having to borrow from the future. So when it’s time to execute, meet the moment with confidence, focus without worrying about the possibilities, and smile.”

A pivotal first-person account of slavery in the United States lay dormant in Australia for a century and a half until a literary scholar’s curiosity led him to it. The scholar, Jonathan D.S. Schroeder ’99, returned to Milton last fall as a Heyburn Lecturer and shared his amazing journey toward resurfacing John Swanson Jacobs’s story.

“Who was John Jacobs?” asked Schroeder, the editor of Jacobs’s The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, published in full this year by the University of Chicago Press. “At the very least, he was the brother of Harriet Jacobs and an ally and friend of Frederick Douglass, two of the most important Black writers of the 19th century.”

Schroeder discovered Jacobs’s narrative through an internet search in 2016 while he was reading a biography of Harriet—whose book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a groundbreaking work and the first published account of slavery written by a formerly enslaved Black woman in the United States. He learned that Harriet’s son Joseph and her brother, John, had gone to Australia, where The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots first appeared, in a Sydney newspaper in 1855.

Schroeder explained to students, “What I could do was ask the question ‘How can one do justice to this text?’” He wrote a biography of Jacobs that accompanies the original text. “His own words constitute the strongest proof of who he was and what he stood for, for John Jacobs wrote and spoke fearlessly,” Schroeder said. “Here, we might invoke the Milton motto, ‘Dare to be true.’ I think it’s important to ask, ‘What does it mean to tell the truth? And in what conditions or situations can telling the truth actually make a change?’”

During his lecture, Schroeder, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, described his motivation to give Jacobs’s narrative the platform it deserved in the United States, where it had never been published. “In 2016, I could not say what I now know: that the rediscovery of John Jacobs’s narrative represents the most important recovery of an autobiographical slave narrative on record.”

As a 10-year-old with the dream of serving on the nation’s highest court, Edna Etienne-Dupie ’25 caught the attention of some high-profile Massachusetts lawmakers. She delivered a speech at a campaign event for former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and was soon invited to speak at Walsh’s inauguration. “I mainly talked about the importance of voting and spoke about how I wanted to be a United States Supreme Court justice,” she says. “I have no idea if that’s my career plan now, but I’ll think about it. The clerk of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), Maura Doyle, was watching, and after I spoke, she invited me to intern there for two weeks. It was absolutely incredible. I loved it.” And so—as a 10-year-old—Etienne-Dupie began her public-service career. Today, she is a member of a state advisory board aiming to help some of the most at-risk young people in Massachusetts.

During her time at the SJC, she met and later interned with Judge Marjorie Tynes, who was then serving on the state’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee (JJAC). This past summer, at Tynes’s recommendation, Governor Maura Healey appointed her to the JJAC.

Her early interest in politics and public service stems from her family’s activism and involvement in local politics. “I’ve grown up around politics my entire life,” she says, “so I know that other students my age may have a different experience, but I do think that within my generation, there’s a lot of interest in politics and activism.”

Etienne-Dupie’s experience at Milton, in and out of the classroom, has deepened both her interest and her understanding. As a junior, she took the “History of Civil Rights” elective taught by Matthew Blanton, which provided an “amazing and informative” deep dive into the civil rights era and Black history in the United States. She is also a member of the Milton Progressives, a club that meets weekly to discuss current events in politics and encourage peers to get involved.

Now, as a member of the JJAC, Etienne-Dupie has a front row seat to see politics in action. The JJAC reviews and approves funding related to outreach programs for incarcerated young people, and also those who are at risk of returning to prison. The group also focuses on legal assistance and social- and emotional-health resources for incarcerated youth. Typically, the youth member of the JJAC is a college student. Etienne-Dupie is its youngest-ever member.

“I’m interested in criminal justice because I have always had a passion for the law,” she says. “I’ve read a lot and heard about a lot of cases where young children have gotten involved in the legal system and cannot financially support themselves to get out of it. I personally believe that it is my job, as someone who has had a lot of opportunities, to help people who are genuinely in need.”