Phillip Martin

Reporter

WGBH News

Since joining WGBH in the spring of 2010, Phillip Martin has reported on human trafficking in southern New England, the Boston Marathon bombing, Whitey Bulger, carbon offset schemes, police shootings, training and race, the Occupy movement and the fishing industry in New England, among other topics. On WGBH-TV, he is a regular panelist for Basic Black and an occasional panelist for Beat the Press, and hosted the World Compass 2012 presidential primary coverage. He is a Senior Fellow with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and a 2012 International Center for Journalists Ford Foundation Fellow.In addition, Phillip is executive producer for Lifted Veils Productions, a nonprofit public radio journalism project dedicated to exploring issues that divide and unite society. Phillip has worked as a supervising senior editor for NPR and was NPR’s first national race relations correspondent, from 1998 to 2001. In 1995, in his role as a senior producer, he helped create The World.


A young woman is shown wearing a face mask and backpack while holding a laptop.

Discussion: Mental health concerns for students of color heightened amid the coronavirus

Health & Medicine

Young people of color around the world confront serious challenges and systemic inequalities in higher education that are only exacerbated amid the pandemic. This panel discussion, moderated by GBH News’ Phillip Martin, addressed the mental health challenges for young people of color navigating today’s campus climate, social distancing protocols and remote learning experiences.

A crowd of protesters are shown with a man in the center holding a sign that reads, "Racism is a pandemic too."

Discussion: Mental health concerns for young people of color during COVID-19

Health & Medicine
street

Dalit Americans make a pilgrimage to Ambedkar Avenue, named for civil rights hero

Caste in America
A woman looks to the side.

Caste discrimination exists on college campuses. Some schools are trying to change that.

Caste in America
Several women in saris and a man laugh

Even with a Harvard pedigree, caste follows ‘like a shadow’

Caste in America
A former sex buyer, now in recovery, revisits Boston's Chinatown where he sometimes frequented erotic massage parlors. He says such establishments are all over the state.

Across the US, many illicit massage parlors avoid police detection

Economics

Prosecutors from Massachusetts to Minnesota detail cases where mostly foreign-born women work seven days a week, 12-24 hours a day, sleeping in parlors or nearby flophouses, and are managed by a network of interstate traffickers and business people.

Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who runs the Bristol County Jail

How a few notations by a school resource officer caused a teen to wind up in a high-security detention facility

Conflict

Henry Lemus Calderón, 19, is incarcerated in a high-security unit, and he can’t figure out why. Though in the country illegally, he was never arrested for any crime and never ordered removed, and he bristles at the notion of being considered in need of high security.

Handwritten notations on a school resource officer's police report tagged Lemus as a member of the 18th Street gang.

On Nantucket, a teenage migrant gets swept up in a crackdown on Salvadoran gangs

Conflict

The teen and his advocates insist that he’s being swept up and threatened with deportation because of teenage bravado, rather than actual evidence.

The World

Africa’s albinos seek their place in the sun

Agence France-Presse

Lack of pigmentation causes many to be killed to make potions for the superstitious.

The World

Why white skin is all the rage in Asia

From pills to lasers to cream, what’s fueling the boom in skin-whitening procedures across the continent?