“Black history is American history, and we always need to make sure that we are reminding people of that fact,” City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said to conclude a kick-off event for Boston’s Black History Month celebrations.
The nearly two-hour event began Tuesday with a flag-raising outside City Hall and wrapped up with a locally-catered indoor press conference honoring the city’s Black artistry and culture, in keeping with this year’s theme of “African Americans and the Arts.”
Pointing to the national attention that Boston received from last year’s installation of The Embrace on the Common, Mayor Michelle Wu said the monument, described on its website as an important cultural symbol of equity and justice for city residents, is representative of the “gift and the power of Black art.”
“The ability to include, bring out and double down on the strength of our communities, using beauty as a multiplier and a challenger,” Wu said. “Boston would not be the city that it is today if not for our Black leaders, Black artists and activists, Black entrepreneurs and advocates all sharing their craft with the deep knowledge of what is at stake for our communities.”
Wu honored two local artists at the event, Paul Goodnight and Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga.
The trauma of the Vietnam War left Goodnight without the ability to speak, a voice he rediscovered through the canvases he painted, Wu said, before introducing his daughter, Aziza Goodnight, to accept the award on her father’s behalf.
The mayor described the second recipient, Dibinga, founding artistic and executive director of a Roxbury-based performing arts center, as a “poet, playwright, performer, founder and educator who has shared her gift through OrigiNation.”
The day’s ceremony also featured a rendition of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” from Danny Rivera Jr. and a prayer from the Rev. Art J. Gordon, a pastor at the St. John Missionary Baptist Church.
It also included a number of speakers, highlighted by Taneisha Nash Laird, an author and president/CEO of Roxbury Arts and Cultural Center, who gave the keynote address.
After rattling off a lengthy list of Black artists, poets and musicians that hail from the city, or “some of the stars etched upon the sky of Boston’s cultural legacy,” Nash Laird went on to say that those people “are guiding lights” and “examples of “Black excellence” for “aspiring talent incubated by the city,” while criticizing the backlash against so-called identity politics.
Those “detractors,” according to Nash Laird, “suggest that we should blend into some amorphous, tasteless and indistinguishable porridge that they called America.”
“For decades,” she added, “those same forces of the 19th century, of the 20th century, and even now into this millennium proclaimed that the nation was nothing more than a melting pot whose contents were only to be defined by how the ingredients they assumed came first, notwithstanding that Black Americans have been here for 400 years.”
Nash Laird continued by urging America to think of “Black Boston’s past” as “so much more than Crispus Attucks and the one-time homes of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as proud as we are for their prospective historical roles.”
“We are more than that,” she said. “We are also an incubator and host of artistic talent. We are a crucible of American culture.”
