Black History Month 2024: Rich in history, Boston celebrates its Black artists

As she took to the lectern in Boston City Hall’s cavernous and echoey atrium on Tuesday, Taneshia Nash Laird came to sing a serenade to the Black artists whose toil and effort, whose joy and tears, whose words and music, have knit this city together.

To singer Donna Summer, who taught the city to move.

To artist Paul Goodnight, whose canvases captured Black Bostonians in vivid color.

To poet and playwright Derek Walcott, whose verses and dramas explored the Caribbean cultural experience.

To dancer Tai Jimenez, who shattered barriers when she became the Boston Ballet’s first Black female principal dancer.

And, yes, even to once and current R&B popsters New Edition, who made a much younger Taneshia Nash Laird bop along to their 1983 hit “Candy Girl.”

Nash Laird came to City Hall on Tuesday, as Boston kicked off its Black History Month celebrations, to not only pay tribute to the trailblazers who had come before, but to help build the “crescendo that will carry us forward.”

“We believe in the transformative power of the arts to tell our story and enrich our history,” Nash Laird, the inaugural president and CEO of the Greater Roxbury Arts & Cultural Center told the arts, community, faith and city leaders who rose in their chairs in applause when she finished her self-styled “serenade.”

And as much as Boston is steeped in American history — and Black history is American history, as one speaker after another noted Tuesday — “You cannot have a vibrant city without a first-class arts and culture scene,” Nash Laird said.

Tuesday’s midday observance at City Hall, which began with a flag-raising honoring the experience of the city’s Black, African American and African residents, marked the start of a month’s worth of programming and activities across the city.

• Read More: The full schedule of events for the city of Boston’s Black History Month celebration

They range from a Feb. 9 event in Roxbury honoring the 100th birthday this year of the author James Baldwin to a skating and trivia night on Feb. 22 in Dorchester for city youth aged 17 and younger.

It’s all part of ensuring that the vast civil, cultural, economic and political contributions of Boston’s Black residents are celebrated and honored, officials said.

“We are so blessed to live in a city filled with Black art and fueled by Black brilliance,” Mayor Michelle Wu said Tuesday.

The city honored Goodnight, who has designed works for the World Cup and the Olympics, for his years of contributions to the city’s arts and cultural scene.

His daughter, artist Aziza Robinson-Goodnight, accepted the award on his behalf. Her father “humbly walks this city with a world of accomplishments,” she said.

Poet Amanda Shea moved the crowd with a recitation of her poem “Black Excellence.”

“We are the voice for the voiceless, and sometimes we feel voiceless,” Shea told her City Hall audiences. But, she added later, “Without artists, this world would be bleak.”

Quoting from the one Scripture that everyone knew, the Gospel according to James Brown, the Rev. Art J. Gordon, exhorted the crowd.

“Say it loud: ‘I’m Black, and I’m proud,’” Gordon, the pastor of St. John Missionary Church, said to laughter and cheers.