– Imari Paris Jeffries
Originally printed on Bay State Banner
When Boston raised the Black Liberation flag at City Hall this week, marking 100 years of observing Black history in February, Rev. Willie Bodrick spoke a sentence that carried more weight than ceremony ever could.
Black history, he said, is the history of America.
It is the mirror the country keeps circling, unsure whether it wants to recognize its own face. This nation has always known how to speak about itself. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Boston has long spoken in that same elevated tongue, a city upon a hill, a lesson offered to the world. Those words have traveled easily. They have asked very little of the people who repeat them.
What has been harder is sitting with the distance between the language and the lived truth.
As the semiquincentennial approaches, we are watching an effort to make that distance disappear, not by closing it, but by covering it over. History is being thinned. Public memory is being edited for ease. The sharp edges that once named responsibility are being filed down until they feel abstract enough to ignore.
The National Park Service has removed references to slavery from public sites. Exhibits that addressed George Washington’s ownership of human beings have vanished. At the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home, language describing white supremacy plainly has been stripped away. Even Dr. King Day and Juneteenth have been quietly reduced, emptied of the civic weight they once carried.
None of this is random.
It is choreography.
It shows us how power prefers to be remembered. It shows us which histories must remain intact and which can be rearranged. It shows us that forgetting is still treated as a form of order.
The same impulse that once raised Confederate monuments now defends their return. The same authority that threatens funding for the Smithsonian and Boston’s Museum of African American History insists it is merely protecting neutrality. But neutrality has always had a posture, and it has always leaned in a particular direction.
Black people have never relied on the state to tell them who they are.
Memory lived elsewhere. In sanctuaries that doubled as strategy. In footsteps pressed into city streets.In institutions built to outlast neglect.
It lived in the African Meeting House and Twelfth Baptist Church, where faith and defiance shared the same walls. It lived in the Underground Railroad, carried hand to hand, breath to breath. It lived in the minds, bodies, and souls of the twenty thousand people who marched through Boston with Dr. King in 1965. It lives now in The Embrace, holding the Boston beginnings of Dr. and Mrs. King’s love in full public view, refusing distance, refusing myth.
For generations, Black America waited for acknowledgment from the country it built. That waiting was often met with silence. But silence never stopped the work.
Carter G. Woodson understood this. Black History Month was never meant to be a corrective footnote or a temporary accommodation. It was a preparation. A way of ensuring that the next generation would know what had been taken from them, what had been demanded of them, and what they were still owed. And in carrying Black history, we carry everyone’s history. A way of grounding the future in something sturdier than hope alone.
That grounding remains unfinished.
We see it in the way Dr. King is remembered now. His image is everywhere. His discomfort rarely is. His opposition to racism, militarism, and economic exploitation made him deeply unpopular in his own time. He was not embraced for his patience. He was feared for his insistence. And still, he moved forward.
Because justice, as he understood it, did not wait for approval.
It did not depend on safety. It did not retreat in the face of resistance.
We do not need to wait until it is safe or convenient to uplift ourselves and our history. We must do it with the fierce urgency of now, in this moment of erasure and division. To reflect our history fully, both nationally and here in Boston.
History is still being written in this city. The question is not whether it will be told, but whether it will be carried with honesty, with courage, and with a willingness to remain unsettled by what it reveals. Black communities have always carried it that way.