boston uncommon

Massachusetts's capital is famed for its history, but many of the communities who built it have been excluded from the city's narrative. Sarah Khan returns to her hometown to meet the artists and entrepreneurs— as well as the dynamic young mayor—writing its next chapter

- Photographs by Christian Harder

Where the past ends and the present begins can be hard to decipher in Boston.

That park bench, that lamppost, that row house—it's safe to assume that each played a role in some pivotal moment in American history. But there are no plaques and statues on Marlon Solomon's itinerary. “You're about to go on a tour of places that don’t exist anymore,” he tells me on a late-spring morning as we set off from Nubian Square in Roxbury, a historically Black neighborhood just south of downtown Boston. I've been on plenty of walking tours, trolley tours, and duck tours in the city. But Solomon, the founder of the Afrimerican Academy, a local nonprofit supporting underserved multicultural communities, has taken a different approach. Drawing on oral histories and archival images, he has created an experience that asks guests to imagine bygone Black cultural landmarks that were erased in the 1960s mania for urban renewal that transformed so many American cities.

Instead of the familiar stops of Boston’s Freedom Trail, we go to an athletic field at Northeastern University that was once a vibrant community playground; a vacant grassy plot where an elite Black school once stood; and a dull apartment complex on the site of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. ministered when he met Coretta Scott. Their union is commemorated in a nearby mural by the street artist Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs. “We sell history in Boston,” Solomon says. “That’s what we do.” But in redlined Black areas like Roxbury, “there are no historical sites for us to show. We have to find ways to convert this history into revenue.”