Talking History and Memory with Corporate Executives on the Boston Common

(Source: Wikipedia)

Yesterday I led a group of roughly 40 corporate executives on a brief tour of the monuments on Boston Common as part of their two-day Social Innovation Summit Learning Journey organized by Landmark Ventures. All of the participants work to address questions of equity and diversity in their respective companies and the communities that they serve.

Groups like this pose a number of challenges, most obviously that they are not visiting Boston to dig deep into history or be dragged around to look at a bunch of monuments. You also never want to lead a tour at the end of a long day right before dinner.

All of that said, I had an incredible experience leading and talking with this group.

We began our brief tour at The Embrace, which is the newest addition to Boston’s monument landscape. The sculpture honors Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King as well as some of Boston’s most important Black political leaders from the mid-twentieth century. From there, we walked up Beacon Hill to take a look at the Shaw/54th Massachusetts Memorial.

(Source: Boston.Gov)

I encouraged the group to recognize that each of their companies have their own unique histories and that each of us embodies a personal history, a history of the communities in which we reside, and the nation as a whole, all of which we pick up over time and often without being conscious of the process. In addressing issues of equity and diversity it is sometimes helpful to take a step back to think about how history shapes our understanding of the world around us and more specifically the workplace.

More specifically, recognizing this history can help us to identify the ways in which our places of work discriminate, hold back certain groups from advancement and promotion, or simply stifle the voices of certain groups.

It’s not unlike the process that we continue to work through in evaluating our local monument landscapes. Do our monuments and memorials reflect the collective values of the entire community. Are our public spaces spaces places where everyone in the community feels respected, welcome, and seen? What can we do to ensure that our monuments and other commemorative sites reflect the diversity of our communities and promote equity as something worth striving toward?

While at the Shaw Memorial I asked the group to look down at the narrow thread of red bricks that begins on Beacon Hill and winds its way downtown through the North End ending eventually at Bunker Hill in Charlestown.

I explained that Boston’s famed “Freedom Trail” was created after WWII at the height of the Cold War as a way of attracting white American families to the city. The history highlighted on this trail was organized to bring visitors to important sites leading up to the American Revolution such as the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, the Old North Church, where Paul Revere began his famous “Midnight Ride,” and Bunker Hill.

The stories that families were exposed to are best characterized as a consensus history, intended to unite white Americans around a patriotic narrative of the nation’s birth. There were good guys and bad guys—a narrative that mirrored the ongoing ideological struggle with the Soviet Union.

Just as the bricks highlighted specific sites and stories, I reminded the group that they also steered visitors away from other stories and voices that are just as relevant to the history of Boston and the United States.

In short, the Freedom Trail gives visitors a sense that they have experienced the city’s history, when what they have really seen is just a thin slice of what certain individuals and organizations wanted to highlight for tourists. It was a safe and non-controversial story, but in doing so, it obscured a much more complex and more inclusive past.

The bricks, I suggested, could be viewed as a metaphor for the types of structural inequities that exist in our communities, institutions, and even many of the companies that my audience of executives represent.

Much has changed along the Freedom Trail and new trails have been added over the past few decades, most notably the African-American Heritage Trail, which brings visitors to the north slope of Beacon Hill, to what was once one of the most vibrant and politically active Black neighborhoods in the country. It has a long way to go in attracting the same numbers of visitors that still confine themselves to the old trail, but the future looks promising.

That future, however, will only come to fruition as long as people continue to push themselves to interrogate the ways in which the past informs the present and exposes places and issues that need to be addressed.

Despite the very positive response that I received from many of the participants, I don’t know what, if any, impact it will have.

For me, it was enough to have spent a little bit of time with perfect strangers thinking about the ways in which we all carry the past with us and how through a little bit of reflection we might be able to take one tiny step in the direction of a better future together.