Cambridge MLK Community Walk to Celebrate Black and Brown History

Many Helping Hands 365, My Brother's Keeper, and  YMCA Cambridge sponsored the annual Cambridge MLK Day of Service and Learning January 17-20, 2022. 

 Virtual activities included conversations on racial justice, signing up to lead a team to gather food or diapers for local pantries, making valentines or sewing scarves and blankets at home, or collecting clothing and books. 

The one in-person outdoor event, attended by hundreds of Cantabridgians on a blustery but sunny January 17, was a Community Walk around the Port neighborhood, hearing from speakers along the way, to learn about the rich Black and Brown history of our city and to “learn what we do individually to help create an equitable community that brings us closer to racial justice and equality.” 

Beginning with a gathering in Starlight Square, the self-guided walk included g historical buildings and places of worship, public murals, community gathering places, pantries, food centers and more. At each stop, student guides from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (CRLS) provided information and directions to the next map location. 

I enjoyed revisiting some places familiar to me, such as the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, founded in 1902, which offers youth services, community building, and food services. I have continued to explore and enjoy the many murals created by young people across the neighborhood, but this walk brought me for the first time to the 80-year old Community Art Center, which "cultivates an engaged community of youth whose powerful artistic voices transform their lives, their neighborhoods, and their worlds."

I also learned about the Goree Freedom House on Windsor Street, founded in 2004, with a mission to "empower every community member to reach their full potential by connecting ideas, providing resources, and opportunities to fulfill aspirations, tailored to the individual." 

While I am familiar with the U.S. structurally racist federal, state, and local housing policies, shockingly started under FDR's New Deal in the 1930's, I was disturbed to learn about government-enforced housing segregation in Cambridge, including the 1938 razing of a low-income tenement neighborhood in which many of the Black residents of Cambridge lived. In its place, two low-income housing developments were built side by side in the late 1930s to early 1940s, and they practiced segregation in housing assignments, with Newtowne Court primarily for white and Washington Elms for Black residents.

I had passed the Union Baptist Church on Main Street many times, but on the walk, I learned that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon at this historic church on June 20, 1954. I also learned that Charlotte Hawkins Brown, about whom I knew thanks to the Cambridge African-American Heritage Trail and the Cambridge Black History Project, a nationally known  educator, lecturer, civil rights activist, author, and cultural leader, is memorialized in a stained glass window in the church.

Although I have lived in Cambridge most of my life, and spend a lot of time learning about the city's history, exploring neighborhoods, and engaging in social justice efforts, participating in this walk taught me a lot and reminded me that I always have more to learn and more to do to work for an equitable, anti-racist Cambridge. I thank the organizers of this Walk!

My two-minute video from the walk.