They Know
I think the former Massachusetts State Representative, the Honorable Byron Rushing; and the preeminent scholar and Black fine art museum curator and director of NCAAA, the National Center and Museum of Afro-American Artists, one Dr. Barry Gaither, Ph D., are the elite Black Boston tour guides and historians. So is Dr. Reginald L. Jackson, Ph D., and director of AAMARP, the African American Master Artists in Residence Program at North Eastern University. Their Black Boston heritage knowledge speaks for itself.
Black tour guides have a basis for doing what they do. For me Bostonmurrell, I create and produce the website and the online BlackBoston.com Guide to Black Boston.
I wanted to give thousands of readérs of my calendar page something more to do. I asked 500 people what they knew about African American cultural destinations in New England?
The survey results were encouraging. I set out to discover and hype 100 Top African American oriented destinations for day trips from Boston. I got the idea from the Boston Magazine list of Top 100 destinations to explore — but it did not list any Black sites in 2018.
To learn the tour development and narration trade, I enrolled into a 40 hour cultural interpretive guide training class given by the National Association of Interpretation – NAI is a source for National Park Ranger level storytelling about points of interest. A ranger tipped me off about NAI.
My class project was to create a tour program and present it to the class and instructor for grading. The outcome is “Protest to Freedom,” a Black Boston riding tour framing how Black activists built Boston and impacted its status in the world. Another is titled “From the Back Bay to the Heart of Black Boston,” – targeted to tourists and white Americans living in homes or hotels in Back Bay.
During its development I learned of the Tuffs University catalog of African American Heritage sites in Massachusetts. It was awesome. The dream of realizing there are 100 noteworthy African American Destinations in New England became reality. I won’t leave you hanging. Soon, I will add web links to the locations, in case you want to know.
Black-owned Boston Tour Guide Companies
- Live Life Like A Local Tours, by Colin Mcknight
- Afrimerican Academy
- Reidren Associates, The Hidden History of Black Boston series, Joel Mackal
Google them for proper impact
They will tell you about their inspirations to create and deliver tours into the Black Boston community. They teach you Boston African American Heritage. These Black Boston tour guides and history griots speak about old and new Boston with passion. They cover the entire region.
This article is a work in progress. The goal for this page is to boost business for African American Black Tour Guides operating in Massachusetts and the New England states.
Written by William Murrell, III
IG: BOSTONMURRELL
bostonmurrell@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/williammurrell
