By John L. Micek | jmicek@masslive.com
As she took to the lectern in Boston City Hall’s cavernous and echoey atrium on Tuesday, Taneshia Nash Laird came to sing a serenade to the Black artists whose toil and effort, whose joy and tears, whose words and music, have knit this city together.
To singer Donna Summer, who taught the city to move.
To artist Paul Goodnight, whose canvases captured Black Bostonians in vivid color.
To poet and playwright Derek Walcott, whose verses and dramas explored the Caribbean cultural experience.
To dancer Tai Jimenez, who shattered barriers when she became the Boston Ballet’s first Black female principal dancer.
And, yes, even to once and current R&B popsters New Edition, who made a much younger Taneshia Nash Laird bop along to their 1983 hit “Candy Girl.”
Nash Laird came to City Hall on Tuesday, as Boston kicked off its Black History Month celebrations, to not only pay tribute to the trailblazers who had come before, but to help build the “crescendo that will carry us forward.”
“We believe in the transformative power of the arts to tell our story and enrich our history,” Nash Laird, the inaugural president and CEO of the Greater Roxbury Arts & Cultural Center told the arts, community, faith and city leaders who rose in their chairs in applause when she finished her self-styled “serenade.”
And as much as Boston is steeped in American history — and Black history is American history, as one speaker after another noted Tuesday — “You cannot have a vibrant city without a first-class arts and culture scene,” Nash Laird said.