Jan. 5 marks the start of a new legislative session for the City of Boston. It would be nice to have an agenda for the Black community. A group of individuals, led by Mac Hudson and including Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, former City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, Priscilla Flint, Royal Smith, Mavrick Afonso, and others, are trying to do just that. Without an agreed-upon Black agenda, it was hard to solicit feedback from the mayoral or city council candidates as to how committed they were to Boston’s Black agenda, and since they never committed to a Black agenda, it will be impossible to hold them accountable for delivering on it. This is a mistake as discovered by Sen. Bill Owens years ago.

“Unless we have our own agenda of African people, we cannot form coalitions with others,” former Massachusetts Sen. Bill Owens said in his introduction to The National Black Agenda Convention (NBAC) in March 2004. The five-day NBAC in Boston was the fifth Black convention ever held in the United States and the first in Boston, hosted at Roxbury Community College.

Owens attended the first NBAC in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, a gathering of 10,000 Black activists, where delegates organized into working groups to craft what became the National Black Political Agenda. Nearly 30 years later, he brought the convention to Boston to “develop a unified agenda and political strategy” for African Americans, addressing issues such as education, health care, economic development, politics, criminal justice, reparations, and foreign policy.

Inspired by the national convention, Owens co-founded the Black Legislative Caucus on Beacon Hill in 1972 with other Black lawmakers.

One of the people Owens urged to develop a Black Agenda for Boston was Jamarhl Crawford, then a member of the National Black Panther Party. Having seen similar agendas created in other cities, Crawford believed it could be done in Boston. He secured the domain BostonBlackAgenda.com as a digital space for community members to share their thoughts on policy areas, envisioning it as both an organizing hub and a democratic forum.

To expand beyond the digital sphere, Crawford printed 10,000 newspapers and 15,000 flyers for distribution citywide, targeting neighborhoods most impacted by systemic inequities. The response was sobering — only 27 submissions, mostly from friends — highlighting the challenge of turning rhetorical support into active participation.

Despite the setback, Crawford formally launched the Boston Black Agenda in 2013, prioritizing violence prevention, youth investment, educational equity, economic opportunity, and government accountability. As publisher of the Blackstonian, an independent media outlet focused on issues often ignored by mainstream press — particularly those affecting Boston’s Black residents — Crawford promoted the agenda widely. That same year, he ran for Boston City Council as a write-in/sticker candidate for District 7, further elevating its visibility.

State Senator Dianne Wilkerson was also a central figure in Boston’s Black Agenda. A successful lawyer and legal counsel for the Boston Branch of the NAACP, she played a pivotal role in suing the Boston Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for racially discriminatory public housing practices. The resulting landmark consent decree mandated fairer policies and established her reputation as a formidable advocate.

Wilkerson succeeded Owens in 1993, becoming the highest-ranking Black elected official in Massachusetts. Sen. Wilkerson used her Senate position to advance the causes of Black Bostonians through legislation, hearings, and advocacy, and was regarded as one of the most effective legislators on Beacon Hill.

In 2015, Wilkerson and a coalition including OneUnited Bank’s Teri Williams, business leaders Darryl Settles and Glynn Lloyd, and activist Louis Elisa presented an initiative called “Freeze Frame” to 450 attendees at Prince Hall Masonic Lodge. Described as “eye-opening” and “jaw-dropping,” Freeze Frame exposed economic disparities that hinder wealth-building in communities of color and offered strong policy recommendations to disrupt cycles of disinvestment. This work eventually led to the founding of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA).

Other groups and initiatives followed: the Black Mass Coalition and its “Blueprint for a New Normal,” the NAACP Boston Branch and its 2020 Racial Justice and Black Reconstruction Agenda, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Boston Black Agenda Project. The Boston Foundation issued multiple reports useful for shaping a Black Boston Agenda. Organizations such as the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts (ULEM), Embrace Boston, the Massachusetts Black & Latino Legislative Caucus (MBLLC), and the Governor’s Black Advisory Council also advanced related policy priorities.

Wilkerson later introduced the concept of “Contemporations,” addressing one critique of reparations — that of long timeframes between harm and restitution. She argued there is no need to look back more than 50–75 years, as corporate perpetrators, victims, and damages are all known.

Municipal contributions followed. Under Mayor Martin Walsh, Boston launched the Office of Diversity (2014) and the Office of Returning Citizens (2017), and in 2020 he convened the Boston Police Reform Task Force — which included Jamarhl Crawford, who had been working on this issue for decades, long before George Floyd or Rodney King. Crawford was able to see the committee’s recommendations lead to the strengthening of the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency (OPAT) .

Mayor Michelle Wu has since expanded these efforts to address Boston’s Black political agenda, creating the Office of Black Male Advancement (2022) and launching the Reparations Task Force (2023).

We will continue to have one-off initiatives, but what we really need is a plan. Let us hope Mac Hudson et al. can deliver one.

Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations