U.S. 250th anniversary campaign aims to capture diverse voices

As Boston and the nation look forward to celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States next year, a campaign organized by a coalition of groups focused on arts, culture and the humanities is looking to center more than just colonial voices.

The campaign, called “Everyone250” aims to tell a broader range of stories about the country and its history over the past 250 years, and that means painting  a wider, deeper picture of what Boston is.

“You think you have an idea of what Boston is, but when you visit Boston, you’re going to get a full idea, a full scope, of everything Boston is and what it has to offer,” said Dart Adams, co-founder of Mathmatik Athletics and co-chair of Everyone250.

It was launched at an event held downtown on Feb. 26.

That campaign will bring a focus to a diverse collection of “founding stories,” aimed at broadening the narrative beyond just colonial events and making the city a “hub for belonging,” said Imari Paris Jeffries, president and CEO of Embrace Boston, who is also a co-chair of Everyone250.

“When we think about the opportunity of the celebration of the country’s 250th, we could tell the millions of founding stories that have taken place in the city of Boston,” he said. “That these founding stories can live beside the colonial commemorations and the history of the founding of our country that we all know.”

And a big part of that includes highlighting the voices of Boston’s communities of color.

“For far too long, the stories of Black and brown communities have been left untold, overlooked or erased, but history cannot be rewritten,” said Stax Teixeira, a performing artist and program coordinator at Beat the Odds, in a promotional video for the campaign.

Adams said he recalls growing up and seeing the remnants of Boston’s celebration of its bicentennial, as well as Boston’s 300th anniversary. That signage and those campaigns, which were meant to portray the essence of Boston, showed limited perspectives on what the city is.

Adams, who is Black, said it’s important to him that the faces and voices featured in the campaign don’t just look like the Irish and Italian residents of the city, who are often centered in the popular image of what Boston is.

“It frames Boston as a place of white Irish and Italians, and it kind of leaves out the whole other side of what Boston culture is,” Adams said.

And that means breaking some of the typical images shown in the city.

“This is how an authentic Bostonian sounds,” Adams said, in a voice free of the dropped Rs that pack the stereotypical accent.

In its effort to broaden the stories it tells, the campaign aims to celebrate not just the country’s initial origins in 1776, but all the years of history since then. Paris Jeffries compared it to celebrating his 50th birthday, when he didn’t just recognize the 50th anniversary of his birth but what it meant to be a 50-year-old person and all of his personal history that got him to that point.

“In that aspect, our country has over 250 years of stories and opportunities and occurrences in history, findings in both victories and setbacks that have taken place,” Paris Jeffries said. “All of those make up who we are as a country today.”

Highlighting those stories, he said, isn’t a rejection of celebrations of colonial history that will also mark the country’s semi quincentennial but should be lifted up in concert.

And key to doing that, Adams said, is the element of partnership that the campaign is aiming to bring to its efforts. The campaign brings together over 100 partners to tell a range of stories from across the city.

“When we have the opportunity to show what Boston is, we want to include everybody so they’re all part of the story,” he said. “Having all these partners is the way to do it.”

Paris Jeffries said that the campaign wants to reject the idea of a “single storyteller” and that bringing in so many partners helps do that.

“You can’t practice inclusion by not creating opportunities for inclusion,” he said. There are different art and cultural leaders and creatives that have a story to tell, and collectively, each of their stories make up a chapter of stories.”

The campaign’s launch comes as the country grapples with political divides and political attacks on many of the communities of color and immigrant communities that the effort aims to center.

Adams said he sees many of the federal efforts as moves to close off and erase the country’s history. The campaign, he said, is a chance to push back.

“We want to highlight it and reveal it,” Adams said. “That’s why the stickers and everything says “reveal more resistance” or “heroes” or “secrets”, on all of our Everyone250 campaigns.”

And Paris Jeffries said that the city is no stranger to celebrating big anniversaries in moments of political tension.

Despite what Paris Jeffries called a “level of nostalgia that it was apple pie and hot dogs and fireworks,” he said that in the years leading up to the country’s bicentennial, like now, the United States was busy grappling with a moment of political strife.

Less than 10 years before, in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Less than five years before, in 1973, people were throwing oil drums into Boston Harbor to protest gas prices. The country was fending off a constitutional crisis in the form of then-President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

“We are in something that’s eerily familiar, but we have an opportunity to let this anniversary create new commitments to each other and new resolutions around belonging,” Paris Jeffries said.

The campaign’s programming will start in April, with a celebration of the anniversary of the 1965 Freedom Rally, where Martin Luther King Jr. marched with over 20,000 people from Carter Field in Roxbury, through the South End, to Boston Common. That event focused on housing, poverty, education and racial equity — issues that Paris Jeffries said are still just as pertinent today.

“It’s an opportunity for folks to advocate for the city and the community and the Commonwealth that we want to be a part of,” Paris Jeffries said.