As we approach the one-and-a-half year mark as the new stewards of the Bay State Banner, we are relocating the newspaper to the Nubian Square area to take over the historic Cruz Company offices at One John Eliot Square. The decision to move the Banner from Lower Mills in Dorchester to the old Cox Building, constructed in 1870 and renovated by Cruz over 30 years ago, was not an easy one. The building we are leaving behind houses many doctors and dental offices as well as other medical support businesses. It is a great location — modern and clean, with a friendly and welcoming environment — and served the paper well for many years.
However, as we move the Bay State Banner forward, it’s important that we more closely connect with our audience and create a more interactive relationship with our readers in print and online. Moving our offices into the Nubian Square community in Roxbury is a great opportunity to provide more access to our newsroom, business office and, eventually, our live-streaming studio. We think that working in the same striking space where John Cruz and his family headquartered their successful construction and property management companies for decades allows us to continue the Cruz legacy of community work, economic empowerment and entrepreneurship.
Walking towards the building entrance, visitors are flanked on one side by the austere white-steepled sanctuary of the First Church in Roxbury, a historic congregation dating back to 1630, and on the other by the imposing Norfolk House, an historic commercial building used by Roxbury town officials for lavish banquets before annexation by Boston. The Highland Park neighborhood, stretching from Eliot Square to the far slopes of Fort Hill, was home to prominent abolitionists and is filled with architectural masterpieces, including the nearby 1750 Dillaway-Thomas House, headquarters of the Continental Army during the siege of Boston.
Generations of Black Bostonians have lived in the neighborhood, among them many leaders of Boston’s battles for civil rights and social justice. Fugitives moving along the Underground Railroad were harbored in the area. Families of color using the Green Book to find welcoming places to rest and dine during the Jim Crow era were directed to addresses near our new offices. It is a place noted for tolerance and respect, with places of worship for people of all faiths, including Muslims who attend services at the Islamic Society of Boston Mosque on Malcolm X Boulevard. The Roxbury Action Program was headquartered nearby. Roxbury Community College built its campus along the Columbus Avenue corridor at the edge of the neighborhood. Nubian Square, renamed in honor of our African ancestry to replace the name of the slaveowner Joseph Dudley, is undergoing a commercial revitalization that promises new opportunity for people of color in the city of Boston. All in all, our new home is in the geographical heart of “Good Trouble” that continues to this day.
Relocating the Banner to this community will help ensure that the Banner’s unbridled spirit and commitment to help to create a more productive, Black and brown Boston community continues hopefully for another half century. It is also, in many ways, a homecoming, as the Banner’s first offices were located on Ruggles Street, in an office just off Washington around the corner from what is today the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building.
As we approach the Banner’s 60th anniversary in 2025, we humbly look back on the many world-class journalists, photographers, editors and business executives who have made this historically Black-owned newspaper one of the most successful and respected in the country.
Looking ahead to the next chapter, we anticipate the opening of a full, live-streaming studio where we will produce a weekly online Bay State Banner newscast. We look forward to airing segments from various community support organizations underwritten by advertising sponsorship from some of the most socially responsible corporations and nonprofits in New England. Our newscast will be available on baystatebanner.com every day on demand as well as premier broadcasts scheduled biweekly. In addition to the full half-hour streaming newscast, we will be creating individual video clips of all of our new stories and distributing them out through all of our social media platforms in partnership with allied media who will be announced in our next issue.
Over the past year, the print version of the newspaper and the website have gone through extensive revitalization. In addition to moving from a tabloid to a larger broadsheet format, we have added special sections for business and sports and launched a virtual art gallery, all the while continuing the strong news and features and arts and culture journalism we inherited from esteemed Banner founder Melvin B. Miller.
With our upcoming newscast and the ability to distribute stories in shorter formats across all our platforms, we will make hard news, features, entertainment content and community information available to a younger audience that receives news in smaller increments on their cell phones and other electronic devices.
We can’t think of a better place to launch our new chapter than among the sidewalks and streets where figures like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Melnea Cass and W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter and so many other pioneers and visionaries once worked. They will continue to fuel our commitment to provide truth, hope and a vision of our Black American experience to the whole world.
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