#UjimaWednesdays | Preserving Our Stories | 6.25

Month Description:

Memory is not passive. It is an inheritance, a method, a tool. The stories we choose to carry or recover shape the ground we walk on and the futures we dare to imagine. June’s workshop series, Receipts: Remembering as Collective Power, invites us to reflect on the quiet, patient labor of remembering. Together, we will explore how communities are building archives for themselves, not only through formal collections but through sustained acts of repetition, ritual, and care.

Through community archiving practices, oral histories, and creative documentation, we will ask: What does it mean to hold the historical record on our own terms? How do we honor what survives our time? How do we tend to the materials of the past and present, not as gestures of nostalgia but as strategies for building power, so that we might create something lasting?

This series will remind us that remembering is miracle work, a deeply relational act that helps us strengthen our foundations and build the kind of power that carries us forward.

Event Description:

Join Kalimah Redd Knight, president of the League of Women for CommunityService (LWCS) for an exploration into one of the oldest continuing Black Women’s service clubs in the nation. Based in the South End, LWCS was co-founded in early in the 20th century by Maria L. Baldwin, educator, suffragist and civil rights activist, and became a nexus of art and culture in the city, and a hub for Boston’s Black community, where it also provided a variety of social services, including housing. Among the boarders who lived at the League’s headquarters at 558 Massachusetts  Ave. was a young Coretta Scott King while she was a college student in Boston in the early 1950’s.

This presentation will highlight the League’s rich legacy; its efforts to restore and preserve its iconic building and a significant archival collection; and its vision for the future. /// from ujima: what does it mean to build an archive while living inside the very legacy you’re trying to preserve? This workshop explores the past and present of the League of Women for Community Service, a Black women-led institution founded in 1918 in Boston, and a site of ongoing organizing, mutual aid, and care. As the League undertakes the creation of its own archive, we reflect on what it means for communities to hold, protect, and make legible their own histories—without waiting to be documented by others.

Facilitator Bio:

Kalimah Redd Knight is president of the Board of The League of Women for Community Service (LWCS), one of the oldest continuing running Black women’s service clubs in the United States. As president, Kalimah is tasked with shepherding the more than $5 million renovation of its historic headquarters at 558 Massachusetts Ave. Once construction is complete, the building will be used as a gathering space for all people, including those from community, corporate, and academic settings, to build stronger social networks and to provide a forum where people can grapple with and identify solutions to pertinent current issues that affect the social, economic, and general well-being of the community. The intersectionality of Black history with women’s history is a constellation rarely seen on a single site. In addition to serving on the Board of LWCS, Kalimah has a more than 25-year professional communications career. A former news journalist and longtime public relations professional, she currently serves as senior deputy director of media relations of Tufts University. Kalimah is a native Bostonian and an HBCU graduate; she is married and has a teenage son.