Leaders across health care, food and government gathered at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building Monday night to celebrate Black leadership at the city’s second annual Trailblazers and Torchbearers event.
The event featured a panel of five local leaders who discussed challenges Black and brown communities face in Boston and alongside possible solutions.
“This is our Boston, but our Boston success is only going to be that all of us are successful at the same time,” said event organizer and Boys and Girls Club CEO Robert Lewis Jr.
Fernando Phillips, who manages the Teen Career Pathways at the the Boys and Girls Club, said he was “a kid in the community who had a nonprofit.” Now an instructor at the Boys and Girls Club, Phillips is glad to give back to his community and the next generation.
“I think having an event like this is important because we could see Black leaders in the neighborhood that they built, in the neighborhood that they grew up in,” Phillips said in an interview with the Banner.
“This neighborhood is a beacon for something new, something that the kids could aspire to look at, and not be afraid when they walk through. [They] know that when they are a Roxbury kid, they can walk with their head high and feel proud about that,” he added.
Michele Courton Brown, who will become the first Black board chair with the Boys and Girls Club in October, led the panel discussion. She began by asking panelists how growing up in Boston shaped their leadership styles and worldviews.
Michael Curry, honoree, panelist and the president of Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, said growing up in Roxbury exposed him early to the city’s racial inequalities.
Everywhere he went, Curry said, he noticed the people who were successful or in positions of authority — such as doctors and police officers — were white, whereas those who went to jail looked like him.
“The people dying of cocaine, the crack condition, looked like me,” Curry said. “They were Black and brown.” Curry said his leadership “was born out of this notion that this can’t be right” and a desire to understand why.
“That didn’t make sense to me, because all the dudes I grew up with — smart, brilliant dudes,” Curry said. “And I’m saying, ‘Why is it this dude ain’t in college? Why is it this dude ain’t running a business?’ Because they were denied the opportunity.”
Boys and Girls Club director of academic success and panelist Saaran Sillah said she has seen “firsthand how academic outcomes are tied to access and opportunity.” Encouraging her fellow leaders to find ways to lift up young people, she added that, “This city has incredible opportunities, but also very real disparities.”
As a result, Sillah said she works to ensure Black and brown children become “academically strong and personally empowered,” especially in “spaces where they may not be seen or represented.”
“We make sure that their voice matters and teach them how to use their voice,” Sillah said.
Progress toward racial equity citywide, however, remains slow, according to panelist and former acting mayor Kim Janey. Janey, who became Boston’s first Black and woman mayor in 2021, said inequality persists in part because too many people have grown “too content.”
“We are too satisfied being the only one in the room and having the access and proximity to what we perceive as power, versus building the real power needed to change the conditions in our own community,” Janey said.
Often, Curry said, Black professionals are chosen for a leadership position because those who pick them know they “wouldn’t push the issue.”
“You make them comfortable,” Curry said. “They chose you because your interests overrode the interests of the advocacy in the community that you was there to represent.”
Curry added he and others at the event have often been featured on lists of the “Top 50 Power Movers” and “150 Most Influential” people, but, as honored as he is to be on those lists, it translates into very little actual influence.
The first Trailblazers and Torchbearers event in 2025 bridged past and present to explore issues facing Black and brown communities, whereas this year’s focused on the collective impact Black leaders have on those issues, according to Lewis of the Boys and Girls Club.
As a trailblazer, Lewis said he felt compelled to continue the work and encourage fellow leaders. Other honorees include Clayton Turnbull, CEO of The Waldin Group, and Rahn Dorsey, president and CEO of the Eastern Bank Foundation.
“I feel obligated because I stand here on the backs of so many that believed in me, nurtured me, developed me, and mentored me,” Lewis said. “So I feel I have a moral obligation to lift up our community, lift up generations.”
This story is part of a partnership between the Bay State Banner and the Boston University Department of Journalism.