Roxbury has been the center of Boston's African American community for more than a century, and Dudley Square, now Nubian Square, is its commercial heart. Roxbury was a separate town from Boston until 1868, and its early history as a farming and manufacturing community is preserved in the Shirley-Eustis House and other colonial-era buildings. By the early twentieth century, Roxbury's Jewish community had established synagogues and institutions along Blue Hill Avenue; after World War II, the Jewish community moved to the suburbs and a growing African American community moved in.
Urban renewal programs in the 1960s demolished large sections of Roxbury's housing and displaced thousands of residents, accelerating the cycle of disinvestment that made the neighborhood one of the poorest in the city by the 1980s. From Roxbury came some of the most important figures in the civil rights and Black Power movements in Boston: Mel King, whose 1983 mayoral campaign was the first serious Black candidacy in city history; and the protests against the Boston school busing crisis of 1974 to 1988, which was one of the most violent implementations of school desegregation in any Northern city. Dudley Square — recently renamed Nubian Square — is the commercial heart of the neighborhood.
Look at the Ferdinand Building, the former department store now housing city offices, and the squares around it: they are the bones of a neighborhood that has survived a century of policy failures.