For over 250 years Roxbury has been an essential ingredient in the story of Boston as a pioneering and world-class city.  It was Roxbury that emerged as a protective barrier to fend off the British, it was in Roxbury where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ministered at the 12th Baptist Church, and where Malcolm X lived with his sister during formative years, it was in Roxbury where jazz musicians defined that genre in Boston, and in the middle decades of the 20th Century no other area in Boston, save for perhaps downtown, rivaled Roxbury as a bustling commercial and cultural hub.

Roxbury celebrates community culture through visual and performance arts at the Roxbury Center and the Museum of the National Center for African-American Artists.   Nubian Square is a dynamic intersection of public art, retail shops, bookstores, eclectic cafes and restaurants.  The creative economy is alive in Roxbury, and the neighborhood itself is both a canvass for artistic expression and an incubator of those energies.