Coproducer and host Jezelle Anim-Addo (COM’26) (left) and camera operator Ellen Dong (CAS’26, CDS’26) during a recent practice. Photo by Michelle Delateur

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BUTV Premieres First Black History Month Special, Pulse: The Soul of Boston

Show aims to highlight Black culture and shatter the misconception that Boston lacks a vibrant Black community

When Kayla Sharpe first came to Boston, she was adamant about seeking out Black culture, given that she’s Black. Now a senior, she’s working to draw attention to the city’s Black community: she‘s hosting and heading the production of Pulse: The Soul of Boston, a BUTV special that aims to shatter the misconception that Boston lacks a vibrant Black community.

She and her coproducers “connected over people saying there’s no real Black culture in Boston,” Sharpe (COM’26) says. “But that assumption isn’t true at all.”

The 45-minute special will premiere in COM101 Friday, February 27, and will feature segments on Black music, history, art, poetry, and food. It will also stream the next day on BUTV.com.

The Soul of Boston’s team includes producer and host Jezelle Anim-Addo (COM’26), director Lola Duek (COM’26), producer Christie Delanois (COM’26), reporters Courtney Knight (COM’27) and Justin Mincy (COM’29), and many other behind-the-scenes folks. The team was guided by BUTV faculty advisor Adam Boyajy (COM’03), a COM lecturer in film and television and journalism, and journalism advisor Tina McDuffie, a COM associate professor of the practice of journalism. “I’m extremely proud of our team,” McDuffie says. “I am always impressed by their initiative. Black history is American history.”

Two highlights of the special are a spoken word poem read by recent alum Bermina Chery (CAS’25) and an R&B performance by BU step team Rhythm N’ Beat. 

“We wanted [the special] to be more feature-y rather than newsy, so it’s more arts and culture and shows the vibe of different parts of the Black community here,” Sharpe says. She and her team also wanted to branch out beyond BU to encourage students to seek Black culture in other parts of the Greater Boston area. “We didn’t want to use BU as a blanket,” she says. “We wanted to use it like a springboard to ask professors and people around campus, ‘Where can we go?’” 

Sharpe reached out to people in neighborhoods across the city: those interviewed come from Beacon Hill, the South End, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. “As soon as you leave the BU bubble, there’s Black culture everywhere,” she says. “Black culture has always been in Boston.” 

One segment features an interview with the owner of Wally’s, a Black-owned jazz club in the South End that opened in 1947. 

“We can’t talk about Black culture without music and food,” Sharpe says. “It’s a family-run business, so we interviewed the owner’s great-grandson. The owner was the first Black man to have a liquor license in the state of Massachusetts.” 

Another segment took them to Soul on Shawmut, a Black-owned restaurant in Roxbury. There, a chef answered questions and prepared a catfish sandwich, one of the restaurant’s most popular menu items, on camera. “Boston is a city that has a lot of hidden nooks and crannies that aren’t actually so hidden,” Sharpe says. 

Production has been intense in the past several weeks. Students volunteer to work on the show, which Sharpe calls “a labor of love.” The team built custom sets in COM’s Studio East to create a comfortable, homey atmosphere and did a series of pre-shooting and editing. “I just hope that students are able to see all the effort we put in,” she says, “and also engage in Boston in a different way, or maybe connect with some of the people we’ve connected with, to give them more visibility and appreciation.”

The COM student says the skills she learned as a double journalism and film/TV major gave her the what she needed to develop the special. And joining BUTV shows like Good Morning BU helped her become familiar with using a camera and gave her enough confidence to pitch her own ideas, like the Black History Month special. 

One of the most important lessons Sharpe has learned is one she and her team used as a guiding principle during production. “A lot of the time we have to amplify people from their own community,” she says. “People already have a voice; you just have to seek out the voice that wants to talk.”