CFA Professor’s Love Letter to Roxbury
For more than a quarter century, Leland Clarke has collected ephemera celebrating the history of his childhood home. Now, he hopes to share it with others
Leland Clarke (Wheelock’75) at his home in Randolph, Mass., with some of the approximately 1,800 pieces of ephemera he’s collected that chronicle Roxbury’s history.
CFA Professor’s Love Letter to Roxbury
For more than a quarter century, Leland Clarke has collected ephemera celebrating the history of his childhood home. Now, he hopes to share it with others
This article was originally published in BU Today on February 23, 2026. By John O’Rourke. Photos by Cydney Scott
EXCERPT
It all began with a grocery ledger.
In 2000, Leland Clarke was going through his father’s papers after he died when he came across the scrapbook, stuffed with items like newspaper clippings, old photographs, and church programs. It offered a tantalizing snapshot of Roxbury, Mass., where Clarke (Wheelock’75), now a College of Fine Arts professor of the practice of musicology and ethnomusicology, was raised.
Little did he know then that the ledger would set him on a journey lasting more than a quarter of a century, a journey that has resulted in a collection that’s grown to include approximately 1,800 pieces of ephemera chronicling Roxbury’s history.
Growing up, Clarke says, he knew little of the neighborhood’s storied past, particularly as it related to Black culture. He remembers hearing German, Italian, and Swedish spoken on his block, but had no idea that Malcolm X spent his teenage years only a few streets away. When he flipped through the grocery ledger, the first thing he saw was a flyer from 1903 announcing an appearance by Booker T. Washington, the prominent Black educator, author, and lecturer, who was coming to Roxbury’s Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal Church to speak.
“I thought, I have to find out more information,” Clarke says. In the course of his research, he discovered that Washington’s appearance instigated what became known as the Boston Riot of 1903, where supporters of Booker T. Washington and of William Monroe Trotter, founder of the Boston Guardian newspaper, battled over their differing beliefs about integration.
Clarke’s interest was piqued.
“As a child, I had dreamed of being an archaeologist, digging in the dirt and finding something, and I’ve never lost that desire of searching and discovery,” he says.
Clarke was determined to learn more about Roxbury’s past and the men and women who had contributed to its history, so he began attending online auctions, stopping by yard sales, and visiting used bookstores.
“Sometimes I found some really great things,” he says. “People also found out I was collecting stuff about Roxbury, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m clearing out my attic or my basement, do you want to come by and take a look?.”