Remembering Boston's Children 1980-2005 is a memorial to victims of urban violence. It remembers the many Boston children born in the last 20 years of the 20th Century who will not become Boston adults in the 21st Century.

The memorial is a public art project that uses an MBTA bus as a mobile canvas. The schoolbus-yellow vehicle enables a powerful message about urban childhood violence--authored by children themselves--to travel throughout the city. The format of the bus, a mode of transportation that connects all classes and neighborhoods, is an ideal medium for bringing this message to all citizens.

The memorial focuses on the point of view of peer survivors, a largely overlooked group, allowing children who have been most affected by community violence to respond to it. Statements by children about children they knew--classmates, friends, brothers, sisters, cousins--who have been killed, illustrate the human impact of child homicide.

Working through the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, peer survivors participated in the memorial by writing brief descriptions that convey an aspect of the humanity of victim they knew, communicating something of that child's character that is now missing from the community. Since these testimonies recall loving, positive, cheerful aspects of the child, they present, at first reading an uplifting addition to the urban landscape. When the reader realizes, however, why these children are being represented, the memorial delivers its emotional civic message.

Thomas Starr
March 2007
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