Researching Black History at the BPL
Introduction
In the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson and increasing racial terror in the South, tens of thousands of Black people made their way North to Boston during the period known as the Great Migration.
Migrants traveling to Boston frequently took one of the trains heading up the East Coast. Considering this path helps answer the question why Boston received a smaller influx of southern Blacks during the Great Migration. Some migrants may 
have ended their journeys at one of these other northern cities prior to Boston. Additionally, the journey cost African Americans weeks of wages, and frequently these individuals sold everything they owned prior to making the trip. When they arrived in Boston, many southern Black migrants moved to Roxbury. Since this Boston neighborhood had a well established Black community, southern migrants received support from local churches and groups to establish their new life and form their own close-knit communities. Organizations such as the Boston Branch of the NAACP and the Boston Urban League frequently provided programs for new southern migrants and helped them find jobs. (Abbreviated version of the National Park Service article on the Great Migration in Boston)
In addition to the activism of these organizations, Boston continued to be a hub for Black political thought. Several Black political publications flourished in Boston, including The Women's Era, The Guardian, and The Colored American Magazine. The likes of W. E. B. DuBois hailed from nearby Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and continued frequent conversations with Black activists in the Boston area.
On This Page:
- Timeline of the Great Migration era in Boston
- Related primary sources and research projects
- Related nonfiction books
Image Above: Painting number 40 of the 60 in Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series. Here, several families make their way out of the fields of the South, suitcases in hand. This series has become a defining depiction of the Great Migration. Image via Ron Cogswell on Flickr.
1887 - Boston Massacre (Crispus Attucks) marker installed near the location where Attucks fell
1895 - Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin founded the National Federation of Afro-American Women in the Charles Street Church
1897 - Shaw 54th Memorial Installed
1900 - Black Bostonian Pauline E. Hopkins publishes the Colored American, a monthly magazine
1901 - William Monroe Trotter Founds The Guardian newspaper
1912 - Boston Branch of the NAACP founded by Mary Evans Wilson and Butler Roland Wilson
1915 - William Monroe Trotter leads protests of D.W. Griffith’s racist film “Birth of a Nation”
1919 - Maria Baldwin co-founds Boston’s League of Women for Community Service in 1919.
Image Above: Detail from The Guardian. May 01, 1948 calling for the desegregation of the Armed Forces. The Boston Guardian was first published in Boston, Massachusetts in 1901 by William Monroe Trotter and George Forbes, former publisher of the Boston Courant and a reference librarian at the Boston Public Library. Trotter was the editor of the newspaper from its beginnings until his death in 1934. It was a weekly publication, coming out on Saturdays, that was aimed primarily at Boston's African American community, though eventually it had significant readership across the United States. This collection has been digitized by the Boston Public Library.
Timeline courtesy of The City of Boston
Primary Sources and Research Projects
As the country’s largest internal migration, the Great Migration drastically altered the demographics of cities and towns across the nation during the 20th century. Boston served as one of the final destinations for African American southern migrants looking for economic opportunities and an escape from legalized discrimination. As I
sabel Wilkerson shares the stories of three Black southern migrants in her work The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, we sought to research the under-told stories of migrants who settled in Boston and worked at the Charlestown Navy Yard. This is a project of the National Park Service.
John B. "Jack" Miller (1924-1948) was a Black photojournalist active from 1939-1948. Jack Miller was born and raised in Boston, and during his high school years he worked as a photographer and columnist for the Boston Chronicle, a newspaper representing the West Indian community in Boston. After graduation, Miller was inducted into the U.S. Army, serving primarily as a T/5 in the U.S. Signal Corps attached to the 372nd Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. While at Fort Huachuca, Miller documented activities in the camp including daily life, training, drilling, sports, the camp buildings, and visits by dignitaries. After his discharge in 1946, Miller returned to Boston to pursue work as a photojournalist, contributing photographs to Black newspapers including the Baltimore Afro-American and Amsterdam News, and to Ebony magazine. In addition to his freelance work, Miller was hired as a staff photographer for the Baltimore Afro-American for a brief time before returning to Boston.
Image Above: Black and white photo of Jack Miller in a military uniform holding a camera.
Nonfiction Books
Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940 by Call Number: E185.6 .R765 2017ISBN: 9781625342423Publication Date: 2017-02-08In the 1920s and 1930s Boston became a rich and distinctive site of African American artistic production, unfolding at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance and encompassing literature, theater, music, and visual art. Owing to the ephemeral nature of much of this work, many of the era's primary sources have been lost. In this book, Lorraine Elena Roses employs archival sources and personal interviews to recover this artistic output, examining the work of celebrated figures such as Dorothy West, Helene Johnson, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Allan Rohan Crite, as well as lesser-known artists including Eugene Gordon, Ralf Coleman, Gertrude "Toki" Schalk, and Alvira Hazzard. Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920?1940 demonstrates how this creative community militated against the color line not solely through powerful acts of civil disobedience but also by way of a strong repertoire of artistic projects.
Black Radical : The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Call Number: E185.97.T75 A3 2021ISBN: 9781631498756Publication Date: 2021-01-12The award-winning biography that restores William Monroe Trotter to his essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and Malcom X in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. Black Radical reclaims William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934) as a seminal figure whose prophetic yet ultimately tragic--and all too often forgotten--life offers a link from Frederick Douglass to Black Lives Matter. Kerri K. Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America, showing how Trotter, a Harvard graduate, a newspaperman and an activist, galvanized black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the virulent racism of post-Reconstruction America. Situating his story in the broader history of liberal New England to "satisfying" (Casey Cep, The New Yorker) effect, this magnificent biography will endure as the definitive account of Trotter's life, without which we cannot begin to understand the trajectory of black radicalism in America.
Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920 by Call Number: F73.9.N4 S36 1997ISBN: 9781555532963Publication Date: 1997-03-20An adept, well-written illumination of this crucial time in an extraordinary city . . . The text in engrossing and written in a conversational tone, but it is most impressive for the intelligible way it fits the pieces of the political puzzle together to form a complete, multidimensional picture of Beantown racialists. -- Publishers Weekly
This book is also available without a library card for free online at https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68432- Burden of Blackness : Quest for "equality" Among Black "elites" in Late-nineteenth-century Boston byCall Number: F73.9.N4 O46 2001axPublication Date: 2001
North to Boston by Call Number: F73.9.B53 .G867 2023ISBN: 0197614442Publication Date: 2023-04-21Between World War II and 1980, tens of thousands of Black people moved to Boston from the South as part of the Great Migration, one of the most consequential mass movements of people in American history. Black migration from the South transformed the city, as it did urban areas across the country. North to Boston is the first book to examine that important subject. Blake Gumprecht traces the history of this migration and explores its impacts in greater depth through the lives of ten individuals, each the subject of one chapter. Those chapters are short biographies based on extensive interviews by the author and are told in an engaging style that reflects the author's background as a journalist. The ten people featured came from six southern states. They fled racism, limited opportunity, and hopelessness, and moved north in pursuit of better jobs, equal treatment, and greater freedom. They settled in neighborhoods such as Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. They worked as teachers, factory workers, welders, and security guards. Their stories are emblematic of the experiences of Black people everywhere who left the South, and provide a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people living in one city's Black community. North to Boston brings to life the history of the Great Migration, revealing a hidden aspect of New England's history and shining a spotlight on a singularly important event in the making of Black Boston.
The Other Black Bostonians by Call Number: F73.7.W54 J64 2006ISBN: 0253347521Publication Date: 2006-12-06This study of Boston's West Indian immigrants examines the identities, goals, and aspirations of two generations of black migrants from the British-held Caribbean who settled in Boston between 1900 and 1950. Describing their experience among Boston's American-born blacks and in the context of the city's immigrant history, the book charts new conceptual territory. The Other Black Bostonians explores the pre-migration background of the immigrants, work and housing, identity, culture and community, activism and social mobility. What emerges is a detailed picture of black immigrant life. Johnson's work makes a contribution to the study of the black diaspora as it charts the history of this first wave of Caribbean immigrants.
Race over Party : Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-century Boston by Call Number: F73.9.N4 B47 2018ISBN: 9781469640419Publication Date: 2018-05-21In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post-Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America's democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves "independents," forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians' faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
