Researching Black History at the BPL
Introduction
The first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Boston in 1638. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to make slavery legal. This became the first step in Massachusetts creating a system of race-based, chattel slavery that was hereditary. Over the next 150 years, Bostonians revisited this law and refined their understanding of slavery until legally abolishing it in the late-1700s. The business of slavery also contributed to the rise of industry in Boston. Unlike the American South and Cari
bbean where slavery was visible everywhere and enslaved people could constitute upwards of 90% of the total population, Boston's ties to slavery were commercial and enslaved people comprised a minority of the population. (From The Boston Slavery Exhibit)
Boston and Massachusetts served as a proving ground for early Jim Crow segregation, both in the adaptation and the fight against it. Though racism and the specter of slavery continued, Massachusetts remained at the foreground of the fight against slavery. Black men in antebellum Massachusetts had full voting rights. In addition to being an abolitionist organizing hub, Boston had several stops on the Underground Railroad. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the subsequent trial of Anthony Burns, the call for abolition swelled as the country headed toward Civil War.
On this page:
- Timeline of pre-Civil War Black history in Boston
- Related primary sources and research projects
- Nonfiction books about pre-war Black Boston, including both recent and historical publications
Image Right: This print portrays Phillis Wheatley, the first Black American enslaved woman to have her writings published. She was enslaved in Boston and is buried in Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston's North End. The image is also the first known individual portrait of an American woman of African descent, made as the frontispiece for the author's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religion and Moral" (London, 1773; second edition London and Boston, 1773). Today, many scholars believe that Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved man of African descent who lived near the author in Boston, created the image—Wheatley dedicated one of her poems "To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works," and his identity was later established from a note she had made in a copy of her book.
1638 - The first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrives in Boston
1641 - Massachusetts becomes the first English colony in North America to make slavery legal
1770 - Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous heritage, is killed during the Boston Massacre, becoming the first death of the American Revolution
1773 - Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, is published
1773 - Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man, enlists in the Lexington militia
1775 - Prince Hall founds the First Black Masonic Lodge (Boston) in the US
1789 - Black Bostonians are permitted to use Faneuil Hall for “public worship” on weekdays
1796 - The African Society, a Black mutual aid organization, is founded
1806 - African Meeting House is built, housing the African Baptist Church of Boston
1818 - First African Methodist Episcopal Society was formed in Beacon Hill, and later renamed the Charles Street AME Church
1829 - Black Abolitionist David Walker published “The Appeal To The Colored Citizens of the World”
1832 - Maria Stewart addresses the New England Anti-Slavery Society
1835 - Abiel Smith School becomes the first school In the nation for public education for Black Children
1840 - The founding of Twelfth Baptist Church, which became known as the “Church of the Fugitive Slave” for helping enslaved people escape to freedom
1843 - Massachusetts becomes the first state to decriminalize interracial marriage
1849-1850 - Roberts v. The City of Boston results in the desegregation of Boston schools
1851 - Black Boston abolitionist Lewis Hayden helps free Shadrach Minkins from courthouse during the Fugitive Slave Act
1854 - Anthony Burns, a man who had escaped slavery and was subsequently captured by slave, goes on trial. His lawyers unsuccessfully argue the illegality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and Burns is sent back to slavery in Virginia. The trial ignites further abolitionist activism in Boston and the Northeast
1854 - Massachusetts State Council of Colored Citizens held in Boston
1855 - Massachusetts passes law ending racial segregation on public schools
1860 - Massachusetts becomes the first state to allow Black jurors to serve on trials
Image Above: A circa 1770 print depicting the Boston Massacre. This print is held in the BPL Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. The physical copy can be accessed by appointment by contacting the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Department for further information.
Timeline courtesy of The City of Boston
Primary Sources and Research Projects
- African-Americans in Antebellum Boston: Neighborhood Database
- African Americans in Antebellum Boston
Made by the Massachusetts non-profit Primary Research, this collection includes a Beacon Hill & West End Neighborhood Database of Black residents from 1848-1855, maps
- Boston Slavery Exhibit
This exhibit confronts Boston’s role in slavery through stories, documents, and objects. It reveals the lives of individual enslaved people: the persistence of their community, their fight for freedom, and how the struggle for freedom continues today. It explores how laws and policies in Boston helped create and maintain the institution of slavery, how most Bostonians directly benefited from and were complicit in slavery and how many residents of Boston still experience the aftereffects and legacy of slavery today.
- Early Black Boston Digital Almanac
The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac project models an approach for collecting and contextualizing archival materials to address a gap in many common narratives of Boston’s past—the contributions of black individuals to the city’s history—in a digital almanac format. With the EBBDA as an example, the BRC will consider approaches to handling both perceived and actual absences in historical records, while exploring new methods for representing race in historical data collections. In the BRC prototyping phase, the project teams has investigated ways that maps and visualizations might show large-scale historical trends while further contextualizing the archival items curated by the EBBDA.
- Eleven Names Project: Recovering Enslaved People of Massachusetts
The Eleven Names Project is an independent digital research project. The mission of the Eleven Names Project is to create and increase the digital footprints of Black, indigenous, and multiracial people in Massachusetts during the time of slavery (c. 1638 – 1783).
- Enslaved Bostonians
Compiled by the City of Boston, a list of known enslaved Bostonians and any other biographical information known about these individuals.
- Equal Justice Initiative Digital Exhibit on the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Boston
This digital exhibit/report is a first step in helping people understand the scope and scale of the devastation created by slavery in America and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s influence on a range of contemporary issues. It has chapters dedicated to New England, Boston, New York City, the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, Richmond, the Carolinas, Charleston, Savannah, the Deep South, and New Orleans.
- Massachusetts History of Slavery & Segregation
Made by the Massachusetts non-profit Primary Research, this collection includes both primary sources and secondary analysis of slavery, segregation, the Fugitive Slave Law, and abolition in Massachusetts.
- The Northeast Slavery Records Index
The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Image Above: One of many abolitionist broadsides produced in Massachusetts before and during the Civil War. This image is part of The Anti-Slavery Collection at the Boston Public Library.
Nonfiction Books
Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750-1860 by Call Number: F73.9.N4 L48 1994ISBN: 9780815385578Publication Date: 2019-07-30Between the Revolution and the Civil War, non-slave black Americans existed in the no-man's land between slavery and freedom. The two generations defined by these two titanic struggles for national survival saw black Bostonians struggle to make real the quintessential values of individual freedom and equality promised by the Revolution. Levesque's richly detailed study fills a significant void in our understanding of the formative years of black life in urban America. Black culture Levesque argues was both more and less than separation and integration. Poised between an occasionally benevolent, sometimes hostile, frequently indifferent white world and their own community, black Americans were, in effect, suspended between two cultures.
Black Bostonians : Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North by Call Number: F73.9.N4 H67 1999ISBN: 9780841913806Publication Date: 2000-07-01Updated and expanded in this revised edition to reflect twenty years of new research, when published in 1979 Black Bostonianswas the first comprehensive social history of an antebellum northern black community. The Hortons challenged the then widely held view that African Americans in the antebellum urban north were all trapped in "a culture of poverty." Exploring life in black Boston from the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, they combined quantitative and traditional historical methods to reveal the rich fabric of a thriving society, where people from all walks of life organized for mutual aid, survival, and social action, and which was a center of the antislavery movement. CONTENTS: Profile of Black Boston. Families and Households in Black Boston. Formal and Informal Organizations and Associations. The Community and the Church. Leaders and Community Activists. Segregation, Discrimination, and Community Resistance. The Integration of Abolition. The Fugitive and the Community. A Decade of Militancy.
Boston's Abolitionists by ISBN: 9781933212197Publication Date: 2006In the years before the Civil War, Boston's black leaders helped fight slavery from a vibrant African-American community on Beacon Hill.
Courage and Conscience : Black & white abolitionists in Boston by Call Number: E449 .C86 1993ISBN: 9780253331984Publication Date: 1993-03-22"Written by first-rate scholars, these 10 essays give focus to the antislavery movement in Boston, particularly to the significance of African American abolitionists." --Choice "... handsome, lavishly illustrated, and informative... "nbsp;--The New England Quarterly "... this work is a thoughtful, long overdue discourse on individual and group accomplishments. It is replete with absorbing illustrations, which when accompanied by insightful essays, depict the courage of those who labored for equality in antebellum Boston." --Journal of the Early Republic Until recently little was known of the contributions of African Americans in the antebellum abolition movement. Massachusetts, having granted voting rights early on to black males, was a center of antislavery agitation. #157;Courage and Conscience documents the black activism in 19th-century Boston that was critical to the success of the abolitionist cause.- A History of the Boston Negro From the Revolution to the Civil War byCall Number: F73.9.N4 J3 1968xPublication Date: 1968Thesis--Boston University, 1968.
More Than Freedom : Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 by Call Number: F73.9.N4 K36 2012ISBN: 0143123440Publication Date: 2013-07-30A major new account of the Northern movement to establish African Americans as full citizens before, during, and after the Civil War In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz offers a bold rethinking of the Civil War era. Kantrowitz show how the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign by African Americans to claim full citizenship and to remake the white republic into a place where they could belong. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lives of black and white abolitionists in and around Boston, including Frederick Douglass, Senator Charles Sumner, and lesser known but equally important figures. Their bold actions helped bring about the Civil War, set the stage for Reconstruction, and left the nation forever altered.
The Other Brahmins : Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 by Call Number: F73.9.N4 C76 1994ISBN: 9781557283016Publication Date: 1995-07-01Adelaide Cromwell's pioneering work explores race and the social caste system in an atypical northern environment over a period of two centuries. Based on scholarly sources, interviews, and questionnaires, the study identifies those blacks in Boston who exercised political, economic, and social leadership from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The central focus is a comparison of black and white upper-class women in the 1940s. This rare look at a black social microcosm not located in the South is seminal and timely. Because it concludes at a critical period in American history, The Other Brahmins paints a colorful backdrop for evaluating subsequent changes in urban sociology and stratification. In a groundbreaking study, Cromwell effectively challenges the simplistic notions of hierarchy as they pertain to race.
Sarah's Long Walk : The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America by ISBN: 9780807050194Publication Date: 2006-02-01In 1847, a five-year-old African American girl named Sarah Roberts was forced to walk past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School on Boston's Beacon Hill. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, her father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston on her behalf. The historic case that followed set the stage for over a century of struggle, culminating in 1954 with the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The Trials of Anthony Burns : Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston by Call Number: E450.B93 V66 1999ISBN: 9780674908505Publication Date: 1999-02-15Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. In a searching cultural analysis, Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney, as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held, and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. The story is one of desperate acts, even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others. Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising, with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history, this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.
Afro-Americans in Antebellum Boston : An Analysis of Probate Records by Call Number: F73.9.N4 S73 1993ISBN: 9781138878174Publication Date: 1993First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.- Equal School Rights Meeting Among the Colored Citizens byCall Number: 4265.409Publication Date: 1850
- Equal Schools for All Without Regard to Color or Race byCall Number: 4265.407Publication Date: 1851Petition addressed "[t]o the Members of the Legislature of Massachusetts" concerning a bill on segregation of schools.
- Black Boston : Negro Life in Garrison's Boston, 1800-1860 byCall Number: F73.9.N4 L48 1976axPublication Date: 1976Thesis dissertation on microfilm
Documentaries
A Man Kidnapped! The Rendition of Anthony Burns
Anthony Burns was an African-American man who escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1854. His capture and trial in Boston, and eventual transportation back to Virginia resulted in public outrage in the North and led to increased support for abolition. This short documentary by the National Park Service shows the story of Anthony Burns, told through those who witnessed the event in 1854.
Image Left: An 1855 bust portrait of the twenty-four-year-old Burns is surrounded by scenes from his life. These include (clockwise from lower left): the sale of the youthful Burns at auction, a whipping post with bales of cotton, his arrest in Boston on May 24, 1854, his escape from Richmond on shipboard, his departure from Boston escorted by federal marshals and troops, Burns' "address" (to the court?), and finally Burns in prison. Copyrighting works such as prints and pamphlets under the name of the subject (here Anthony Burns) was a common abolitionist practice. This was no doubt the case in this instance, since by 1855 Burns had in fact been returned to his enslaver in Virginia. This portrait is part of the Boston Public Library's Print Department Collection.