Despite being one of the most important stops on the Underground Railroad,[2] until 1950, African Americans were a small but historically important minority in Boston, where the population was majority white. Since then, Boston's demographics have changed due to factors such asimmigration,white flight, andgentrification. According to census information for 2010–2014, an estimated 180,657 people in Boston (28.2% of Boston's population) are Black/African American, either alone or in combination with another race. Despite being in the minority, and despite having faced housing, educational, and other discrimination, African Americans in Boston have made significant contributions in the arts, politics, and business sincecolonial times.[3]
In 1638, a number of African Americans arrived in Boston as slaves on the shipDesiré fromNew Providence Island inthe Bahamas. They were the first black people in Boston on record; others may have arrived earlier.[5]
The first black landowner in Boston was a man named Bostian Ken, who purchased a house and four acres inDorchester in 1656. (Dorchester was annexed to Boston in 1870).[6] A former slave, Ken bought his own freedom, but was not necessarily afreeman with the right to vote. For humanitarian reasons he mortgaged his house and land to free another slave, making him technically the first African American to "purchase" a slave.[7]Zipporah Potter Atkins bought land in 1670, on the edge of what is now theNorth End.
A small community of free African Americans lived at the base of Copp's Hill from the 17th to the 19th century. Members of this community were buried in theCopp's Hill Burying Ground, where a few remaining headstones can still be seen today. The community was served by theFirst Baptist Church.[8] In 1720, an estimated 2,000 African Americans lived in Boston.[9]
The first casualty of theAmerican Revolutionary War was a man of African and Wampanoag descent,Crispus Attucks, who was killed in theBoston Massacre in 1770. Historians disagree on whether Attucks was a free man or an escaped slave. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1781,[11] mostly out of gratitude forblack participation in the Revolutionary War. Subsequently, a sizable community of free blacks and escaped slaves developed in Boston.
Several slave rescue riots took place in Boston.[14] In 1836, Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, two escaped slaves from Baltimore, were arrested in Boston and brought before Chief JusticeLemuel Shaw. The judge ordered them freed because of a problem with the arrest warrant. When the agent for the slaveholder requested a new warrant, a group of spectatorsrioted in the courtroom and rescued Small and Bates.[15][note 1] Controversy over the fate ofGeorge Latimer led to the passage of the 1843 Liberty Act, which prohibited the arrest of fugitive slaves in Massachusetts. Abolitionists rose to the defense ofEllen and William Craft in 1850,Shadrach Minkins in 1851, andAnthony Burns in 1854. An attempt to rescueThomas Sims in 1852 was unsuccessful.[14]
Several white Bostonians, such asWilliam Lloyd Garrison (founder of theLiberator and a member of theBoston Vigilance Committee), were active in the abolitionist movement.Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator who in 1856 was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by a Southerner for condemning slavery, was from Boston.
After the Civil War, the West End continued to be an important center of African-American culture. It was one of the few locations in the United States at the time where African Americans had a political voice. At least one black resident from the West End sat on Boston's community council during every year between 1876 and 1895.[19]
TheBoston Police Department appointedHoratio J. Homer, its first African-American officer, in 1878. Sgt. Homer spent 40 years on the police force. A plaque in his honor hangs at the Area B-2 police precinct inRoxbury.[20]
According to historian Daniel M. Scott III, "Boston played a major role in black cultural expression before, during, and after" theHarlem Renaissance.[21]
In theater, Ralf Coleman's Negro Repertory Theater earned him the unofficial title of "Dean of Boston Black Theater". In dance, Stanley E. Brown,Mildred Davenport, andJimmy Slyde earned national acclaim. In the visual arts,Allan Crite was one of the most influential painters in Boston.[21]
In literature, theColored American, one of the first magazines aimed at African Americans, was originally published in Boston before moving to New York in 1904; Cambridge-bornPauline Hopkins wrote for the magazine and was its editor from 1902 to 1904.William Stanley Braithwaite's annualAnthology of Magazine Verse, which ran from 1913 to 1929, influenced American taste in poetry.[21]
In 1900,Booker T. Washington founded theNational Negro Business League in Boston. Its mission was "to bring the colored people who are engaged in business together for consultation, and to secure information and inspiration from each other". In 1910, David E. Crawford opened the Eureka Co-Operative Bank in Boston; it was referred to as "the only bank in the East owned and operated by 'Colored People'."[25]
The first chartered branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in Boston in March 1911.[26][2]
In the first half of the 20th century, Boston's black community diversified considerably due to an influx of immigrants from the West Indies and Cape Verde as well as the American South and West (includingMalcolm X). In the 1920s the community began expanding from the South End into Roxbury.[21] Social workersOtto P. Snowden andMuriel S. Snowden foundedFreedom House in Roxbury in 1949.[27]
"Although popular and scholarly attention has been paid to the struggle for equality in other parts of the country during the twentieth century, Boston's civil rights history has largely been ignored", according to organizers of a symposium at the Kennedy Library in 2006.[28] Although Boston's civil rights movement is usually associated with the busing controversy of the 1970s and 1980s, Bostonians such asMelnea Cass andJames Breeden were active in the civil rights movement before then.[29][30] In 1963, 8,000 people marched throughRoxbury to protest "systemic segregation" in Boston's public schools.[31] In April 1965,Martin Luther King Jr. led a march from Roxbury to Boston Common to protest school segregation. That June, after the 114 day Freedom Vigil of Rev.Vernon Carter of All Saints Lutheran Church in the South End, which began two weeks after Martin Luther king's Boston march, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act signed by Governor Volpe, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate.[32]
On April 5, 1968, hoping to ease racial tensions following King's assassination, MayorKevin White askedJames Brown not to cancel a scheduled concert atBoston Garden. He persuadedWGBH-TV to televise the concert so that people would stay home to watch it. The next day, nearly 5,000 people attended a rally organized by theBlack United Front inWhite Stadium. Protesters presented a list of demands that included "the transfer of the ownership of ... [white-owned] businesses to the black community, ... every school in the black community shall have all-black staff ... [and] control of all public, private, and municipal agencies that affect the lives of the people in this community."[33]
AfterRobert F. Kennedy was assassinated,Mel King, then the executive director of the New Urban League, wrote:
We may voice our outrage at certain kinds of violence. We may implement some type of gun-control legislation, but until we confront ourselves, examine and readjust our priorities, make a firm commitment to change, and act on that commitment, we are deceiving ourselves and perpetuating a system which will lead to the ultimate form of violence—the destruction of society.[34]
That September, 500 African-American students walked out of school after a student was sent home fromEnglish High School for wearing adashiki. Later that year, Mel King and the New Urban League protested at aUnited Way luncheon, charging that Boston's African-American community was receiving only "crumbs".[35]
The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which theBoston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate,W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of theUnited States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan forcompulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The court control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to a decline of public-school enrollment andwhite flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.[36]
In 1968,WGBH-TV began airingSay Brother (later renamedBasic Black), Boston's longest running public affairs program produced by, for and about African Americans. In 1972, Sheridan Broadcasting purchased theWILD (AM) radio station, making it the only urban, contemporary music radio station in the country owned and operated by a black-owned company.[37]
Rabbi Gerald Zelermyer ofMattapan was attacked on June 27, 1969, by two black youths who came to his door, handed him a note telling him to "lead the Jewish racists out of Mattapan" and threw acid in his face. He was severely burned but not permanently disfigured. Two Mattapan synagogues were burned down by arsonists in 1970. By 1980, nearly all of the Jews who had lived on Blue Hill Avenue had relocated.[38][39]
In 1972, the Museum of African American History purchased theAfrican Meeting House, in Boston's Beacon Hill.[42]
From 1974 to 1980, theCombahee River Collective, a political organizing group largely composed of Black lesbian socialists, met in Boston and nearby suburbs.[43] The Collective is perhaps best remembered for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement,[44] a foundational text foridentity politics and an important Black feminist text.[45][46]
In 1978, the Boston branch of theNAACP successfully sued theUnited States Department of Housing and Urban Development for allowing theBoston Housing Authority to discriminate based on race.[47] Housing discrimination in Boston remained an issue; in 1989 theFederal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that residents of Boston's black neighborhoods were less likely to receive home mortgages than residents of white neighborhoods, "even after taking into account economic and nonracial characteristics that could be responsible for differences between these neighborhoods".[48]
As a gesture of protest over inadequate city services, a group of activists obtained enough signatures to put a non-bindingreferendum on the November 1986 ballot, proposing that the predominantly black neighborhoods of Boston secede and create a new city calledMandela. Voters in those neighborhoods rejected the proposal by a 3-to-1 margin.[49][50]
In 1989,Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife to collect life insurance and told Boston police she had been killed by a black gunman. The case exacerbated racial tensions in Boston for a time.[51]
Many black Boston natives have moved to the suburbs or to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, San Antonio and Jacksonville.[54][55]
According to census information for 2010–2014, an estimated 180,657 people in Boston (28.2% of Boston's population) are Black/African American, either alone or in combination with another race. 160,342 (25.1% of Boston's population) are Black/African American alone. 14,763 (2.3% of Boston's population) are White and Black/African American. 943 (.1% of Boston's population) are Black/African American and American Indian/Alaska Native.[65]
Number
% of Boston population
Black/African American
180,657
28.2%
Black/African American alone
160,342
25.1%
Black/African American and White
14,763
2.3%
Black/African American and American Indian/Alaska Native
943
.1%
According to the same report, an estimated 145,112 people in Boston are Black/African American and not Hispanic.[65]
Leonard Black (March 8, 1820 - April 28, 1883), minister, slave memoirist
William Wells Brown (1814–1884), escaped slave, abolitionist, playwright, historian; author ofClotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American
Anthony Burns (1834–1862), fugitive slave who fled to Boston
John Stewart Rock (1825–1866), dentist, doctor, lawyer, abolitionist
George Lewis Ruffin (1834–1886), the first African-American graduate of Harvard Law School, the first African American elected to the Boston City Council, and the first black judge in the United States
Mildred Davenport (1900–1990), nationally acclaimed dancer, dance instructor, and founder of two dance schools, the Davenport School of Dance and the Silver Box Studio[21][69]
William H. Ferris (1874–1941), author, minister, scholar, and activist
George Washington Forbes (1864–1927), civil rights activist, journalist, co-founder of theBoston Guardian, and one of the first African-American librarians; served at the West End branch of the Boston Public Library for over 30 years[70][71]
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958), journalist, teacher, playwright and poet of theHarlem Renaissance; one of the first African-American women to have a play publicly performed
Roland Hayes (1887–1977), lyric tenor and composer
Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930), author from Cambridge; member of the Saturday Evening Quill Club, a Boston literary group; edited theColored American, one of the first magazines aimed at African Americans[21]
Clement G. Morgan (1859-1929), Harvard-educated attorney, activist, and city official; born into slavery
Florida Ruffin Ridley (1861–1943), civil rights activist, suffragist, teacher, writer, and editor
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842–1924), civil rights activist, founder of the Woman's Era Club (the first black women's club in Boston) and editor of theWoman's Era, the first newspaper published by and for black women
Bessie Stringfield (1911–1993), the first African-American woman motorcyclist to ride solo across the United States; one of the few motorcycledespatch riders for the U.S. military during WWII
Doris Bunte (b. 1933), in 1972, became the first African-American woman elected to the Massachusetts state legislature; appointedBoston Housing Authority administrator in 1984
William Henry Lewis (1868–1949), pioneer in athletics, law, and politics; the first African American to be appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney
Paul Parks (1923–2009), the first African-American Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts; also a civil rights activist, and president of the Boston NAACP
Deval Patrick (born 1956), 71st governor of Massachusetts (was educated in Boston, worked in Boston)
^Different historians describe the rioters differently. According to Jim Vrabel (2004), it was a group of "African-American and white women". In "The 'Abolition Riot': Boston's First Slave Rescue" (1952),Leonard Levy describes them as "Men and women, both white and colored". Other sources refer to a group of "black women". According to Jack Tager, most slave rescue riots were initiated by African Americans prior to 1850, and by white abolitionists after 1850.
^Emilio, Luis F. (1891)."Readville Camp".History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865. Boston: The Boston Book Co. pp. 19–34.
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