History of African Americans in Boston
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 since colonial times.
[10] Wheatley is featured, along with Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, in the Boston Women's Memorial, a 2003 sculpture on Commonwealth Avenue.
The first casualty of the American Revolutionary War was a man of African and Wampanoag descent, Crispus Attucks, who was killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770.
Black Bostonians who fought in the Revolutionary War include Primus Hall, Barzillai Lew, and George Middleton, among others.
In the 19th century, many African-American abolitionists lived in the West End and on the north slope of Beacon Hill, including John P. Coburn, Lewis Hayden, David Walker, and Eliza Ann Gardner (see Notable African Americans from Boston).
[14] In 1836, Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, two escaped slaves from Baltimore, were arrested in Boston and brought before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw.
[15][note 1] Controversy over the fate of George Latimer led to the passage of the 1843 Liberty Act, which prohibited the arrest of fugitive slaves in Massachusetts.
[14] Several white Bostonians, such as William Lloyd Garrison (founder of the Liberator and a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee), were active in the abolitionist movement.
Harriet Tubman Park, at Columbus Avenue and Pembroke Street, features a memorial sculpture by Fern Cunningham.
[citation needed] According to historian Daniel M. Scott III, "Boston played a major role in black cultural expression before, during, and after" the Harlem Renaissance.
[21] Ruffin, who was a suffragist as well as a civil rights leader, edited the Woman's Era, the first newspaper published by and for African-American women.
William Stanley Braithwaite's annual Anthology of Magazine Verse, which ran from 1913 to 1929, influenced American taste in poetry.
[21] The Saturday Evening Quill Club was a black literary group organized by Boston Post editor and columnist Eugene Gordon in 1925.
The Saturday Evening Quill, the group's annual journal, published the work of African-American women, including the Boston-born poet Helene Johnson and artist Lois Mailou Jones,[24] and attracted the interest of writers in New York.
Another noted Boston writer of Johnson's generation was the poet William Waring Cuney, whose 1926 poem "No Images" was later used by jazz artist Nina Simone on her 1966 album Let It All Out.
[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.
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, Mayor Kevin White asked James Brown not to cancel a scheduled concert at Boston Garden.
"[33] After Robert 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.
Later that year, Mel King and the New Urban League protested at a United Way luncheon, charging that Boston's African-American community was receiving only "crumbs".
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 the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city.
In 1968, WGBH-TV began airing Say Brother (later renamed Basic Black), Boston's longest running public affairs program produced by, for and about African Americans.
[42] From 1974 to 1980, the Combahee River Collective, a political organizing group largely composed of Black lesbian socialists, met in Boston and nearby suburbs.
[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.
[53] Many black Boston natives have moved to the suburbs or to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, San Antonio and Jacksonville.
[59][60] In 2021, Kim Janey became the first African-American mayor of Boston, having succeeded Marty Walsh following his confirmation as the United States Secretary of Labor.
[61] When founder Joseph L. Walcott opened Wally’s Paradise in Boston's South End neighbourhood in 1947, he was the first African American nightclub owner in New England.
