The Black History Trail makes 200 stops in Massachusetts

MEDFORD, Mbad. – During Black History Month, Mbadachusetts likes to highlight its reputation as a 19th-century enlightened center of the movement for abolition. The state was one of the first to end slavery long before the 13th Amendment officially banned it nationally in 1865.

We know less that Mbadachusetts was the first to legalize slavery, in 1641. Even before, the merchants of the Mbadachusetts Bay colony had enslaved the Amerindians and, in 1638, traded them for Africans in the West Indies. The slave trade then gained momentum and quickly became a pillar of the colonial economy.

Two professors from Tufts University, Kendra Field and Kerri Greenidge, are among the many researchers who have traced the history of African-American residents of Mbadachusetts from slavery to Black Lives Matter.

Their research, a collaboration with students and non-profit organizations, has evolved to become what they call the African American Trail Project, a website that lists more than 200 historical sites throughout the world. state.

"We wanted to make history more visible and make the facts accessible," said Dr. Field.

The teachers have sought to connect these disparate people and places so that a visitor – tourist, student or local resident – can see them not in isolation but in a historical context.

Dr. Greenidge said that people often thought of Boston as "where fugitive slaves came and were" rescued "by abolitionists, or as the place where people threw bricks at black children" during demonstrations against in the 1970s. (The site of the Boston School Committee demonstrations at 15 Beacon Street is one of them.)

The professors said their goal was to "complicate the narrative", fill the gaps, show African Americans all their dimensions and place the current struggles for racial justice on a continuum.

"Pathways" of African American importance have existed for a long time. These trails, which can be covered in a few hours, include Black Heritage Trail on Beacon Hill in Boston; a self-guided tour of anti-slavery sites in Concord, Mbad .; and the African American Heritage Trail at Mount Auburn Cemetery. In contrast, the Tufts Trail Project is not a stand-alone walking tour, but rather a planning tool for do-it-yourselfers, especially beyond Beacon Hill, where much of the popular narrative has been concentrated . The website features a map with a bird's eye view of most of Mbadachusetts' known sites, as well as further information. This allows readers to suggest new places.

Some places, like the 1806 The African Meeting House of Beacon Hill, the oldest black church in the country, is open all year and offers guided tours. others consist of a statue, plaque or historic house; some are not open to the public, and some are not marked at all. Here are four remarkable sites to have.

Mike Womble, the street artist responsible for 20 murals in Boston, painted this expansive public art piece in 1995 at Roxbury's Dudley Square. In an interview, Womble said he wanted to pay tribute to the sense of community in this predominantly black neighborhood, in which Martin Luther King Jr. marched in 1965. All the people represented were residents-based real. Famous neighbors in the painting include Melnea Cbad, the suffragist and civil rights activist. Malcolm X was another. He lived as a teenager in Roxbury in the 1940s and appeared three times in the mural – "as a pimp in a zoot suit, as an executioner and as a man he became," said Mr. Womble, 45. . "I wanted to show kids that they could become something bigger."