Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Abstract

ON March 5, 1858, William C. Nell led a protest in Boston in the form of a massive history lesson. Though the city had discontinued annual public commemorations of the Boston Massacre in 1783, declaring that all the events of the Revolutionary period would henceforth be celebrated on July 4th, Nell resurrected the earlier date, insisting that a revised observance of local history was a fitting rebuttal to the United States Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision on its first anniversary. In response to the government's denial of Black citizenship, Nell organized a festival in honor of Crispus Attucks, a Bostonian of African and Wampanoag descent, the first American life sacrificed for the nation's independence. Nell marshaled a crowd at Faneuil Hall, near the site that the ship Desire docked in 1638 when it brought the first enslaved Africans to New England and, in our own time, a popular tourist attraction embroiled in controversy because it carries the name of the slave trader who funded its construction. It was precisely this kind of historical strata, layering the history of Black Boston across centuries and interwoven with the stories the nation tells about itself, that Nell meant to invoke. Displaying a collection of primary documents in front of the platform, Nell narrated the story of Attucks's heroic death, how the shops in Boston closed and bells tolled through the city on the day he was buried. But far from stroking the city's liberationist self-image, Nell and the other speakers that day took Bostonians to task for falling short of their own history and ideals, given the city's equivocal role in the fugitive cases of that explosive decade. Charles Lenox Remond warned that Massachusetts was “crawling in the dust at the feet of the Southern slaveholder.” Black Bostonians brought the city's neglected Black past to bear on the national crisis of their own moment, which Remond called “the revolution of the present.”1African American activists from the antebellum generation to our own have called attention to the repercussions of Black historical erasure and undertaken the contentious scholarly and political work of correcting the record. “[H]istory has thrown the colored man out,” William Wells Brown lamented in 1860. “You look in vain to Bancroft and other historians for justice to the colored.”2 This critique of George Bancroft is even more aptly applied to foundational New England historians from John Winthrop to James Truslow Adams, who established the vision of the region as a bucolic white village of hardworking, industrious, and independent Protestants, people “noted for the simplicity of their manners, the purity of their morals, their noble independence, the equal distribution of their property, the industrious cultivation of their lands, and the enjoyment of all the necessaries and conveniences of life,” as Jedidiah Morse described them.3 In American literary studies as well, scholars including F.O. Matthiessen and Van Wyck Brooks centered New England as the core of a national canon reflecting European intellectual traditions and a specifically white American male confrontation with nature and the New World. These works ignored, to name only one example, Boston poet Phillis Wheatley, who had been a literary celebrity not only in the region but the world for over a century at that point.4After early works from Nell, Robert Benjamin Lewis, and George Henry Moore that contested these whitewashed versions of New England history, Columbia University historian Lorenzo Johnston Greene, a student of Carter G. Woodson and a Black New Englander himself, published a substantial scholarly treatment of what he called “the long history of the Negro in America's oldest region.”5 Greene's revelation that Black people had a wide-ranging and significant presence in colonial New England and that this presence was worthy of historical inquiry set the stage for works in the subsequent decades that not only established a field of Black New England studies, but also dovetailed with projects that preserved this history, especially that of the North Slope of Boston's Beacon Hill, and made it accessible to the general public. Sue Bailey Thurman, wife of theologian Howard Thurman, conducted “Negro history” lectures during the late 1960s and early 1970s for Black teachers, scholars, and citizens across Greater Boston. Their work served as the basis for the Museum of African American History (est. 1972), the first museum in the region dedicated to the history of African American people. MAAH was also a meeting place for scholars like James and Lois Horton, whose Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North became the scholarly basis for Boston's Black Heritage Trail.6 Works by Adelaide Cromwell, William D. Piersen, Eliizabeth Pleck, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Marilyn Richardson soon changed the fundamental conception of what a Bostonian, a Yankee, a Brahmin, a New Englander was and had always been.7Since that time, scholars have deepened our understanding of the Black Bostonians who carried out some of the most consequential activist careers in American history, from Prince Hall to Lewis Hayden to Malcolm X, in keeping with the city's reputation as the proud birthplace of the radical abolition movement. But at the same time, they have engaged the difficult history of the Commonwealth as the first place in British North America to adopt slavery as a legal institution in its Body of Liberties in 1641. These works have reckoned with the links between New England's creation and the devastation wrought by European settler colonialism and enslavement. They have tracked the violent implementation of New England capital across the Cotton Kingdom and the Global South, revealing early Boston to be less the hub of the solar system, as it has been called, than of racial capitalism, both the Athens of America and a nexus of racialized “unfreedom.”8 But far from focusing on marginalization, scholars of Black New England have revealed the constitutive entwinement of African Americans in the strands of intellectual and religious history that define the region's culture, such as Puritanism and Transcendentalism.9 Literary biographies of Wheatley, Harriet Wilson, Brown, Pauline Hopkins, and Dorothy West have explored the lives and works of Black New England writers, illuminating as well the communities that produced them and were shaped by them in turn.10 Print culture studies and a now voluminous body of criticism on these figures and others have reshaped our understanding of the genres and concerns of New England literature and therefore the American canon.In this tradition of Black New England studies, the Quarterly presents the articles in this issue, focusing on the centrality of Black people, their experiences and accomplishments, to the long history of the city and the region, at a time when early African American history is the subject of national debate and, in many states, legislative control. First, Nicole Maskiel's imaginative and finely researched essay recovers a constellation of Black life in Cambridge at the turn of the eighteenth century surrounding a girl named Cicely, held captive by the prominent Brattle family, whose grave marker in the Old Cambridge Burying Ground may be the oldest surviving monument to an enslaved person in North America. Under the well-known landmarks of colonial Cambridge that still stand today—First Church, Harvard College, the grand estates that came to be known as Tory Row—Maskiel excavates evidence of the enslaved people who inhabited the parsonages and attics and less celebrated sites like the execution grounds where at least one Black woman was burned at the stake, highlighting the defiant, improbable endurance of material traces of lives neglected by the classic histories that have stewarded the stories of their enslavers.Moving into the antebellum period, Kabria Baumgartner explores a youth activist movement generally overshadowed by Garrisonianism: the Young Men's Literary Society, one aspect of the city's robust network of mutual aid and uplift projects that catapulted the careers of men including Robert Morris, who went on to renown as one of the most prominent Black attorneys in the country. Contributing to scholarship on African American childhood, free Black communities in the North, and the long tradition of Black education activism in Boston in the face of insufficient and segregated public schools, Baumgartner highlights the society's equal school rights petition campaign in 1844 that ultimately led to the passage of a bill in the Massachusetts state legislature in 1855 that was cited ninety years years later in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.Next, Max Chapnick sheds light on one of the postbellum fruits of the city's nominally desegregated schools in his study of Pauline Hopkins, novelist and editor of Boston-based Colored American Magazine, as a student at Girls High School in Roxbury, where she excelled in what was likely the strongest science curriculum in the nation. He argues that her novel Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903), arguably the first science fiction novel by an African American woman, reflects her training in chemistry and other lab sciences, essentially unheard of in girls’ education at the time, as well as first-hand experience with cutting-edge experiments in electricity and electromagnetic induction. This focus not only sheds light on the novel's treatment of traditional, emergent, and occult sciences but also helps position Hopkins as a voice in debates over Black education associated with Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and William Monroe Trotter.Finally, Maddie Webster examines the conversion in 1904 of Rockledge, the Roxbury home of William Lloyd Garrison for the last fifteen years of his life, into a nursing home for Black women and children. Webster positions the preservation of historic buildings, specifically the practice of adaptive reuse, as a strategy to advance racial justice in Jim Crow-era Boston as the city's Black activist elite rehabilitated, maintained, and preserved historic properties to provide for the needs of the Black community and to shape public memory. Specifically, Webster theorizes adaptive reuse as a preservation strategy particularly well suited for critical thinking about history and thus a fitting approach for African Americans shaping the place of antebellum buildings in the city, especially given the national context of Civil War memorialization and preservation that silenced Black history in the name of white reconciliation.Taken together, these essays not only intervene into New England historiography but also make significant contributions to the study of Black girlhood, the history of science, and the city's long tradition of educational activism. They showcase collectivity and institution building, suggesting an alternative set of values including intergenerational care and community engagement that we might come to regard as just as central to regional identity as “self-reliance.” But the work collected here also make it clear how much is left to be done. New Englanders boast so many African American “firsts” that it would be tempting to appeal to familiar narratives of regional exceptionalism in elaborating their history. We eagerly anticipate the field's continued investigations of the dynamics of race, place, and economics outside of cities like Boston, Providence, and New Haven, such as Janette Thomas Greenwood's study of postbellum Black migration to Worcester. We imagine future issues of the New England Quarterly that will establish the links connecting the region to Jamaica, Bangor, Puerto Rico, and Somalia, in the tradition of Marilyn Halter's study of Cape Verdean communities that signaled a new era in immigration studies and presented Blackness in New England as politically and culturally transnational.11 Indeed, we conclude with a call for further work on New England as a region, a cultural concept, and a political imaginary that has shaped Blackness across the African diaspora since the seventeenth century, for the reconceptualization of a regional identity capacious enough to embrace the African-descended people—Black and Afro-Native—who have shaped it, and for the development of decolonial methods befitting the study of a Black New England enmeshed in networks across the globe.We dedicate this issue to the memory of Lois Horton, James Oliver Horton, Adelaide Cromwell, and Robert Hayden, in appreciation of their work. We would also like to thank Britt Rusert, Anna Mae Duane, Richard Brown, Jared Hardesty, Shawn Salvant, Hilary Moss, Nemata Blyden, Whitney Martinko, and Sari Edelstein.