Consider This: Boston Was Once The Center Of Black Radical Abolition In America

On Beacon Hill, just across from the Massachusetts State House, sits one of the city’s most celebrated landmarks. The recently restored Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment depicts Black volunteer infantry from Massachusetts and beyond, marching to fight in the Civil War.

Massachusetts was the first state to ban slavery outright in its constitution in 1783. It was also the first state to hold slaves, starting in the 1630s. And throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, right up to the national abolition of slavery in 1865, Massachusetts was the center of African-American organizing around Black freedom, civil rights and self-defense.

Ahead of Juneteenth, Consider This cohost Paris Alston speaks with Kerri Greenidge, an historian at Tufts and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.

On why Massachusetts was the first state to ban slavery outright

"You have this rhetoric of Republicanism, which is the idea that everyone needs to be able to govern themselves. You have a strong cohort of Republican statesmen, states, people in Massachusetts — such as [John and Abigail] Adams — who are arguing and really struggling with, ‘What does it mean to have liberty if you have slavery?’

"Also, by that point, the economy was not relying completely on slave labor. It was relying on slave trading and on trading other goods that were produced by enslaved people elsewhere, as opposed to in the state of Massachusetts. And so there was the economic argument: Is this an economic system that is actually going to be viable in 20 years? And most people in Massachusetts would have said ‘No.’

"There's also the notion that by the [17]70s and 80s … slavery existed, say, in Boston, but enslaved people were a minority of the Black population. So you have these traditions of freedom within Boston. Some black people who were ... for all intents and purposes free legally, even though they were bound working for a white person. And so the arguments against slavery were that economically, it's not viable.

"And C, there were all these comments and ideas that, you know, eventually the Black community is going to die out if we get rid of slavery. You know, ‘Massachusetts will be a white state.’ That was kind of a very true sort of idea of looking at it."

On why Massachusetts was viewed as a 'hotbed of abolition' in the first half of the 19th century

"One of the things we know, though, is that by the 1780s, 1790s, the Black community didn't dissolve. It actually increased. And so that's when you start to have a real push by Black people themselves to make freedom a reality within the state. So doing things like fighting for schools ... fighting for their right ... to have their own church when they're excluded and treated poorly by white churches. A push to strengthen laws that descendants of Black Revolutionary War soldiers receive a pension, for instance, which was, you know, controversial at the time. ... You have the African church that's founded here in the 1790s. ... if you were a Black person fleeing enslavement during the revolution, Massachusetts was the one place where you could have some protections under the law.

"... you have the 54th Memorial that's installed in 1897, which was directly the result of Black people protesting to get that installed by the early 19th, 20th century. You have protests that take place right here on the Boston Common on behalf of strengthening the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. William Trotter, editor of The Boston Guardian at the time. In 1915, you have some of the largest and most sustained protests against the racist film “Birth of a Nation” that take place right here behind us. You have Black people campaigning on behalf of a federal integration bill right here across from the State House from roughly 1912 up until 1922.

"... Massachusetts's reputation in the South, particularly by the [18]40s and 50s, was that it was a hotbed of abolition. And the irony of that is that abolition and antislavery were still a minority opinion in Massachusetts among white Massachusetts residents. It was really a core group of African-American people and then a handful of white allies who were interested in antislavery abolition. … You have this community, a very small Black community, that really had and has been at the forefront of this protest tradition."

Emancipation is one thing, true freedom and equality another thing entirely

"Massachusetts ends up getting rid of enslavement, but it's definitely something that ends over time. ... And just because slavery ended did not mean that every white person in Massachusetts believes that slavery should end. And in fact, we know there's a lot of evidence that some white people who owned enslaved people actually sold all their enslaved people to the South. ... So they're still living in Massachusetts and they can definitely say, 'I don't own slaves,' but they sold all their slaves, say to somebody in Barbados or somebody in Virginia or somebody in North Carolina ... and they were still making money off of that. So it's something to think of in terms of slavery legally not existing ... what did freedom actually look like if you're still living in a society that functions off of enslavement?"

On Massachusetts’s connection to West Indian Emancipation Day

"So when we think of Juneteenth, you know, we have to kind of think of the fact that you have Juneteenth in Texas, but you have all of these versions of emancipation that take place in Black communities before that happens. And that one of them, of course, is in New England. And ... most Black people in New England celebrated their own emancipation day, which was West Indian Emancipation Day in 1833. And that was because a majority of Black people in Massachusetts had a lot of ties to the Caribbean and to the Atlantic trade that went into the West Indies. And so slavery ending in the West Indies was actually a sort of celebration ... for this community, well into the 19th and early 20th century."

Looking back to the roots of Black community in Massachusetts

"If you're in Massachusetts, you're having somebody do pretty specialized labor for the time, somebody who's working in a blacksmith shop. So what does that mean? It means that you're taking an innocent person from the time they're a child. You're teaching them how to do blacksmithing. If that person, you know, very crudely is injured or dies, right, then you have to invest in getting another person and training them to do that thing. So it may just be that slavery functioned differently [in Massachusetts].

"The other thing we know is that Puritans had a belief that in order to enslave people, they had to know the word of God. So it seems kind of opposite of what we would think, but it goes into ... the Puritan belief at the time. … And so how do they know the word of God? They have to read it directly from the Bible — a Puritan idea. ... and so slaves had to know how to read and write.

"So that means that Massachusetts was different in the sense that a slaveholder in, say, Mississippi or North Carolina, had no interest in the fact that their enslaved person could read or write. In Massachusetts, they did. And that's part of the reason why we see people like Phillis Wheatley, where we see people who like Lucy Terry Prince, why we see some of the first novels and poetry written by Black people is in New England. It's not because New England Black people were like special. It’s because they had different access to learning and reading and writing.

"And then like a third thing to realize is that because you have this Black community that is cosmopolitan … that is enslaved but is enslaved to do a form of labor that is considered skilled for the time, it meant that this attracts a lot of other enslaved people who are running away. Who are, say, blacksmiths from North Carolina who're like, ‘I need to escape and find a place to go where I can be a blacksmith and not be enslaved.’ … And so it means that you have all of this very diverse Black community … a black community that has a lot of skills within it, even though that's not really recognized by the [white] population that surrounds it. You have a Black community that is very literate, very early, and therefore also has a lot of knowledge of the law. And so we have, you know, records of Black people reading the law, and realizing that they deserve certain rights under the law ... and fighting on their own behalf."