Advocate for Community Development

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Advocate for Community Development

Charles 'Chuck' Turner, executive director of the Center for Community Action, has been a community organizer, activist, and advocate for Boston's African-American community for over 20 years. He has a record of effectively organizing people to confront city and state agencies for jobs, affordable housing, and equitable land use. In 1967 he organized Mothers for Adequate Welfare; in the late 1960s he led the Black United Front to gain adequate funding for community economic and educational development. Turner was a leading architect of the Boston Jobs Coalition whose efforts helped create the Boston Jobs for Boston Residents Ordinance, now in effect, guaranteeing a percentage of jobs for people of color and women on all city construction projects.

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Charles Lenox Remond

Charles Lenox Remond (1810-1873) was perhaps the boldest agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and possibly the most eloquent of the Black abolitionists of antebellum Boston. He had a national and international reputation as an anti-slavery leader, and was appointed as an American

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

New England Anti-Slavery Society

The New England Anti-Slavery Society, successor to the Massachusetts General Colored Association, was founded at Boston's African Meeting House in 1832, becoming the leading, most eloquent, most effective voice in the battle against slavery. (Note: The Caution poster in the other panel was not

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

'Dean' of Black Lawyers

Henry E. Quarles, Sr., born in Boston in 1906, and a graduate of Suffolk Law School in 1928, is considered 'The Dean' of Black lawyers in Boston. He holds the distinction of having the longest legal career - 61 years of practice as an attorney - in Boston. He received an Honorary Doctor of Law from

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Top Black Businesses

In Black Enterprise magazine's listings of the top 100 Black companies and the 100 largest Black auto dealers in the United States during the late 1980s, a number of Boston area-based businesses made the lists: B.M.L. Associates (telecommunications); Grimes Oil Company (petroleum products

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Published Novelist

William Wells Brown, a novelist, playwright, historian, essayist, lecturer, physician, and abolitionist, spent most of his life and published most of his work in Boston. He is especially noted forClotel: or The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), the first

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Noted Immigration Lawyer

Attorney John W. Schenck (1869-1962), admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1914, was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston in 1920 and held that position until 1933. During that time he handled most of the immigration cases in the Commonwealth.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Black Population 1708-1752

Throughout the colonial era Boston contained the largest number of Blacks in Massachusetts. The flourishing slave trade and increased birthrate expanded the Black population from 400 in 1708 to 1,374 in 1742. In 1708 there were 33 free Blacks in Boston. In 1742 one-third of all Blacks in

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Ex-Slave Founded Church

In 1871 ex-slaves from Virginia, led by Rev. Peter Randolph, founded Ebenezer Baptist Church, which celebrated 100 years of service in Boston in 1981.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Rev. Vernon Carter's Vigil

In 1965 Rev. Vernon Carter, minister of the All Saints Lutheran Church in Boston's South End in the 1950s and 1960s, conducted a personal 114-day vigil/march in front of the Boston School Committee Headquarters to protest racial imbalance in the Boston schools.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Early Entrepreneur

By 1855 J. H. Lewis, one of the best known clothiers of the period, developed a thriving business making fashionable 'bell trouser' in a large shop on Washington Street in Boston's downtown business district.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Famous Restaurants

Small lunchrooms and restaurants were plentiful during the early 1900s in Boston's Black neighborhoods. One was the Southern Dining Room operated by Thomas E. Lucas, who advertised his place as 'cool, clean and commodious. . . . . Good food and prompt attentive service have made this a most

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Henry Owens Movers

Henry Owens Movers was founded in 1927 in Cambridge, becoming one of the major moving and rigging companies in New England still in business today. Henry Owens, Sr., founded his business with a horse and buggy, peddling ice to his neighbors and carting baggage to and from Boston's piers for the

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

John B. Cruz Construction Company

The John B. Cruz Construction Co., established in Boston in 1945, has expanded into one of the largest minority-owned construction firms in the U.S. This family-owned and operated business has constructed both housing and commercial complexes to revitalize Boston's Black neighborhoods.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Founder of Equal Rights Newspaper

J. Gordon Street was a journalist for three of Boston's white newspapers in the 1880s: theBoston Beacon, theBoston Evening Record, andThe Boston Herald. Critical of the white American press' neglect of discrimination faced by Blacks in the late 19th century, he established a Black newspaper, The

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Harvard Phi Beta Kappa

In 1895 Boston's William Monroe Trotter became the first Black to receive a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leads Rally

In April 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a graduate of Boston University School of Theology, led a march from Roxbury to a rally on Boston Common to protest the evils of school segregation in Boston. Dr. King spoke at the State House where he appealed to the Massachusetts legislature to end

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Black Newspaper

Boston's first Black newspaper of record before the Civil War was the Emancipator and Free American, founded in 1842 and closed in 1844.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

National Negro Business League

The National Business League was founded in Boston in 1900 by Booker T. Washington 'to bring the colored people who are engaged in business together for consultation, and to secure information and inspiration from each other.' More than 400 business people from 34 states attended the convention in

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First School Principal

The first African-American to be appointed as a school principal in the Boston Public Schools was Gladys Wood. Appointed in 1966 to administer the Dearborn district (composed of three elementary schools), she then moved into the Tileston district and to the Chittick School, serving for 15 years as

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

20th-Century Novelist

Dorothy West, born in 1910 and raised in Boston, became a leading novelist, short-story writer, editor, and columnist. Her novelThe Living Is Easy (about growing up Black in Boston) was published in 1948; currently she writes a column for theVineyard Gazette on Martha's Vineyard Island.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Distinguished Black Judge

Harry J. Elam became the first Black to serve as a Justice in the more than 300-year history of the Boston Municipal Court when he was appointed in 1971 as an Associate Justice. In 1978 he was the unanimous choice of the full bench of the Supreme Judicial Court to serve a five-year term as Chief

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Leading Businesswoman

A leading African-American businesswoman in Boston for more than 20 years, Estella V. Crosby owned and operated a dry goods store on Tremont Street. She chaired the annual convention of the National Business League in Boston in 1955, organized the Housewives League, and was active in the League of

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Pioneering Black Historian

William C. Nell of Boston, an early writer-reporter for the Liberator, was also a pioneering Black historian, havingwritten Services of the Colored Americans in the Wars 1776 and 1812 (1852) andThe Colored Patriots of the American Revolution with Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons to

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Abolitionist Group

When a group of Black Bostonians founded the Massachusetts General Colored Association in 1826 to fight for an end to slavery, they became Boston's primary abolition organization.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

19th-Century Statesman

Julius C. Chappelle had one of the most successful careers in Boston electoral politics of the late 19th century. He was elected to the Republican State Central Committee, the Boston City Council, and the state legislature. He served in the state House of Representatives from 1883 to 1886, the

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Leads Rally - Part 2

In April 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a graduate of Boston University School of Theology, led a march from Roxbury to a rally on Boston Common to protest the evils of school segregation in Boston. Dr. King spoke at the State House where he appealed to the Massachusetts legislature to end

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Anti-Slavery Treatise

'The Selling of Joseph,' a sermon by white clergyman Samuel Sewall, first published in Boston in 1700, became the first public anti-slavery treatise. Liberty, he wrote, being 'The real value unto life; none ought to part with it themselves or deprive others of it but upon mature

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

William Stanley Brathwaite (1878-1962) of Boston was a significant force in the development of creative American literature from 1906 to 1936. He was a poet, journalist, essayist, and pioneering anthologist of American poetry, writing some 31 books of poetry and prose. In 1918 he received the

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Adelphic Union Library Association

Boston's early 19th-century Black community was concerned with education and cultural needs. In 1838 the Adelphic Union Library Association was formed to encourage intellectual debates and offer lectures. At a time when women were generally excluded from public lectures, the Adelphic Union opened

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First U.S. Senator since Reconstruction

In 1962 Edward W. Brooke, a Boston attorney, became the first African-American to be elected Attorney General for the Commonwealth. Two year later, in 1964, he became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Education Facts

Science Facts

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