Early Boston Latin Graduates

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Early Boston Latin Graduates

Parker Bailey (Class of 1877) and Clement Morgan (Class of 1886) were the first Black graduates of the Boston Latin School. Both went on to Harvard College. Bailey pursued a lifetime of teaching at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., Morgan graduated from Harvard Law School and served as the first Black elected to the Common Council of Cambridge in 1898.

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass gave his first anti-slavery speech on Nantucket Island in August 1841, a speech which propelled him into the anti-slavery cause. He soon found his way to Boston where he became a leader of the movement.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Histrionic Club

The Histrionic Club, the first Black drama group in Boston, was founded in the late 1840s. Many of the plays it produced were written by William C. Nell.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Graduate, New England Conservatory of Music

Rachel M. Washington was the first African-American to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music in the year 1876. She served as organist and choir director at Twelfth Baptist Church in the latter half of the 19th century and was a leading music teacher in Boston's Black community.

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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

Knights of Pythias

The Knights of Pythias was a fraternal and benevolent order in Boston's small and growing Black community in lower Roxbury that provided effective health insurance and death benefits to widows and orphans. Anchored in its own building at the corner of Ruggles and Washington Streets, it helped

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Served General Washington

Barzillai Lew of Cambridge, who had been a member of the Massachusetts fighting unit during the French and Indian War of 1760, was one of the full seven-year veterans of the American Revolution. He directly served General George Washington and later headed an all-Black unit in Rhode Island during

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Early Political Writer

Hailed as America's first Black political writer, Maria W. Stewart, an early Boston activist, championed women's rights and Black self-improvement in a series of speeches and essays written between 1831 and 1833. She was probably the first Black American to lecture publicly in defense of

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

The Fight for School Equality

In 1787 Primus Hall and other Black leaders petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for equal school facilities for Black children.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Art historian Edmund B. Gaither, curator and director of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, has been a leading spokesman for the Black artist in Boston for over 25 years. He is internationally known as an advocate of African-American visual artists and as a contributor to

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Trailblazing Dancer

Born in Roxbury in 1900, Mildred Davenport became a trailblazing dancer and renowned dance instructor. Her first career was in show business. In 1938 she danced her interpretation of the African-American spirituals with the Boston Pops. She appeared on Broadway with such reviews as 'Blackbirds' and

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Leader in Barber Business

James Guilford, who owned and operated a barbering business in lower Roxbury from 1934 to 1973 ( Dunbar Barbers until 1945 and Jimmy Guilford's Men's Hair Salon until 1973), was state president of the Associated Master Barbers of Massachusetts, which included both white and Black barbers.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Museum of Afro-American History

The Museum of Afro-American History was established in Boston in 1964. Its leading founders were Dean Howard Thurman of Boston University and his wife Sue Bailey Thurman. The Museum was established 'to advance knowledge, through historic examination,' about the African-American presence in Boston

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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

'Black Nativity,' a folk-song rendering of the Christian story based on Langston Hughes's gospel song-play about the birth of Christ, has become an annual tradition in Boston since 1969. First presented in the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, it has attracted a wider audience in its performances on

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

A group of Black Bostonians founded a local chapter of the Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization, in 1846.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Legendary NAACP Leader

From her arrival in Boston in 1927 until her death at age 94, E. Alice Taylor (1892-1986) served as a business woman, church leader, and Boston NAACP official, leaving a legend of 58 continuous years of community service. For 50 years she served as an officer and board member of the Boston branch

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Black Population in 1970

In 1970, 51 percent of Boston's African-Americans had been born outside of Massachusetts and had migrated to the state, and most of the newcomers (29 percent of the entire Black population) were of southern origin.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Nationally Known Dancer

Stanley E. Brown (1902-1977) was a nationally known dancer and dance instructor in Boston from 1929 to 1977. Founder of the Stanley Brown Dance Studio, he trained and coached hundreds of professionals. 'Sugar Ray' Robinson took tap lessons from Brown as did Cab Calloway, Diana Ross, and Lola

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Female Anti-Slavery Leader

Susan Paul of Boston, daughter of Rev. Thomas Paul, served as vice president of the Second Annual Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in Philadelphia in 1839.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Black Population 1910-1980

By 1910 Boston's Black population was 13,500, and in 1940 it was only 23,000. Between 1940 and 1960 the Black population of Boston jumped to 63,000, and by 1980 it was approximately 120,000.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Since 1949 Freedom House in Roxbury, founded by Muriel and Otto Snowden, has worked through bi-racial efforts to reduce barriers to education, employment, and housing opportunities for African-Americans in Boston. Growing from the ' Upper Roxbury Community Project,' started in the

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Bay State Banner

The Bay State Banner, Boston's African-American newspaper founded in 1965 and published by Melvin Miller, celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1990.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

NAACP Youth Council

Organized with 58 members from 25 different community youth groups and churches in 1936, the Boston Youth Council of NAACP held a mass meeting a year later protesting educational inequality in the Boston schools.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston who gained her freedom in 1772, became the first African-American to publish a book of poetry,Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks, an ex-slave from Framingham was the first to die in the Boston Massacre (1770), which some historians mark as the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Attucks led a small group of colonists to a British garrison on King Street in Boston. One of the British soldiers panicked

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

William E. B. DuBois

William E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was the first African-American to receive the Ph.D. degree from Harvard (1895). His thesis was on the African Slave Trade. DuBois was influenced by Boston's fiery and 'radical' civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter in

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

For 30 years Samuel P. Perry, Jr., has spent his days and nights tutoring boys and girls in all subjects, preparing them for college. Almost any late afternoon you can see this quiet whirlwind of a Black man rushing back and forth among a half dozen Black students in Bates Hall, the huge

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Talk Show Host

Janet Langhart was the first African-American woman to host a daytime TV talk and variety show in Boston. Between 1973 and 1978 she co-hosted the Good Morning Show, later named the Good Day Show, with Jack Willis on WCVB-TV, Channel 5.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Allan Rohan Crite

Allan Rohan Crite (1910 - ) is Boston's most distinguished Black artist and art historian, noted for an eclectic range of subjects - from religious themes to neighborhood scenes. His religious artwork can be seen in the Church of St. Augustine and St. Martin on Lenox Street in lower Roxbury. His

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Primus Hall's School

A school for Black children was begun on Beacon Hill in the home of Primus Hall in 1798.

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Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

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