T.J. Anderson

BlackFacts Details

T.J. Anderson

T. J. Anderson, who served as Chairman of the Department of Music and is currently the Austin Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is a leading 20th-century composer. He is recognized for his orchestration of Scott Joplin's opera,Treemonisha, which premiered in Atlanta in 1972. He has served on the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Distinguished Female Dentist

Dr. Mary Crutchfield Wright was the only woman to pass the Massachusetts Civil Service examination for dentists in state institutions in 1932.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

World War I Lieutenants

When the 17th Provisional Training Regiment at Des Moines, Iowa, graduated 278 Blacks as Army lieutenants at the beginning of World War I, eleven of the graduates were from Massachusetts and two of them, Oliver Lewis and Edward Dugger, were African-American from Roxbury. Edward Dugger helped to

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Female Bishop

The Reverend Barbara C. Harris was elected Sufragan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in September, 1988 and was consecrated bishop in February, 1989. She was the first woman, Black or white, to be elected a bishop in the Anglican Communion.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Boston Bank of Commerce

Incorporated on June 30, 1982, with Juan M. Cofield as its leading founder and president from 1982-1983, Boston Bank of Commerce is the only fully insured Black-owned and operated bank in Boston and New England. A successor to Unity Bank and Trust, Boston's first Black-owned Bank, the Boston Bank

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare

Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, formerly president of Morehouse College of Medicine, was appointed by President George Bush in 1989 as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Dr. Sullivan graduated from Boston University's School of Medicine and spent the early years of his career as a medical

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Slavery Law in Massachusetts

Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were the first colonies to authorize slavery through legislation as part of the1641 Body of Liberties, a mere three years after the first Blacks arrived in Boston.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Elected Black Woman

In 1952 Madeline D. Andrews was elected to the Medford School Committee. She was apparently the first Black woman elected to public office in Massachusetts.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Sergeant William E. Carter (1858-1918), for whom the Carter Playground in Boston's South End is named, served in the Spanish-American War, the Massachusetts National Guard from 1899 to 1917, and in World War I, where he was killed in action in October 1918.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Distinguished Psychiatrist

Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, is a nationally recognized authority on the social and psychological dynamics related to African-American life and culture in this country. For more than 20 years his numerous articles on male-female

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Underground Railroad Leader

Lewis Hayden, a leading 19th-century Black abolitionist who harbored over two-thirds of Boston's fugitive slaves in his Beacon Hill house prior to the Civil War, was elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1873.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Construction Worker's Union

In 1967 the United States Community Construction Workers, led by Leo Fletcher, became the first Black construction workers' union in Boston.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Head of Massachusetts Commandery

In 1906 James H. Wolff, a lawyer and Civil War veteran, was elected head of the Massachusetts Commandery of the Grand Army of the Republic, a largely white organization.

fave

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.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Slavery Abolished in Massachusetts

The year 1773 saw increasing agitation among Blacks in Boston and Massachusetts for an end to slavery. On January 6, then in April, and again in May, they sent petitions first to royal General Thomas Gage and next to the Massachusetts legislature, denouncing slavery as destructive of natural rights

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

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

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Benjamin and Sarah Roberts Lawsuit

Benjamin Roberts sued the Boston School Committee in 1849 for denying his daughter Sarah admission to an all-white Boston school. His action rallied school integration forces in the early 1850s, leading to the first official school desegregation in Boston in 1855. At that time the Massachusetts

fave

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

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus

In 1972 the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus was founded in an effort to coordinate the efforts of Black elected officials and make them more accountable to the Black community.

fave

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

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Licensed Attorney

Macon B. Allen, who was the first licensed African-American attorney in the United States (he passed the bar exam in Maine in 1844), was the first to practice law in Boston, having been admitted to the Suffolk County, Massachusetts bar in May 1845. He became a Justice of the Peace in 1848 and

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Black Professor of Dentistry

Dr. Joseph L. Henry was the first African-American professor at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine with his appointment in 1974. He created the department of oral diagnosis and oral radiology which he still heads. In 1978 Dr. Henry became the first African-American to become an Associate Dean at

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Black Educator's Alliance of Massachusetts

The Black Educators Alliance of Massachusetts ( BEAM), originally called the Massachusetts Negro Educators Association, was founded in 1965. Led by the late Rollins Griffith, and including John D. O'Bryant, Gerry Hill, Barbara Jackson, and Jean McGuire, it was the first professional association of

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Eminent Foreign Correspondent

William Worthy, Jr., born in Boston in 1921 and educated in its public schools, served as an eminent and significant foreign correspondent and columnist for the Baltimore Afro-American from 1951 to 1980; as a special CBS News correspondent in China, Africa, and the Soviet Union between 1955-57; and

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Black Veterinarian

Dr. Henry Lewis of Chelsea was appointed to the Massachusetts Board of Veterinary Physicians in 1908.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Organization for a New Equality

The Organization for a New Equality ( O.N.E.) was founded in 1985 by Rev. Charles Stith, Senior Pastor of Union United Methodist Church. O.N.E. is a local and national vehicle for mounting strategies to develop economic opportunity for 'people of color' and racial harmony in cities and on college

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

New England Slave Trade

The year 1644 was a momentous date in the history of the New England slave trade. Before that time Massachusetts merchants had occasionally brought in Black Africans from the West Indies; but in that year Boston traders imported slaves directly from Africa, when an association of businessmen sent

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First on Boston Common Coucil

John J. Smith, whose barber shop was an abolitionist rendezvous prior to the Civil War, was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1868 and 1869, and then re-elected in 1872. He was also the first Black to serve on the Boston Common Council in 1878.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Breezy Meadows Camp

On May 1, 1936 the Robert Gould Shaw House bought Breezy Meadows Camp in Holliston, Massachusetts, which provided summer camping for Boston's Black children and youth until the mid 1960s.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

First Black Pharmacist

Robert H. Carter of New Bedford (and great-grandfather of author/historian Robert C. Hayden) was the first Black to practice pharmacy in Massachusetts, receiving his certification from the Commonwealth in 1886. He owned two drugstores in Boston between 1895 and 1905.

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Racial Imbalance in Schools

In July 1964 an advisory committee to the State Board of Education, chaired by Dr. Owen B. Kiernan, reported that segregation existed in 78 percent of the schools in Massachusetts and that racial imbalance was detrimental to sound education in six specific ways, including 'serious conflict with the

fave

Source: African Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years

Lifestyle Facts

Blackfacts BETA RELEASE 11.5.3
(Production Environment)