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Museum of African American History

The Museum of African American History was founded to preserve and interpret the contributions of people of African descent and those who have found common cause with them in the struggle for liberty and justice for all Americans. Through permanent and rotating exhibits, a wide range of public and education programs ranging from debates to concerts, and summer youth camps to Underground Railroad Overnight Adventures, it places the African American experience in an accurate social, cultural and historical perspective. Incorporated in 1967, the Museum is nationally and internationally known for The African Meeting House, a National Historic Landmark, and Abiel Smith School on Boston's Beacon Hill, The African Meeting House on Nantucket, and Black Heritage Trails® in Boston and Nantucket.

https://www.maah.org/

Cheryl LaRoche: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

Thu, Mar 20, 2014

"Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, Dr. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche's book, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, examines the ""geography of resistance"" and tells the powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression. This enlightening study uncovers a new historical perspective on pathways to freedom from enslavement. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have concentrated on ""frightened fugitive slaves"" and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities ' and the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. Outstanding among them was Boston's powerful community on the north slope of Beacon Hill, considered the nexus of the abolitionist movement. Exploring the religious and fraternal institutions at the heart of these free black communities, LaRoche demonstrates how the AME and Baptist churches and Prince Hall Masons, in addition to Quakers, provided both physical and social structures that fostered escape from slavery. LaRoche shows how landscape features, such as waterways, iron forges, and caves, played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Dr. LaRoche, a lecturer in American studies at the University of Maryland, also has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, archaeological conservator for the African Burial Ground Project in New York City, and a history scholar for the Museum of African American History. In 2011, The Society for Historical Archaeology awarded her the John L. Cotter Award for exemplary work in the study of African American archaeology."

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Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom

Thu, May 8, 2008

David W. Blight, Yale professor and historian, discusses his latest work, *A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation*.

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Museum of African American History
US Supreme Court and Race

Wed, Mar 10, 2010

Two Harvard legal scholars discuss the complex and often misunderstood history of how decisions by the United States Supreme Court have affected the legal status of racial minorities in America, and ask if the Supreme Court has been a friend or a foe to African Americans. Conventional wisdom suggests that the high court, throughout its history, has consistently defended racial minorities from discriminatory policies. That interpretation may be more sympathetic than the Court’s actual record warrants. In a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Law Professor Michael Klarman suggests that the Supreme Court, more often than not, has been a regressive force on racial issues. Klarman is introduced, and then joined in conversation, by his Harvard Law School colleague Professor Randall Kennedy.

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Revisiting Brown: Did It Make a Difference?

Wed, May 12, 2004

A distinguished panel discusses the impact of Brown vs. the Board of Education, 50 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision. Moderated by Carmen Fields, director of media relations, KeySpan Energy New England, the panel includes Margaret A. Burnham, associate professor of law at Northeastern University School of Law; Nancy Gertner, US district court judge for the District of Massachusetts; Jonathan Kozol, author and activist; Charles Ogletree Jr., Jesse Climenko professor of law at Harvard Law School; Robert V. Ward Jr., dean of the Southern New England School of Law; and Dianne Wilkerson, state senator of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was particularly fitting that the Museum commemorate the landmark Brown decision given the historic significance of its site, the Abiel Smith School, which was a the center of the first school desegregation case filed in the United States, Roberts v. the City of Boston (1850). The Abiel Smith School, located at 46 Joy Street on Beacon Hill, Boston and opened in 1835, was the first public school in the country to be erected specifically as a segregated school for African American primary and secondary school-aged children. Prompted by a gift from white philanthropist Abiel Smith, the City of Boston opened the Smith School on Beacon Hill. However, the building lacked the adequate space and equipment for a quality education. Benjamin Franklin Roberts, a black printer, sued the city after his 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, had been denied admission to the primary school closest to her home in the West End and was told to go to the Smith School, more than a mile away. In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided against Roberts stating that the Boston School Committee had fulfilled its obligation to provide a "separate but equal" educational program. Forty-six years later, the US Supreme Court relied principally upon this rationale in establishing the "separate but equal doctrine", announced in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). This doctrine was unanimously reversed 58 years later by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Civil Rights Movement Series

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Museum of African American History
African American Slave Trade in New England

Thu, Apr 22, 2004

Experts present papers that discuss the history of the African American slave trade in New England. New England's pride in its abolitionist heritage has long obscured the presence of slavery in the region for over two hundred years from its first founding to the institution's ultimate demise through schemes of gradual emancipation. Though New England's role in the conduct of the slave trade is perhaps better known, the recent compilation of data related to that trade makes this an auspicious time to examine new research in this area. This Conference was sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, in association with The Museum of Afro-American History; The National Park Service; The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Suffolk University; and The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.a

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Native American Slave Trade in New England

Thu, Apr 22, 2004

Panelists from around the country converge to discuss how the history of the Native American slave trade taints New England's past. New England's pride in its abolitionist heritage has long obscured the presence of slavery in the region for over two hundred years from its first founding to the institution's ultimate demise through schemes of gradual emancipation. Though New England's role in the conduct of the slave trade is perhaps better known, the recent compilation of data related to that trade makes this an auspicious time to examine new research in this area. This Conference was sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, in association with The Museum of Afro-American History; The National Park Service; The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Suffolk University; and The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.

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Slavery and the Law in New England

Thu, Apr 22, 2004

A panel discusses the recent compilation of data related to the slave trade in New England that makes this an auspicious time to examine the region's role in the trade. New England's pride in its abolitionist heritage has long obscured the presence of slavery in the region for over 200 years from its first founding to the institution's ultimate demise through schemes of gradual emancipation.

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Museum of African American History
Free People of Color in New England

Thu, Apr 22, 2004

A panel discusses New England's role in the conduct of the slave trade and the recent compilation of data related to that trade that makes this an auspicious time to examine new research in this area. New England's pride in its abolitionist heritage has long obscured the presence of slavery in the region for over 200 years from its first founding to the institution's ultimate demise through schemes of gradual emancipation.

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Museum of African American History
Memory of the Slave Trade in New England

Fri, Apr 23, 2004

A panel discusses the way New England's pride in its abolitionist heritage has obscured the presence of slavery in the region for over 200 years, from its first founding to the institution's ultimate demise through schemes of gradual emancipation. Though New England's role in the conduct of the slave trade is perhaps better known, the recent compilation of data related to that trade makes this an auspicious time to examine new research in this area.

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Museum of African American History
Boston's 19th Century African American Communities

Sat, Jan 25, 2003

As part of a graduate course presented by the Museum of Afro-American History in collaboration with Nantucket Public Schools and UMass Boston Graduate College of Education, James and Lois Horton, authors of Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, discuss how, in post-Civil War Boston, African Americans formed a highly-organized community at the center of the antislavery movement. They describe how fugitive slaves and businessmen, washerwomen and barbers, churchgoers and abolitionists lived, worked, and organized for mutual aid, survival, and social action

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