This August marks the 400th anniversary of the first landing of enslaved Africans in British North America. It happened in 1619 at Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia.
The National Parks of Boston took part over the weekend in what the National Parks Service called the "National Day of Healing." Boston's Old North Church was part of a national bell ringing that took place at NPS sites across the country to mark the occasion. Part of the event included a special presentation in Faneuil Hall’s Great Hall, where park rangers did their best to solemnly illustrate the history of slavery in Massachusetts.
NPS Ranger Will Stilwell described slavery’s beginnings in Massachusetts in 1638. That was the year, Stilwell said, that a Salem man brought the first enslaved Africans to Boston. The man traded them in the Caribbean in exchange for about 20 Pequot — Native American men and women from what is now Connecticut who were prisoners from the Pequot War, which ended in 1637.
Stilwell said by the mid-1700s, there were around 1,600 enslaved people in Boston.
“That's almost 15 percent of the population, 15 percent of the labor force,” said Stilwell. “These people are doing vital jobs. Boston's economy would have collapsed if they didn't have them.”
Stilwell pointed out that Faneuil Hall — nicknamed "The Cradle of Liberty" — was a gift to the city of Boston in 1740 by Peter Faneuil, who enslaved five people in his household and derived some of his great wealth from trading in enslaved Africans.
Stilwell read from a first-person account of a man named Olaudah Equiano, who survived being kidnapped from Nigeria and being brought to America on the infamous Middle Passage.
"'This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become unsupportable,'" Stilwell read aloud with rising passion in his voice. "'And the filth of the necessary tubs into which the children often fell and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable.'"
Stilwell is part the National Park Service Boston's social justice team. One of the team leaders, Eric Hanson Plass, said the team was created about a year and a half ago to enable the Park Service to rethink their storytelling with consideration to historic injustices connected to the region's sites. Hanson Plass said this weekend was a prime opportunity for that.
"Four hundred years ago this month, begins one of, kind of the original sin, so to speak, of this notion of American liberty and American freedom,” Hanson Plass said. “It's built on this idea that all men are created equal, except the very man that wrote that owned slaves in his own right. ... There's still healing to be done. And that's not a bad thing. And to have that opportunity to reflect, to think differently, to engage with the history and learn from it — I think that's been our job for this weekend."
Andrew Lopez, from New York City, attended the Day of Healing in Faneuil Hall while visiting Boston this weekend. He said one of the obstacles to healing centuries of mistreatment of African Americans is that, often, history is taught as what he called "Americana."
"The problem with Americana is that it always gives you a happy ending,” said Lopez. “You know, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. All right, but the problem with that is that it never talks about the women who were there, it never talks about the black people who were there. And the problem with that is is that the foundation of this country isn't just Caucasian American idealism."
Dr. Barbara Lewis, the director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black History and Culture at UMass Boston, was also at the Day of Healing. She said her great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah Bradley, was part of Massachusetts' history, having fought in the Civil War in the state's famed all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
Lewis said healing is about people embracing each other, and understanding that the historic differentiations created by society do not apply anymore.
"We are all the same people. We are all the same family and our future is together,” Lewis said. “We have to join hands, recognize what is done — not deny it — but also understand that moving forward, we move forward together, or we perish together."
