Boston is launching a new project with the local multimedia artist Roberto Mighty to remember the thousands of enslaved Black residents who lived in the city during its colonial and Revolutionary periods.

“I hope folks will experience this exhibit and learn that African Americans — free and enslaved — were living and working in Boston at the same time as Paul Revere, Abigail Adams and John Hancock. We were here, too,” Mighty said.

That’s the name for the project, and its accompanying online multimedia website: “We Were Here Too.”

During a guided tour launch event, Mighty showed people around the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in the North End on Wednesday. The historic site holds the remains of approximately 10,000 colonial- and post colonial-era individuals, he said — but only about 1,200 have headstones.

“Of the 1,000 Black people interred here, all but a handful are in unmarked graves,” he said.

The initiative, funded by the mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, features video interviews with historians, digital illustrations, archival images and historical content drawn from museum collections and archives around the world, according to the project’s website.

An older man in a tan jacket in stands for a photograph in a cemetery.
Local artist Roberto Mighty worked with the city to create "We Were Here Too” to honor the memory of those who lived in a historic Black community that once existed in the North End.
Robert Goulston GBH News

The tour began at the gravesite of Prince Hall, an abolitionist who fought in the Revolutionary War.

“[We] read a petition that Prince Hall sent to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1788. And he complains about Black men being kidnapped off the streets and sold into slavery,” Mighty said.

Other historical figures profiled include Phillis Wheatley Peters, the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry, and Onesimus, an African man who was instrumental in bringing knowledge of smallpox inoculation to America.

“It’s an invisible part of our history and an invisible part of our foundation,” said Linda Markarian, a South End resident who took part in the tour. “I think white people in particular have an obligation to learn more about the history of Black presence in Boston.”

Mighty believes the conversations about these figures alone will help commemorate their contributions.

“That gives them a life. And I think even saying their names gives them life. I’m not a spiritual person at all, but I do believe that. If we just say their names out loud.”