Boston African American National Historic Site (Additional Documentation)

About this property

The Boston African American National Historic Site is in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes 15 pre-Civil War structures relating to the history of Boston's 19th-century African-American community, connected by the Black Heritage Trail. Among them are the 1806 African Meeting House, the oldest standing black church in the United States. The two bills that I will sign today represent a three-pronged effort to preserve a vital, but long neglected, part of American heritage; the history and culture of Americans of African ancestry and their role in the history of our nation. Boston's first African residents arrived as slaves in 1638 with early colonists. Over time, more of their descendants were born free to white mothers; in other cases slaveholders freed slaves for service. After the American Revolutionary War, Massachusetts effectively abolished slavery by the terms of its new constitution. By the 1790 census, no slaves were recorded in Massachusetts. Subsequently, a sizable community of free Blacks and escaped slaves developed in Boston, settling on the north face of Beacon Hill, and in the North End. With a strong abolitionist community, Boston was long considered a desirable destination for southern Black slaves escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad. African Americans became activists in the abolition movement, also working to gain racial equality and educational parity with whites. They engaged in political processes to meet their objectives. Before the Civil War, more than half of the 2,000 African Americans in Boston lived on the north slope of Beacon Hill; blacks also lived in the West End north of Cambridge Street, and in the North End. These areas gradually were occupied by new groups of immigrants after African Americans moved to southern areas of Boston. (The North End became a center of Italian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) The historic site is one of 39 African-American Heritage Sites of the National Park Service. The historic buildings along today's Black Heritage Trail® were the homes, businesses, schools and churches of a thriving black community that organized, from the nation's earliest years, to sustain those who faced local discrimination and national slavery, struggling toward the equality and freedom promised in America's documents of national liberty. Robert Gould Shaw / 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment Memorial – commemorates the first African-American regiment of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War and the officer who led the 54th Regiment until his death at the Battle of Fort Wagner in SC. This monument depicts their farewell march down Beacon Street, which was erected at the edge of Boston Common, across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House. Poet Robert Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize in the 20th century for his poem, "For the Union Dead," about this monument and soldiers. The regiment's heroic battle at Fort Wagner was the subject of the film Glory (1989).

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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