The Black Heritage Trail

Boston African American National Historic Site, on the north slope of Beacon Hill. The situation here looked completely different from what I'd seen in Atlanta — free Black Bostonians could actually gather and organize, centered on the African Meeting House, which held church, school, and abolitionist organizing all in one.

A quote from William C. Nell displayed there captures it: "…this building has won for itself celebrity by the various meetings held within its walls by the colored citizens and the friends for promoting the cause of human brotherhood." Nell, born on Beacon Hill in 1816, drove the campaign that ended Boston school segregation in 1855 and became the first Black person in the U.S. federal civil service.

The Museum of African American History was founded in 1963–64 by Sue Bailey Thurman, whose hand-drawn "Negro Freedom Trails" map was the direct forerunner of this trail. The museum acquired the African Meeting House itself in 1972 — it had spent decades as a synagogue after 1898.

One panel on the Emancipation Proclamation was refreshingly honest about a more complicated Lincoln: he believed the Constitution didn't empower the federal government to abolish slavery where it already existed, and he supported "colonization," a position for which Frederick Douglass and Garrison sharply criticized him. His own words: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it."

Two stories stayed with me. The Sarah Roberts case (1848) — a five-year-old denied a nearby white school — was lost in court, becoming the origin of "separate but equal," yet led Massachusetts to ban school segregation by law in 1855. And Ellen Craft, who escaped Georgia disguised as a white male slaveholder in 1848, settled in Boston, then had to flee to England after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 sent slave catchers after her.