Prologue
The Federal Reserve published a new 2026 study about Black Boston Wealth. Was Black Boston ever this rich? We’re living in a fortune building time, optimistically speaking. Today’s Boston working Black middle-class individual needs a $100K annual salary to be comfortable. Fifteen percent of Black workers have Boston management positions that pay that and more. There are five Black middleclass neighborhoods compared to over 500 White middle class communities in Boston Proper. Black communities of Boston are striving today, however many Black professionals live outside Black the main Black neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan.
A history of Black Boston
National Park Service 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 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.
Stilwell is part the National Park Service Boston’s social justice team. One of the team leaders, Eric Hanson Plass
The Stillwell history story may be from our friend. We include reference to that possibility below.
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’ …..
posted December 28. 2023
The Dorcas biographic sets up how Early Africans became assimilated into Yankee New England. It was very religious those days. One family bought a slave. Then another. Then another. Slaves from different families found a way to get together. At first, enslaved Blacks lived far apart from each other and worked for Puritan families. Eventually they found a way to hang out.
That’s how Dorcas met Her boyfriend. He had a lot to do with making the first Black community in Boston. They had babies. A small African presence began to grow Massachusetts from the 1630s. The Black population grew large enough to become the predominate residential community of Beacon Hill and the West End North station area in the early day. Today’s Boston black population has no ties to the Early Africans documented in Boston. You can look North to Canada for ties. Blacks were left out of New England formal society. We were hidden as property on the books. Our native tongues were lost. The paper trail tracing Blacks moving about Boston were few. Blacks come to Massachusetts a few years after Pilgrims claimed Plymouth at the Rock. Their story is well documented. Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate William Weld claims to be a direct descendant from the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims as does former President George Bush. Henry Louis Gate on his PBS tv show proved to Senator Newt Gingrich that he comes from the ancestral line of first President George Washington.
A woman who sailed over on the Mayflower is tied to 2,200 offspring from the 10 kids she had during the voyage before she died at sea, wrote Ric Burns into the script of his TV documentary titled “The Pilgrims,” which aired on Thanksgiving day 2015. The film set the record straight once and for all about the origin of the Thanksgiving America celebrates.
At what point did the Africans leave? Never! There was a continuing life force birthing Black Boston. The ancestors are not that far behind us. When the unfortunate were expelled from native villages by the chief, little did they know or did anyone know at the time, that they would be dropping seedlings in Early America that would become the African American experience.
This is a historic scene from the original dedication ceremony of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial monument located on Boston Common.
The Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, located across Beacon Street from the State House, serves as a reminder of the heavy cost paid by individuals and families during the Civil War.
In particular, it serves as a memorial to the group of men who were among the first African Americans to fight in that war. Although African Americans served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, northern racist sentiments kept African Americans from taking up arms for the United States in the early years of the Civil War. learn more
African Burial Ground opens in Portsmouth NH
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