As Boston reckons with its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, much of the recognition of this aspect of the city’s past has focused on historically white neighborhoods and places, from Old South Church in the Back Bay to Faneuil Hall across from Government Center.
But new research by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Aabid Allibhai shows that slavery infiltrated all corners of Boston, including today’s mostly Black neighborhoods such as Roxbury.
This final presentation in our series, Enslavement & Resistance: New England, 1620-1760, takes us up to date and asks: given these research findings, how do we understand Boston's colonial past? How entwined was Boston’s elite with slavery? What steps should the city - and, by extension, all of us who are part of contemporary greater Boston - take today? Aabid Allibhai is joined by former member of the Massachusetts legislature and lifelong activist Byron Rushing and the Rev. Mary Margaret Earl.
Aabid Allibhai is a public historian and Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, studying the history of slavery and abolition in New England. His research has been funded by several institutions including the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Center for American Political Studies. Allibhai has twice been awarded Harvard College’s Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where he graduated with honors.
Byron Rushing, who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for over thirty years, is also former president of the Museum of African American History in Boston and current president of the Roxbury Historical Society. Through his life he has been a champion for justice.
The Rev. Mary Margaret Earl has served as executive director and senior minister of the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry for eight years. In this ministry, she has worked to strengthen bonds between UUs and the Roxbury neighborhood where the UUUM operates. She has served on the Faith in Solidarity leadership team and the Roxbury Cultural Network. Prior to her arrival at the UU Urban Ministry, she spent ten years at a faith-based nonprofit in Rhode Island serving the homeless community. She is past president of the board of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, recipient of the Heroes of Faith Award from the Rhode Island State Council of Churches for her interfaith work, and received a Courage of Conscience award from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA. She is a longtime vegan committed to standing up for nonhuman animals.
For more information
You can read Aabid Allibhai's groundbreaking report, Race & Slavery at the First Church in Roxbury: The Colonial Period (1631-1775), here.
The Boston Globe covered the launch of the report on February 6, 2023, and its findings that Roxbury First Church's earliest parishioners "owned" at least 58 enslaved Indigenous and African people. Read its account here.
To find out about the Unitarian Universalist Church at Roxbury and its many diverse programs, see here.
We are grateful to Mass Humanities for its support of our lecture series, Enslavement & Resistance: New England 1620-1760.
The views expressed are those of the presenter and not necessarily those of the Partnership of Historic Bostons.