Boston’s other freedom trail, like the history it chronicles, is steep and uneven, and it isn’t finished yet. The Black Heritage Trail commemorates the affluent free black community that settled on Beacon Hill, where seeds of abolition grew.
“This is history, and this is American history,” said Charles Taylor, a National Park Service ranger and program director.
A national historic site, the trail was taken over by the park service in 1980. Park rangers are tour guides on the 1.6-mile route through the neighborhood that now is Boston’s most elite address. There were 341,487 visitors last year, compared with 4 million on the famous Freedom Trail.
The first Africans in Boston, as elsewhere in the colonies, arrived as slaves, in 1638. By 1705, there were the beginnings of a free black community, and there were more free blacks than slaves at the close of the American Revolution.
The oldest home built by blacks, and possibly the oldest built by anyone on Beacon Hill, was shared by black Revolutionary War hero George Middleton and Louis Glapion. The 1797 house is at the top of Pinckney Street, one of Beacon Hill’s most picturesque; Louisa May Alcott lived at No. 20 and ultra-fashionable Louisburg Square is in the shadow of the red brick Phillips School, built in 1824 and desegregated in 1855.
“The nice thing about the Black Heritage Trail is that it’s on quiet residential streets away from the hustle and bustle of the city,” said John Piltzecker, a spokesman for the park service.
At No. 86 lived John J. Smith, a free black who returned to Boston from the California gold rush and became a barber. Smith’s shop was a center of abolitionist activity and his house was a rendezvous for fugitive slaves.
Central to the trail, and its first stop, is the 1897 Robert Gould Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, an imposing high-relief bronze commemorating the all-black Civil War regiment from Boston that was the subject of the movie “Glory.” This is the relief over which the end credits to “Glory” were shown.
The frieze is dominated by the likeness of its white colonel, Shaw, who led the July 18, 1863, assault on Ft. Wagner in Charleston, S.C. When it was built, the monument bore only the names of the regiment’s white officers; the names of blacks who died were added later.
The trail includes several homes that were asylums for slaves hiding from bounty hunters, reminders of sorrowful days in black history. But Taylor said the trail stresses black successes.
“It’s a positive experience,” he said. “This glorifies a free black community during a time when most blacks in America were slaves.”
Tour guides find themselves correcting misconceptions, Taylor said, reminding visitors “that there were free black people in Boston, that there were rich black people in Boston, and that black people lived on Beacon Hill.”
Some blacks lived as tenants in the neighborhood. One such boarder, William C. Nell, was America’s first published black historian. Facing Nell’s home is the African Meeting House, the showpiece of the trail and the oldest standing black church building in the nation. It was opened by black preacher Thomas Paul, who had been holding worship meetings for blacks in Faneuil Hall, and was built almost entirely by black labor in 1806.
But the hall’s religious purpose was to be eclipsed by the political and abolitionist activities it sheltered.
Frederick Douglass made more than 30 speeches in the building, his principal platform in the early years of his career. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society there in 1832. The meeting house became a synagogue at the end of the 19th Century, but has been returned to its 1854 design.
The Charles Street Meeting House, built in 1807 as a Baptist church, was the setting for a challenge to segregated worship when a congregant invited black friends to his pew one Sunday. The member, Timothy Gilbert, was expelled, and he and other abolitionists went on to found the nation’s first integrated church.
A black Methodist congregation bought the meeting house on Charles Street in 1876, but it has since been subdivided into shops and private offices.
Charles Street is a mecca for antiquers, and the trail recommends it as a route. But use the parallel West Cedar; it’s impeccably preserved and high enough to afford a view of the Charles River through its iron-gated alleyways.
Other free blacks lived on Beacon Hill’s North Slope and worked for wealthy whites who built their mansions at the peak. Not all have been tastefully restored, despite some of the nation’s strictest building codes.
John Coburn ran a gambling parlor in his home three blocks away. His wealth helped make him treasurer of the New England Freedom Association, a petitioner for desegregation and a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee. Coburn was tried and acquitted for the 1851 rescue of a fugitive slave.
“It was a milestone,” Taylor said. “That’s what we’re about: positive milestones.” –
