Boston’s proud Black history has left us a legacy worth recalling every day of the year, especially as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. The first casualty in our fight against British colonialism was Crispus Attucks, a formerly enslaved man who died in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Black history has been American history since before America was America. No effort to erase that fact is going to succeed.
Public monuments like the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial on Beacon Hill remind us of the courage and sacrifice of African Americans who demanded their place in the ranks of Civil War soldiers marching off to end slavery and preserve the union that Black veterans of the Revolutionary War like Prince Hall helped to create. The magnificent 54th Regiment Memorial is but one of many visible symbols of our rich history of resistance and resilience to remember centuries of struggle for freedom, dignity and opportunity.
One hundred years after Carter G. Woodson planted the seeds of Black History Month, our country is caught up in another civil conflict, another one animated by racism and repression. This time the author of racial animosity occupies the highest office in the land. The litany of offenses by President Donald Trump is long but few surpass his blatantly racist social media post depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. Trump took down the post after a relatively bipartisan outcry but has failed to apologize for the deeply offensive image. It is just another sign of the White House’s disdain for Black America. Just a few weeks earlier, the administration removed panels describing the ordeal of enslaved people in the Philadelphia household of George Washington during the Revolution.
The assault on Black history is part and parcel of Trump’s obsession with dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion in every level of society, from college admissions and minority hiring to public contracts and voting rights. His actions, enabled by a compliant Supreme Court and Republican majority in Congress, have been met by rising resistance in the form of court challenges, “No Kings” protests and street action against ICE agents’ violent round-ups of Black and brown immigrants.
Black Boston’s history of standing up to immoral exercises of power is long and storied. In the first half of the 19th century, the nation’s largest free Black community lived on the North Slope of Beacon Hill, where the African Meeting House formed the epicenter of opposition to slavery. The warren of alleys around the sanctuary were trod by escapees along the Underground Railroad. The church itself was an organizing center to plot public action against the hated 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act.
In 1851, a runaway slave named Frederick “Shadrack” Minkins was working as a waiter at a coffee house in Boston, when a U.S. marshal took him into custody and rushed him to the nearby federal courthouse. Lewis Hayden and Robert Morris, prominent Black abolitionists, soon showed up with a raucous crowd of supporters who surrounded the courthouse demanding Minkins’ release. Morris, leading the defense team, convinced the presiding judge to delay an immediate trial. As Minkins was being led to jail, the protesters, mostly made up of Black freemen, burst into the courtroom, grabbed the prisoner and spirited him away to hiding and eventual freedom in Canada. An outraged President Millard Filmore demanded the arrest of those responsible for Minkins’ escape. Nine men, including Hayden, were put on trial but all were acquitted.
About a half-mile from the site of Minkins’ liberation stands The Embrace, the iconic bronze memorial to the love of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King. The 30-foot monument is located close to the Parkman Bandstand, where King in 1965 spoke after leading a march against school desegregation from Lower Roxbury to the Boston Common. The protest took place seven years before the filing of the federal lawsuit that would result in the court-ordered desegregation of the Boston Public Schools. The sweeping court decision was the culmination of decades of efforts by such Black leaders as Ruth Batson, Mel King and Ellen Jackson to ensure equitable educational opportunity for the Black children of Boston.
Boston historian Byron Rushing often quotes a Frederick Douglass speech that includes the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” The formerly enslaved orator, who addressed 19th century Massachusetts audiences throughout the state, said in the same speech, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” The passage that Rushing most likes to cite “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” remains as true as ever.
Black History Month calls us to remember achievements in arts and culture, politics and pulpits, science and business and every other arena of human life. In this moment of heightened stress on the very idea of what America means, we want to remind everyone of the most important lesson Black history teaches us: The lesson of resistance that Trump and his enablers seek to erase. Black history is full of difficult challenges met by organized resistance, by the voices and actions of ancestors near and distant who stood up for justice and made change happen. They planned and plotted and then took action despite risking death to horrific racist violence. That is the lesson the current administration does not want you to know. To paraphrase President Obama, we have always been the change we’re waiting for.
Donald Trump has less than three years left in his current term. What he’s unleashed won’t disappear once he and Melania leave the White House behind. But we lived through this play book before and today is no Different. Remember what history teaches us: It is up to us to stand together and demand a stop to these racism filled attack on all Americans.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
