Horace was a noted authority on Black Boston history, the abolitionist movement, and William Lloyd Garrison, the White abolitionist leader who was an important ally to African Americans in the collective struggle to end slavery. 

Horace was a tireless campaigner for racial justice. In 1968, he founded – and for many years directed – Community Change, Inc., an anti-racism research and action organization based in Boston. From 1980 to 2006, Horace taught a course called “The History and Development of Racism in the U.S.A.” at Boston College. Many students found the course to be transformational, and it was among the most popular on campus.  

In honoring Horace and “his contributions to building a more just society in Boston and throughout the world”, then-Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh proclaimed June 17, 2017 to be “Horace Seldon Day”.

A man of many passions – including music and gardening as well as local history – Michael lived with his wife, Annlinnea, and their daughter, Judy, at 71 Joy Street (formerly Belknap Street) in the heart of the North Slope. Through his research, Michael learned that the house was built in 1840 for Robert Roberts, a free Black man and abolitionist, best known for having written and published in 1827 The House Servant's Directory, a guide for butlers and household staff based on his own experience as a butler to Massachusetts Governor Christopher Gore. Roberts did not live in the house but rented it to relatives and other notable members of Boston’s free Black community, including his brother-in-law and fellow-abolitionist, Hosea Easton. (By coincidence, Robert Roberts is an ancestor of BHS members Beverly Hector-Smith and Christle Rawlins-Jackson.) The house was also briefly occupied by John T. Hilton, a prominent Black abolitionist. 

In 2006, contractors renovating a shed on the property uncovered a brick outline below the floor. Michael contacted state archeologists who excavated what turned out to be an early American toilet. Beneath it, volunteers unearthed shoes, doll fragments, hat pins, medicine bottles, children’s marbles, and a sarsaparilla bottle. The findings provide valuable insight into the daily lives of Boston’s African-American community before the Civil War.

I discovered, with the help of archivist Nicole Topich who was digitizing over 2,000 anti-slavery petitions for Harvard University, that George was instrumental in writing the charter for the Abiel Smith School -- the first school for African American children in Boston organized by Black community members on Beacon Hill -- and that he signed and contributed to many other petitions. His wife, Rachel Telford Washington, was a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1872, their daughter, Rachel, became the first African American to graduate from the New England Conservatory, and she was the music director for 40 years at the historic Twelfth Baptist Church. 

Finding out details about my ancestors’ lives was a revelation. When I was in elementary school, I was taught that all Black people before the end of slavery were “slaves” and illiterate and not much more. I can still recall the shame I felt when upon hearing this from my fourth grade teacher, my all-White classmates turned in unison to see my reaction. 

I believe that knowing and understanding the history, contributions, and sacrifices that people who came before us have made is empowering, and crucial to understanding who we are now and who we will be in the future. Imagine if I could have told my classmates that my ancestors, the Nipmuc people, were the keepers of the land that our elementary school was built on, and that they were instrumental in translating and printing, in 1663, the first bible in the Algonquin language in colonial America; or that my ancestor, George Washington, who was born in 1798, persistently put forth legislation that demanded the end of slavery and equality for People of Color and would live to see the fruits of his labor become a reality. 

It has been an eye-opening journey. Other than growing up with a vague awareness of her ancestor and his life story, she was not by any measure a historian – social justice activist, environmentalist, peacenik, yes. Also a gardener, amateur musician, reiki master, and freelance editor. A historian? Not so much!  But her participation in BHS has fired up her interest in the history of African American and Indigenous people in the U.S. and she is passionate about sharing the story with the wider public through the BHS website and special projects. 

Peter is passionate about helping people discover the unvarnished truth about slavery and the genocide against Indigenous peoples in the U.S., the defining role of slavery as the foundation of the national economy, the scale of its almost unimaginable cruelty, and the extraordinary courage and sacrifice of those who fought to end it. He believes that only by honestly acknowledging and reckoning with these crimes against humanity and their legacies of White supremacy and racism can we make meaningful progress towards authentic racial justice and collective racial healing.  

Peter is a co-founder of the David Walker Memorial Project (see Programs section), a BHS initiative focused on the Black abolitionist David Walker, who was a key leader of the abolitionist movement and a resident of the dynamic Black community on Beacon Hill. 

Peter’s stage play, Raising David Walker, that features Walker as a central character, premiered at Hibernian Hall in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood in 2014. Another of Peter's plays, Seeing Violet, tells the story of a White New England couple struggling to come to terms with revelations that his ancestors included enslavers and slave traders.  

Peter volunteered for many years with Community Change, Inc., an anti-racism learning and action center in Boston that, like Beacon Hill Scholars, was founded by Horace Seldon. 

Ken credits his interest in the history of Beacon Hill to meeting BHS founder Horace Seldon in 2010. Through Horace, Ken learned that there was a lot about the history of his Beacon Hill neighborhood that was unknown to him, despite being a resident for over 50 years. As he dug deeper into research, he became even more convinced that this information is vitally important to understanding the lives of the Black residents of Beacon Hill, the abolitionists and activists of the 18th & 19th century, and the role of New England in the slave trade, which is too often sanitized. Ken has been proud to be a part of this project for the past seven years and appreciates the opportunity to bring more of this fascinating history to light.

She has given many public talks on these topics, including at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, MA, and on the overlap of the proto-feminist writer and enslaver Judith Sargent (Murray) and the Black activist writer Nancy Gardner Prince. Her research on Gloucester-raised Prince and Black abolitionist Thomas Dalton led her to the African American Meeting House in Boston where she was fortunate to have attended the last seminars for the Beacon Hill Scholars led by BHS founder Horace Seldon.

Lise received the Paul Cuffe Fellowship at The Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime History in Mystic Seaport, CT, and the Phillips Library Fellowship, associated with the Peabody Essex Museum's Phillips Library in Rowley, MA. She also attended the Public History Seminar, led by noted historian David Blight, at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City.

As someone whose understanding of Boston's history encompassed only the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, I have been humbled by the magnitude of history I've learned here that I was never taught in high school or college. Working with BHS has been a deeply rewarding experience and I’m excited that visitors and residents of Boston alike can now celebrate and learn more about the rich Black history of the Beacon Hill community.

In my moments of rumination, I find myself thinking deeply about how we progress, as a nation fraught with a past that we are so fearful of confronting. I seem to always come back to the importance of focusing our attention not only on seeking justice, but of truly searching for a semblance of truth and fairness in the way we choose to understand our shared and collective history. Projects such as the Abolition Acre trail and the painstakingly detailed timeline on this website offer us all a safe space to genuinely understand our past, contextualize our present, and redefine our future. I hope everyone who visits this website or walks the Abolition Acre trail is afforded the breadth of introspection that I was offered in helping to put these materials together.

I was born in India, but my family moved to the United States when I was a toddler. At home, I was fortunate to be steeped in Indian culture—my mother and father sustaining it to survive in a new country, but also, to pass along the language, cuisine, and traditions to my brother and me. I have a deep love for my Indian identity, and as I grew older, this commitment also meant questioning some of the shortcomings that may come with it, such as rising Hindu extremism, rampant colorism, and caste discrimination that exists in our community. 

My hometown, Bullhead City, is both diverse and rife with racism. The town is largely low-income with significant Latino and Native communities, and I quickly noticed the extreme racism they faced from the White population. My family and I also experienced racism, but we were generally treated with more respect when compared to other minorities, as tropes of “intelligence” and “a strong-work ethic” were projected onto us. It was then that I realized that a sophisticated race hierarchy was at play. Many years later I came to understand that Black people suffer the most from this hierarchy, and I want to do everything in my power to understand and help dismantle it. My upbringing in Bullhead City abounded with diverse friendships, so it taught me to stand in solidarity with other people of color. 

I joined Beacon Hill Scholars to continue to educate both myself and the public about the inextricable link between Boston and slavery, and by extension, the United States and slavery. I have been a resident of Boston for the past six years, four of which were spent as an undergraduate at MIT, a school that historically has benefited greatly from the labor of enslaved people. I feel that it is important to communicate an honest overview of the history of slavery and related injustices, because it is the foundation for other policies that I feel are necessary in the United States, including an overhauling of our education system to highlight the importance of race, a concerted attempt towards creating reparations, and a rethinking of our carceral system.

Through countless hours of investigation in library collections – including those of the Boston Athenaeum and the New England Historic Genealogical Society – and online, Beverly uncovered information about some of her remarkable ancestors, among them 12 Revolutionary War soldiers. Others include her great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jones, an anti-slavery activist, who was enslaved in North Carolina for 43 years. During that time, he was forcibly separated from his parents and his first wife and three children and never saw them again. He finally escaped to freedom by stowing away on a northbound ship, and made it to Canada with help from abolitionist allies in Boston including William Lloyd Garrison. He later returned to the U.S., and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts with his second wife and three of their children whose freedom he had purchased with the help of a “White friend.”

Beverly also learned that she is related to Robert Roberts, who worked as a house servant for Christopher Gore, a wealthy U.S. senator and governor of Massachusetts from 1825-27. A staunch abolitionist, Roberts authored the House Servant’s Directory: A Monitor for Private Families, which was the first book by an African American published by a commercial publishing house; it was so popular that it was twice reprinted.

In 2017, Beverly was interviewed for a Dutch public television series hosted by leading Dutch hip hop artist Typhoon (Glenn de Randamie.) In his quest to discover his own roots, Glenn de Randamie had learned that his forefather, Cornelius Abraham de Randamie, had lived in Boston in 1828 and was an associate of the dynamic Black abolitionist David Walker. Beverly had discovered that one of her relatives, Henry Tyler, also knew Cornelius. In a filmed conversation at the African Meeting House, Beverly surprised and delighted Glenn by presenting him with the photocopy of a document about Cornelius that he had never seen.

A Councilor on the Board of Trustees of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Beverly is a passionate believer in the importance of history to an understanding of contemporary society. “Very little American history is taught in schools, and what is discussed is limited in scope. That is as true now as it was when I was in the Boston school system eight decades ago. People of all ages can and hopefully will learn about their own history.”

I have been helped in the journey by wise Nana; by wise and patient friends further along in the journey than I; by the many race-related mistakes I made as a school principal and the wise teachings of my students and parents of color; by the opening of an alternative door for going through life by Beverly Daniel Tatum and Horace Seldon; by my three years in the Peace Corps in the once-tiny village of Bichi, Nigeria; by my time with the wise and compassionate women and men at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute; by my 45 years of living in the up-until-recently richly diverse community of Jamaica Plain; by a recent southern Pilgrimage to the sites of civil rights heroism by Black men and women in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia; and by the gift of cross-racial friendships. I love jazz, meditation, Franklin Park, Hibernian Hall, Arts Emerson, the neighborhoods of the city of Boston, the tiny refuge for urban wildlife which is Rockview Place, all of the little critters of the earth that call the land home, and my loving friends and family. I lead the life of a happy hermit. 

Over the course of her illustrious career, Ms. Williams traveled the world participating in international and national forums and world congresses related to slavery and civil rights. In particular, she was given the opportunity to study at Kruger National Park, Durban, South Africa; Nelspruit, South Africa; St. Catherine’s College Oxford, in Oxford, England; and at the International Institute on Slavery at the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, England. These opportunities proved invaluable to her career as she was charged with overseeing all aspects of operations at the Boston African American National Historic Site, primarily focusing on ethno-tourism and heritage tourism.

Ms. Williams was instrumental in creating one of Boston’s thematic tours, the Underground Railroad walking trail, and in establishing award-winning youth programs at the Boston African American National Historic Site, and Boston National Historical Park. She also forged collaborations with sister agencies, state and local governments, and Parks Canada in cooperation with the National Park Service's Network to Freedom Program. 

Through community outreach and local historians, Ms. Williams helped to incorporate Beacon Hill Scholars and is a past president of the organization. She is a proud lifetime member of the National Association of Interpreters and the International Federation of Rangers, and continues to live in Chicago and Boston, the two cities she loves.

Lillian’s interest in history grew after she met BHS founder Horace Seldon and participated in one of his history seminars. A particular focus has been Black veterans and other African Americans whose public service has been unrecognized or undervalued. She was active in a 2010 campaign to memorialize Horatio J. Homer, Boston’s first African-American police officer, who joined the force in 1878 and served for 40 years.

Lillian’s heartfelt and insightful poems reflect her interest in people and events that change lives and change history. Her diverse topics range from the 12 Black firefighters who died while responding to the 2011 World Trade Center attacks, to tributes to poet Langston Hughes, Black abolitionist Prince Hall, and President John F. Kennedy. 

Lillian believes that BHS’s work is important because it helps to shine a light on many “untold truths” from which we can all learn.