BHS has created, or been involved with, a range of projects and programs over the years. Each furthers our mission to increase public awareness of the dynamic Black community that existed on Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts in the 19th century and its leadership role in the abolitionist movement.  

Abolition Acre! A Black Freedom Trail in Boston

The area in and around City Hall Plaza in downtown Boston was a hotbed of abolitionist activity back in the day. You can explore that history on a self-guided tour of the Abolition Acre! trail – in person or virtually – with the help of our recorded narration. And you can view a short film about Abolition Acre!  

The David Walker Memorial Project 

With this project, we aim to introduce more Americans to the most important abolitionist they’ve probably never heard of – and to honor him with a public memorial. An influential champion of the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people, David Walker wrote a freedom manifesto, Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, that he secretly circulated throughout the South via allies and sympathizers. The charismatic Walker was a prominent leader and activist in the Black Beacon Hill community in Boston. Learn more here.  

Women’s March of Courage

BHS periodically organizes a commemoration of a key event in Boston’s abolitionist history: a defiant march by Black and White members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society who ran the gauntlet of a pro-slavery mob. Participants in today’s “Women’s March of Courage” walk the same downtown route as those courageous women did nearly two centuries ago.  

Anti-slavery petitions

In the 18th century and beyond, groups of enslaved people in Massachusetts and other northern states petitioned for their freedom to colonial and state legislatures. Petitions were also used to push for changes in public policy, including desegregating schools and public transportation. BHS participated in a Harvard University-led effort to preserve and make publicly accessible thousands of these petitions by developing the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions.  

Remembering Nancy Gardner Prince

Many abolitionists of color get short shrift in the history books – if they are mentioned at all. BHS was pleased to collaborate in the creation of a memorial marker at the gravesite of abolitionist Nancy Gardner Prince in Everett, Massachusetts. Also a women’s rights activist and writer, Gardner Prince published an autobiography chronicling her impoverished childhood in Massachusetts, through her teenage years as a domestic servant, to her marriage and her travels to Russia and newly emancipated Jamaica. The place of her burial was unknown until 2021, when researcher Ali Tal-mason located Gardner Prince’s unmarked gravesite.  

Background and context

As you read about these programs, consider this historical context:

At the time of the American Revolution in 1776, some 2.5 million people of African and Native American descent were enslaved in Britain’s 13 American colonies. When the Civil War began 85 years later, that number had increased to nearly four million. 

People often think of Boston as a cradle of liberty – and it was if you were White, male, a property owner, and financially comfortable. But in colonial days, Boston was also a slave trading center. And many elite traders, merchants, manufacturers, and farmers in the city and the region made fortunes from the trade. 

They variously transported thousands of kidnapped Africans to Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, and other New England ports; sent thousands of Native American people, captured in the colonists’ wars against local tribes, to Caribbean islands to be worked to death as slaves on plantations; and exported vast quantities of dried fish, timber, livestock, rum and other goods to the islands where almost all land was devoted to the highly lucrative production of sugar. On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly 80 percent of New England's overseas exports went to the British West Indies sugar colonies, notably Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua. 

The slave trade was highly visible in Boston itself. Enslaved people were sold everywhere in the city: On ships and wharves, and in markets, warehouses, taverns, coffee houses, and private homes. Slavery was part of the fabric of society. It was the engine of the economy, north and south. It was the norm. 

But some people – Black, White and Native American – were determined to change that. Within their own communities, and as collaborators and allies, they worked to achieve a common but seemingly impossible goal: to abolish slavery and win equal rights for all Americans no matter the color of their skin, or who they were, or where they came from. 

These brave visionaries risked their lives to agitate, organize, speak out, and build a multi-racial, national grassroots movement against slavery. And despite daunting odds, they partially succeeded. In 1863, slavery was outlawed when President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The struggle for equal rights continues to this day.  

Many leading Black abolitionists in Boston lived on the North Slope of Beacon Hill and worked a short distance away in a then-bustling commercial neighborhood near the wharves of Boston Harbor. That area, in and around what is now City Hall Plaza, is what we call “Abolition Acre.” It was home to the offices of several anti-slavery groups, and the small businesses of some leading abolitionists; it also bore witness to several momentous events in the early history of the movement. Learn more by taking our self-guided walking tour along Abolition Acre! A Black Freedom Trail in Boston.