Before Rosa Parks there was Elizabeth Jennings

Sunday morning service that led to an important Negro advance in citizenship. In the middle of the last century the right of the Negro to ride in car or omnibus depended on the sufferance of driver, conductor, and passenger. Sometimes a car stopped at a Negro's signal, again the driver whipped up his horses, while the conductor yelled to the "nigger" to wait for the next car.

Entrance might always be effected if in the company of a white person, and the small child of a kindly white household would be delegated to accompany the homeward bound black visitor into her car where, after a few minutes, conductor and passengers having become accustomed to her presence, the young protector might slip away. Such a situation was very galling to the self-respecting negro.

In July, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a colored school-teacher and organist at the Congregational Church, attempted to board a Third Avenue car at Pearl and Chatham Streets. She was hurrying to reach the church to perform her part in the service. The conductor stopped, but as Miss Jennings mounted the platform, he told her that she must wait for the next car, which was reserved for her people.

New York horse drawn streetcars.

"I have no people," Miss Jennings said. "I wish to go to church as I have for six months past, and I do not wish to be detained."

The altercation continued until the car behind came up, and the driver there declaring that he had less room than the car in front, the woman was grudgingly allowed to enter the car.

"Remember," the conductor said, "if any passenger objects, you shall go out, whether or no, or I'll put you out."

"I am a respectable person, born and brought up in New York," said Miss Jennings, "and I was never insulted so before."

This again aroused the conductor. "I was born in Ireland," he said, "and you've got to get out of this car."

He attempted to drag her out. The woman clung to the window, the conductor called in the driver to help him, and together they dragged and pulled and at last threw her into the street. Badly hurt, she nevertheless jumped back into the car. The driver galloped his horses down the street, passing every one until a policeman was found who pushed the woman out, not, however, until she had taken the number of the car.

President Chester A. Arthur

She then made her way home. Elizabeth Jennings took the case into court, and it came before the Supreme Court of the State in February, 1855, Chester A. Arthur, afterwards President of the United States, being one of the lawyers for the plaintiff. The judge's charge was clear on the point that common carriers were bound to carry all respectable people, white or colored, and the plaintiff was given $225 damages, to which the court added ten per cent and costs; and to quote the New York Tribune's comment on the case,1 "Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferryboats will be admonished from this as to the rights of respectable colored people."

When you talk with the elderly educated colored people of New York today, they tell you that before the War were "dark days." The responsibility felt by the thoughtful 1 New York Tribune, February 23, 1855. "The Story of an Old Wrong," in The American Woman's Journal, July, 1895. (source: Negro Artist)

Elizabeth Jennings

Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts

Hugh Howard writes in Tufts Magazine, "Slavery in Our Midst: The remains of a New England plantation reveal a side of Colonial life the history books forget to mention," by Hugh Howard: The advertisement read, “to be sold, a likely negro girl, fit for Town or Country.” The girl’s age, place of birth, and personal details are lost. Not even her name has come down to us, although we do know in which eighteenth-century newspaper the notice appeared. It was the Boston Gazette.

Royall House, Medford, MA

Many Americans have found it convenient to believe that slavery was a phenomenon of the Old South, a regional aberration linked to cotton and the Civil War, but slaves were hardly uncommon in Colonial New England. Even today people suffer from what Tufts anthropology professor Rosalind Shaw has called “social amnesia about the role of the slave trade and the presence of slaves” in the North. The truth is that for more than a century and a half, every colony in the New World was a slave colony. In fact, much of Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus sits on what was once Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre plantation presided over by the man who placed that long-ago Gazette ad, one Isaac Royall. His mansion, known as the Royall House, still stands, a two-minute walk from Cousens Gym.

The Royall House and Slave Quarters were built in 1732-1737. The House is one of the finest 18th century buildings in New England; the Slave Quarters is the only such structure in the Northern United States. Both the buildings and grounds are a National Historic Landmark. Together, these unique structures tell the intertwined stories of liberty and bondage, independence and slavery, as they have been played out not only in Colonial times, but throughout American history.

The Royalls reigned in what was then the hamlet of Mystick for two generations. Isaac Royall’s father, the son of a Maine carpenter, had made his fortune on the West Indian island of Antigua. As a slave trader—in one year he sold 121 slaves—he accumulated substantial holdings, including a sugar plantation, a refinery, and a rum distillery. When slave uprisings spread across the Caribbean, he determined to bring his family home to New England. He purchased Ten Hills Farm in 1732.

Cousens Gym and grounds at Tufts University, Medford, MA

The existing saltbox farmhouse was beneath his grandee standards. By the time the family arrived in 1737, together with twenty-seven slaves, a major remodeling campaign had doubled the footprint and raised the roof to enclose three full stories. After his death, his namesake son carried on his ostentatious ways, updating the garden front in a Classical style that incorporated pilasters, pediments, and wood shaped and painted to resemble stone.

Royall Family

Isaac Royall the younger would lose his splendid American assets in the days after Paul Revere’s ride, when, loyal to the king, he left for England. But before that, everything about him and his family’s home conveyed a sense of wealth, taste, and power; he even insisted that the property be known as Royallville. In 1750, a ship’s captain venturing north from Boston noted in his diary that it was “a Fine Country Seat . . . One of the Grandest in N. America.” Had he knocked on the Royalls’ door, he would likely have received a warm welcome. For Isaac Royall, hospitality was “almost a passion,” according to one nineteenth-century historian. “No house in the colony was more open to friends; no gentleman gave better dinners, or drank costlier wines.”

Antigua West Indies Sugar Plantation

Perhaps the visitor would have been offered a draft from the three-gallon silver punch bowl that Royall is said to have kept filled with rum at all times to refresh arriving guests. Looking around, the captain would have marveled at newly paneled walls and carved chimney pieces. The rooms of the elegant interior were furnished with the finest of imported objects, including marble and mahogany tables, peer glasses (mirrors), and a cherished rug, a “Turkey Carpitt” worth the princely sum of forty pounds. In an era when families were fortunate just to own a Bible, the Royalls had a library of more than a hundred volumes, including works by John Locke, Tacitus, and Shakespeare.

The home of one of the richest families in New England and the enslaved Africans who made their lifestyle possible. Architecture, furnishings, and artifacts bear witness to their entwined stories.

Today, the Royalls are remembered thanks to the artifacts that survive them. Their portraits have appeared in the slide trays of American art historians for generations. And their house, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, has long been maintained as a house museum. For more than a century, it has offered both a view of Colonial life among the genteel and a look at the Revolutionary era in general (after Royall abandoned his Medford home, the Continental Army moved in, and George Washington not only visited but probably slept there).

In recent years, however, the more complicated story of master and slave has begun to emerge. The organization charged with preserving the property, the Royall House Association, has begun to focus on a half-forgotten wood-and-masonry building just across the courtyard from the main residence. This was the slave quarters (known as the “out kitchen” in the Royalls’ time), once home to an ever-changing population of more than sixty men, women, and children held in bondage during the forty-odd years of the Royalls’ habitation. Historians believe it is the only structure of its kind still standing in the northern United States, and an archeological dig conducted between 1999 and 2001 unearthed thousands upon thousands of telling artifacts from the area around it.
The manner in which the Royalls lived was dependent upon slavery, and the new interpretation at the property poses a jarring contrast between English gentry and African slaves. For anyone visiting the site, the story of slavery in Massachusetts is no longer deniable.

Massachusetts became the first colony to legalize human bondage when it established the Body of Liberties, its first code of laws, in 1641. From that time until the state proscribed slavery in 1783, the slave trade was big business in the North, particularly in Boston and Rhode Island. Fully three-quarters of all New England exports circa 1770 were linked to it. Most slave ships were built in the region, and the bulk of the exported livestock, sawn boards, and grains went to the Caribbean to support the production of sugar, the raw material essential to the making of rum, the favored medium of exchange for buying slaves. More than four-fifths of the rum distilled went to Africa.

Among these stories is that of Belinda, one of the enslaved Africans owned by the Royalls; after their departure, she successfully petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature in 1783 for a pension. Of course, these stories played out in the context of the American Revolution. After the departure of the Royalls to England, General John Stark made the Royall House his headquarters in the first days of the Revolutionary War. General George Washington helped plan the siege of Boston from here

In some respects, slavery in New England differed from that in the South. Slaves were a common presence in the homes of middling householders as well as the gentry in the North, though the region’s mercantile economy meant fewer slaves were required (the typical slaveholder had between one and five bondsmen). Without a single cash crop like tobacco or rice to plant and harvest, the slaves were more likely to learn trades.

Many became shipwrights, carpenters, tailors, printers, blacksmiths, bakers, or coopers. For their masters, this meant added value, as a slave trained as an artisan or craftsman could be hired out.

At Ten Hills Farm, slaves produced wool, cider, and hay and tended livestock. Some worked as field hands, while others had higher status as boatmen, domestic servants, cooks, and “body slaves” (valets and ladies’ maids). A liveried coachman drove the Royalls’ fine carriage, with its team of four horses. Some of the servants slept in the kitchen, a few in an upstairs chamber, others in an attic garret. The rest probably inhabited the slave quarters, which provided rudimentary accommodations, including a hearth for preparing meals. Beyond this handful of details, little is known about the lives of the enslaved at Royallville. Until 1999, in fact, all such information had to be inferred from vague and fleeting transactions noted in the Royalls’ ledgers, inventories, and probate records.

Then came the meticulous three-season dig masterminded by the archaeologist Alexandra A. Chan, then a graduate student at Boston University. Among the roughly 65,000 artifacts excavated were pottery, sewing implements, tableware, coins, metal, animal bones, buttons and buckles, and shards of glass. As Chan points out in her book Slavery in the Age of Reason (University of Tennessee Press, 2007), such “mundane refuse” is invaluable, because through it, “the historically invisible can come vibrantly to life.” The record of those who labored at Ten Hills Farm is to be found largely in “overlooked places,” she explains. “Artifacts lend heft, depth, and texture to historical narratives; they document the past as much as any deed, letter, or newspaper can.”

Some of the finds complement documents already in the hands of historians, allowing us to envision the gentrified life of the Royalls in more vivid detail. For example, an inventory of the family’s possessions specifies wine glasses, decanters, tumblers, and various items of “chiney” (china). And the dig did indeed turn up fragments that were once teacups, stemware, chocolate cups, wine bottles, pharmaceutical containers, and liquor bottles imprinted with the Royall seal.

In his will of 1779, Isaac Royall left land to Harvard College to establish the first professorship in law at the school. His heirs subsequently inherited the Medford estate and used the proceeds from its sale to endow Harvard Law School itself.

Contrasting with such finds are numerous bits and pieces of plain, homely crockery. While the Royalls drank port, chocolate, tea, punch, and coffee from an array of purpose-made and imported vessels, those who served them ate off coarse earthenware. The dig uncovered thousands of shards of crude redware storage jars, relics of the hard work that was the slaves’ lot: growing produce, cooking and preserving foods, laundering their owners’ clothes, making soap and candles, maintaining the house and horses, and performing the thousand other duties that gave the Royalls the leisure to read, socialize, and pose for paintings.

A 2011 re-creation of a bed for an enslaved member of the Royall household.

Still, the relics illuminate more than the slaves’ travails. There are also crude tobacco pipes, handmade children’s marbles, and gaming pieces shaped from shards of porcelain. Chan believes that a decorative stone bead discovered in a foundation was worn by a slave woman as part of her “garments of gladness,” clothing for times of spiritual celebration. Another object that resembles an arrowhead may be an amulet of the sort that the Akan people of West Africa thought to be magical. The evidence is tantalizing: because of Chan and her colleagues, enslaved people about whom so little is known can now be considered during moments of relaxation and ritual.

The Royalls’ “Negroes” were just “sundry goods,” to be sold along with barrel staves, “very good hay,” West Indian rum, and “Molases.”

Artifacts like these are in poignant contrast to slavery’s more brutal realities. Slave families in the North, like those in the South, lived with a terrible uncertainty: their owners could, and often did, sell individuals or shift them at a whim to other properties. Enslaved parents, children, and siblings could be separated forever. They were assets, plain and simple, and family ties were irrelevant. To judge by trade notices of the time, the Royalls’ “Negroes” were just “sundry goods,” to be sold along with barrel staves, “very good hay,” West Indian rum, and “Molases.” When the elder Isaac Royall died in 1739, the female slaves Ruth, Trace, Sue, and Jonto and the male slaves Fortune, Barron, Ned, Robin, Quamin, Cuffe, Peter, and “house Peter” (so named to distinguish him from the other Peter) were listed in his probate inventory along with the cattle, oxen, and swine. In the 1739 Probate Inventory, each man was valued at a hundred pounds, each woman at seventy-five.

Upon expatriating himself in 1775, the younger Isaac Royall left behind more than porcelain and portraits. One household member—Belinda, an elderly slave—is unique among Royall’s retinue in that she is survived by a fairly detailed life story.

Captured at age twelve by slavers on the banks of the Volta River in what today is Ghana, Belinda Royall served the family for some fifty years, in both Antigua and Medford. She was left penniless with an invalid daughter, Prine, when the younger Royall fled Ten Hills Farm. In his will, her master (who was remembered as “kind to his slaves”) gave Belinda a choice: she could be bequeathed to his daughter as chattel or be set free. She chose freedom, and went to Boston to join the growing free black community. In 1783, she filed the legal document, a petition, that is the source for virtually all we know about her. Wishing to avoid the poorhouse, she sued the Royall estate for support, citing a promise in Royall’s will to provide her “security that she shall not be a charge in the town of Medford.”

She was unlettered (she signed her name with an X), and the petition may have been prepared for her by Prince Hall, a black freeman active in the freemason and abolitionist movements in Boston. Nonetheless, it is impossible to read the petition without imagining the spirited woman behind the words. It recounts Belinda’s kidnapping by “men whose faces were like the moon,” her trans-atlantic journey (in “a floating world” with “three hundred Affricans in chains”), and her fifty years of “ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall.” It concludes with a plea: “Your Petitioner, [her face] now marked with the furrows of time” asks “the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her and her more infirm daughter from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their Lives.”

The Massachusetts House and Senate award Belinda 15 Pounds, 12 Shillings per annum.

She was awarded the sum of fifteen pounds annually, but had to seek redress four years later when the money went unpaid. The date and circumstances of her death were unrecorded.

Now that the acknowledged ghosts at 15 George Street in Medford include Belinda and her fellow slaves, visitors to the Royall House and Slave Quarters confront the fact that bondage was once an accepted way of life in New England. But as they set foot inside the slave quarters—as they file past the multiple cases filled with artifacts from Alexandra Chan’s dig—something else happens as well. The stratified world of the eighteenth century, in all its racial and economic complexity, becomes more tangible.

Enslaved People at the Royall House: When the Royalls moved to Medford from Antigua, they brought 27 slaves with them. New England slavery was not benign

The addition of the archaeological finds, says Alexandra Chan, “invites people to engage in the debate. Rather than coming in to be talked at and given a cold, factual narrative, we invite people to ask questions, to try to think about the physical world. In that way you make the study of history more personal, and it extends its interest to a wider audience.”

Now that it has changed its mission, revised its tour, and added the archaeological exhibit, the Royall House receives more visitors—“particularly group tours, teachers, and college classes,” says Thomas Lincoln, executive director of the Royall House Association. Lincoln has observed a generational shift, too, especially in the African American community. “For some the slave quarters used to be almost embarrassing,” he says, “but the current generation has a real yearning to know more.” That is reflected in the people of color who take the tour: some are locals viewing a neighborhood landmark for the first time, while others arrive from much further afield, being of Caribbean origin and even Africans visiting the United States.

Henry Billings, "The Golden Triangle of Trade,"

Medford, MA Post Office, 1938

Scholars have shown a renewed interest as well. “You see all these dimensions of history happening all at the same time and place,” explains Steven Cohen, a lecturer in education and American studies at Tufts. “You have the buildings at one level. You have the way the house used to be interpreted when the slaves were almost always referred to as ‘servants.’ Now you have the present interpretation based on Chan’s work, which adds a different take. Going there is much more powerful than reading a text or having a teacher talk about slavery.”

Billings' mural consists of three panels and is titled The Golden Triangle of Trade. Two side panels depict economic activities of eighteenth-century Medford, specifically shipbuilding and the production of rum. On the left panel, a still alludes to "Distill House Lane" where rum was produced into the early twentieth century; the ship's hull represents Foster's Shipyard whose vessels carried the necessary sugar cane from the West Indies. (source:Art and Muralism )

The new, more candid look at the past provokes many questions. Penny Outlaw, who is African American, is co-president of the Royall House Association and sometimes acts as a docent. She says she detects little hesitation among visitors, white or black, to ask questions about New England’s slave days. “Visitors typically ask about the extent of slavery in Massachusetts,” she says. “They ask, ‘What happened to the Royall House slaves after the Royalls decamped for England?’ ‘Why don’t we hear more about slavery in the Northeast?’ They also wonder about the daily lives of the slaves, given the harsh New England climate.” The answers to such questions can be conjectural. But even the uncertainties serve the discussion.

This transaction is reflected in the right panel's rendering of a West Indian sugar shack and cane press, with the ship in the background presumably bound for Massachusetts. The central panel bridges these two worlds, literally connecting Guinea, Africa, the West Indies and New England with a golden triangle. (source:Art and Muralism)

If, in the twenty-first century, we find ourselves unable to conscience the social and racial wound that was slavery, historical sites like the Royall House may move us beyond merely separating out slaveholder and enslaved. We must recognize that the identities of all who inhabited Ten Hills Farm were inseparable and interdependent. We do ourselves a disservice if we dismiss the players as merely monsters and victims. It may be discomfiting to imagine oneself as either slaver or slave but, as Alexandra Chan says, “No mattd Slave Quarters is located at ie many of the seeds of our modern American society.”

Penny Outlaw puts it another way. “At the Royall House, slavery has become part of the conversation.”

The Royall House and Slave Quarters is located at 15 George Street in Medford, Massachusetts. Visit www.royallhouse.org for admission information.

____________________________
HUGH HOWARD, A74, has written about the past for more than twenty years. In addition to authoring a number of books, the most recent being The Painter’s Chair: America’s Old Masters Paint George Washington, he has written for the New York Times, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, House Beautiful, Traditional Home, Adirondack Life, Travel and Leisure, Esquire, Preservation, and Early American Life.

New York Slave Laws

Ships flying the Dutch West India flag.

The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery to New York (known then as New Netherland) in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves. These early slaves were put to work as farmers, fur traders, and builders. Some were used to build a wall to protect white settlers from the Native American population at the site of today's Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Although enslaved, the Africans owned by the Dutch enjoyed a few basic rights.

They could be admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers. Their children could be baptized, and slave families were usually kept intact. Slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some slaves were permitted to work after hours earning wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell to the British in 1864, the Company freed all its slaves-thus establishing early on a nucleus of free African Americans in New York.

English slave laws in the colony were much harsher in comparison to Dutch slave laws. For one thing, slaves were considered chattel or property, and their enslavement ended only with their death or manumission. The earliest slave codes passed in 1664 defined slavery as an inherited racial status-meaning that the children of slaves were also slaves. New York slaveholders could inflict any punishment short of mutilation and death on their human property. Freed blacks were also denied most civil rights under English rule. Any crime committed by a black against a white was severely punished, while white crimes against blacks were largely ignored.

According to the first U.S. Census, the slave population in New York grew to 21,324 by 1790, making New York the largest slave-owning state north of the Mason Dixon line, a distinction it held throughout the two centuries the state practiced slavery. In New York City, a large percentage of the blacks were free-some 33 percent or 1,482 inhabitants by 1820. In the nearby rural area of King County, in what is present day Brooklyn, most of the blacks that lived there were slaves and worked as farm laborers.

In New York City, on the other hand, one third of the black population worked as skilled artisans. Not only did many enslaved Africans live and work in New York prior to the American Revolution, New York City prospered as a thriving center of the slave trade. New York slaving ships made over 150 trips to Africa between 1715 and 1776. Most of the enslaved people brought to Manhattan were transported from New York after a brief time in port to the Caribbean or else to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

(source: New York Slave Law Summary and Record)

The English sweet tooth and the New York slave trade, 1690 - 1725

Yale University's Slavery Past

Yale Press reports that "Honesty must be basis for slavery dialogue," on Monday, October 30, 2006:

A portion of this pane once depicted slaves (beneath the figure of John C. Calhoun) but has since been replaced with the colored glass in the bottom left corner.(Yale Press)

Brown University’s recent report on that university’s ties to 18th-century slavery should make any socially conscious Yalie stop and think. Yale, like Brown, was a product of that same colonial era, and members of Yale’s founding generations almost certainly had similar involvement with slavery, either as slave owners or as merchants benefiting indirectly from slave labor.

After library employees in the early 1990s complained about a stained glass pane originally titled “Negro with a watermelon,” the pane was removed and replaced with the pane on the far right.(source: Yale Press)

But unlike Brown, Yale has not yet conducted a thorough and scholarly study of its past involvement in colonial slavery. In 2001, three Yale doctoral candidates, employed by Yale’s unions, produced a report arguing that nine of the 12 residential colleges were named for slave owners, but, as the News had reported at the time, some historians criticized that report for failing to provide necessary historical context.

Sterling Memorial Library’s East Asian Library contains a pane of stained glass with this depiction from Bret Harte’s poem “Heathen Chinee.” (Yale Press)

The example Brown now sets with its honest accounting of past errors is an admirable example and one that Yale, in the name of scholarship and institutional self-awareness, should consider following. Yale prides itself on fostering open and honest dialogue, but meaningful dialogue must be informed dialogue. It is time that Yale set the record straight by examining and acknowledging its own history, from the slave owners among Yale’s early professors to the decision in the 1930s to name the newly built colleges after such problematic figures as slavery advocate John C. Calhoun 1804.

A stained glass pane in Calhoun College depicts an enslaved black man and woman picking cotton. (Yale Press)

That said, we are not sure what, if anything, Yale is obliged to do in making amends for any of our institution’s past errors. The Brown report calls for building a memorial, increasing efforts to recruit students from Africa and the West Indies, and emphasizing in freshman orientation the university’s ties to slavery. But it is important to remember that every institution is very much a product of its own era — the problems in Yale’s and Brown’s history are really problems in America’s and Europe’s history. Those problems, moreover, are not limited just to slavery. Elihu Yale worked as a merchant with the British East India Company, hardly known for being a paragon of cultural sensitivity, and misogyny and anti-Semitism lingered at Yale until at least the beginning of the 20th century.

Calhoun Dining Hall, Yale University

Any decisions or actions taken after Yale knows the facts of its complicity in slavery should reflect the fact that Yale’s focus should be on fostering a healthy community on today’s campus. To the extent that slavery continues to mar the environment of our temporary home — as does, arguably, the window in the Calhoun dining hall that depicts working slaves — the Yale administration would be remiss not to address those wrongs. But Yale’s commitment to a respectful multicultural environment does not need to be based on Yale’s need to right a past wrong — diversity is beneficial in itself, a point that risks being obscured if such measures as broader recruiting are couched as justification for a potentially dirtied past.

Calhoun College Buildings

But Yale cannot acknowledge its complicity in prior wrongs until it figures out what exactly those wrongs were. It is time for Yale to follow Brown’s lead and embark on a meaningful study of slavery’s imprint on our university.

(source: Yale News -- http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2006/oct/30/honesty-must-be-basis-for-slavery-dialogue/?print)

Noyes Academy: A New Hampshire Struggle for a Black College

The brief, but courageous life of Noyes Academy

Noyes Academy was opened in 1835 for “youth of good character, without distinction of color”. Black students included Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, and Julia Williams, all of whom became historic black leaders. Open only months, the building was literally dragged away, the building later torched, and this early attempt at integrated education failed. Active among the Trustees were David Child, S.E. Sewall, of Boston, and Nathanel P. Rogers, of New Hampshire, all friends of Mr. Garrison. This photo is of a rebuilt replica of the destroyed Academy.

While researching his book on the New York City school system, Professor ofHistory Craig Wilder came across a surprising local connection. "I was researching early black activists, where they were educated, and I found that some were students at Noyes Academy in nearby Canaan, N.H.," said Wilder. Canaan, a small town 20 miles east of Hanover, was for a few months in 1835 home to Noyes Academy, an institution founded on the idea - revolutionary in pre-Civil War America - that blacks had the same rights as whites to formal education. Wilder found the story that resulted so fascinating that he developed his research into a presentation for a "Chalk Talk," Alumni Relations' Saturday pre-game fall lecture series.

Map of Canaan, New Hampshire

Slavery was officially abolished in New York state in 1827, prompting a push among black parents for educational opportunities for their children. Although many cities offered some form of segregated schooling for black children, the kind of classical, formal education available to affluent whites was inaccessible to African Americans.

As a result, a group of abolitionists founded Noyes Academy with a view to offering students a classical education regardless of race or gender. A solid majority of the school's major donors and trustees voted to allow integration and the decision was announced in the Boston abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

Mikel Wells' painting depicts the 1835 Removal of Noyes Academy. (Canaan Historical Society)

William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator reports on the razing of the Noyes Academy on September 5, 1835: "Three Selectmen of the town of Canaan deny a published statement that the citizens of the town support the school. Then follows an account of the removal of the school."

"This is the story of the vote at a Town Meeting, held July 31, at which there was a vote to remove the school, and a committee appointed to discharge that duty, “the performance of which, they believe the interest of the town, the honor of the state, and the good of the whole community, (both black and white) required without delay.” Then follows the account of how three hundred people, with ninety to one hundred oxen, carried out the work “with very little noise, considering the number engaged, until the building was safely landed on the common near the Baptist meeting-house, …..” The account claims the duty to have been carried out in the “spirit of ‘75”, and in memory of those who have fought and fell struggling for liberty."("Removal of Noyes," Liberator, 5 Sept. 1835)

Main Street in Canaan, New Hampshire, USA

Records of the academy and its students are scarce, but evidence suggests that among the more than two dozen students who formed the school's first and only class, some 14 were African Americans. What Wilder finds so remarkable is the hardship many students endured to reach Canaan and a chance at education. They came from all over the Northeast, their travel impeded not just by lack of funds but by restrictions on their use of public transportation and lodgings.

"Blacks could not ride in the cabins of steamboats," said Wilder. "They had to sleep out in the elements. How the students got to New Hampshire was heart wrenching. These black teenagers made long journeys under terrible conditions. It was an extraordinary struggle and sacrifice for education."

Among the students enrolled in Noyes Academy were several African Americans who later rose to prominence as abolitionists and activists. Henry Highland Garnet, an abolitionist remembered for his call for slave revolts as the antidote to slavery, and Alexander Crummell, who advocated that freed slaves emigrate to Liberia, both attended Noyes. Their fellow student Thomas Paul, Jr. would go on to be one of the earliest black graduates of Dartmouth. Paul was a member of the class of 1841.

Within months of its opening, opponents of integrating the academy appealed to the town of Canaan to close the school. At first, said Wilder, this tactic met with little success but the segregationists launched a campaign to discredit school officials and cultivate hysteria over the possibility of interracial marriage and racial mixing. "The local newspaper ran articles warning about young black men arm in arm with white women," said Wilder.

In August of 1835, hundreds of men from Canaan and surrounding towns, including Hanover, launched an assault on the school. They arrived with 90 oxen, ropes and chains. Working in shifts, they physically dragged the schoolhouse off of its foundation and destroyed it. The students watched from the homes of the local townspeople with whom they boarded. After destroying the school, the mob threatened the students and the people sheltering them by firing cannons at the homes.

Garnet, who, with many of his classmates, was boarding with school founder George Kimball, fired a return shot from the window, deterring the mob long enough for the students to be smuggled out of town under cover of night.

Beyond its interest as a forgotten narrative of New England, Wilder said he values the story of Noyes Academy for what it says about courage and commitment to education. "These were remarkable students," said Wilder, "and courageous abolitionists who risked persecution to further education and oppose slavery." (source: Dartmouth Life, " The brief, but courageous life of Noyes Academy," by GENEVIEVE HAAS, December 2005)

Noyes Academy: A New Hampshire Struggle for a Black College


In 1835, Noyes Academy, in Canaan, NH, opened its doors to young men and women of all races; enrolling black teenagers from the northeast. That summer, the school was attacked by hundreds of armed men who opposed an integrated school in NH. Investigate the issues of the Academy’s rise and fall, the bold abolitionists who built it, and the extraordinary students who defended it with their lives.

Sundown Towns, USA

The Washington Post article,"Darkness at the Edge of Town," by Laura Wexler, author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America." reviews James Loewen's book Sundown Towns. Laura Wexler writes: In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."

On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000 census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000 residents.

Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful and important new book, Sundown Towns . On the contrary, Loewen reports that -- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns" owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."

Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."

This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930, you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.

As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.

Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded" a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for 'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into town ended up dead.

If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history" of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South, Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in 1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than [those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.

With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.

Much has been written about the history of segregation within American cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less textbook-like form.

That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more suspiciously -- and rightly so.

*source: Washington Post, by Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America.")

Click here to watch on CSPAN TV

James Loewen talked about his book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, published by New Press. The book chronicled the history of towns and neighborhood that were closed to African-Americans. The author pointed out that most of these towns outside of the traditional South in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Professor Loewen explained that "Sundown Towns" used policemen, fire, bricks, and signs to force blacks out of the suburbs and into the ghettos. He asserted that although the tactics to exclude blacks may not be as blatant, these towns are still very much in existence. Following his presentation, Professor Loewen responded to questions and comments from members of the audience.

SUNDOWN TOWNS

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

By James W. Loewen

New Press. 562 pp. $29.95