Allan Rohan Crite was a world renowned artist who grew up in Boston’s South End in the early part of the 20th century. After enrolling in the Children’s Art Center and graduating from English High, he attended the MFA School and graduated in 1936. His work was first shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and his first solo show at the Boston Athaneaum was in 1948. He went on to work at the Charlestown Navy Yard for over thirty years, while his paintings drew local and then national and international attention. During this time, he attended Harvard Extension School, where he earned an ALB degree in 1968. Looking at all of these experiences together, Allan Rohan Crite truly was a son of Boston, his work opening a window on the experience of Black Bostonians in the 30s, 40s, and beyond. If you are a lover of Boston history, you won’t want to miss the special exhibition of his work on view at the Boston Athenaeum through January 24 and at the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum through January 19th. In this episode, Michelle Leblanc from the Athenaeum joins us to discuss the two wonderful exhibitions Crite’s work that are on display in Boston right now and what we can learn about Boston history from them.
Tag: African American
The Well Known Caesar Marion (was committed to prison) (episode 333)
In this episode, we go in search of a Black Bostonian who was “well known” to his contemporaries, including Boston newspapers, but who was all but forgotten by history. If not for a one-paragraph news article and work by historians to reconstruct aspects of his life from notarial records, we may not know the name Caesar Marion. In this somewhat brief episode, we’re going to look at why Mr. Marion was thrown into Boston’s notorious jail 250 years ago this week, and then we’ll compare his treatment inside British-occupied Boston with the experience of Black volunteers in the Continental Army outside Boston, once Virginia enslaver George Washington took command.
Continue reading The Well Known Caesar Marion (was committed to prison) (episode 333)
Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)
This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston. As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood. With Dr. Paris Jeffries’ help, we’re going to imagine the Boston that Reverend King experienced: where he studied, where he fell in love with Coretta Scott, and where he would return over a decade later, when he had already become a legend in his own time.
Continue reading Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)
The Rise and Fall of Black Boston’s First Hospital (episode 294)
Despite the name, Plymouth Hospital was a South End institution. As the first training school for Black nurses in segregated Boston, Plymouth provided a needed service to an underserved community, led by a medical pioneer. Dr. Cornelius Nathanial Garland moved to Boston from the deep south to seek opportunity, but while he found opportunity in the Hub, he also found a deeply segregated medical establishment. To fight against this system and provide opportunities for Black Bostonians in medicine, he founded a hospital and nursing school. However, the most radical civil rights leader in Boston would accuse Garland of reinforcing that very same system of segregated medicine.
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Annie’s Restaurant (episode 269)
Annie L. Burton was an entrepreneur and restaurateur, who moved to Boston as a young woman after spending her childhood enslaved on an Alabama plantation. Annie spent decades as a domestic servant, first in the south, and then in the north, in Newton, the South End, Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, and other neighborhoods in and around Boston. For most Black women in the years and decades after emancipation, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and washing and ironing for white families were among the only opportunities available for paid work, making Annie’s experience utterly typical. Two things make her life unique: her decision to bet on herself and open a series of restaurants, first in Florida, then in Park Square in Boston, and then in a number of New England resort towns; and her decision, just after the turn of the 20th century, to put pen to page and write her story down and publish it, preserving the details of her life in a way that wasn’t available to most of her peers.
Joseph Lee and his Bread Machines (episode 268)
Joseph Lee was a hotelier, caterer, and one of the richest men in his adopted hometown of Newton. By the time of his death in 1908, Lee had worked as a servant, a baker, and for the National Coast Survey; he had worked on ships, in hotels, and at amusement parks. He had earned a vast fortune in hotels, lost most of it, and earned another one through his patented inventions that helped change the way Americans eat. He had entertained English nobles and American presidents. And he had raised three daughters and one son, who was a star Ivy League tackle before graduating from Harvard. If you make bread at home, or meatballs, or fried chicken, or casserole, you are the beneficiary of the technology Joseph Lee developed. That would be a remarkable life for anyone, but Joseph Lee was enslaved in South Carolina until he was about 15 years old, making his accomplishments even more remarkable.
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Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)
Frank Hart was a transplant to Boston who became a famous star in a sport that no longer really exists. Hart was a pedestrian, competing in grueling six-day races where the winner was the person who could run, walk, or even crawl the most miles by the time the clock ran out. He made his debut in the Bean Pot Tramp here in Boston, but he followed the money to races in New York, London, San Francisco, and beyond, becoming one of America’s first famous Black athletes. However, Frank Hart’s career declined along with the popularity of pedestrianism, while the rise of Jim Crow raised new hurdles for a Black competitor. Joining us this week to discuss the rise and fall of Frank Hart is Davy Crockett, the host of the Ultrarunning History podcast and author of the new biography Frank Hart: The First Black Ultrarunning Star.
Continue reading Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)
Reading David Walker’s Appeal: The Pen as the Sword (episode 240)
This week, we’re trying something a little bit different. This fall and winter, the Old North Church historic site has been hosting a series of conversations about radical Black abolitionist David Walker, and his book An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. As part of their Digital Speaker Series, education director Catherine Matthews moderated a discussion between artist, educator, and activist L’Merchie Frazier and playwright Peter Snoad on December 15. This edition focused on the text of the Appeal as a piece of rhetoric that pointed out the brutality and hypocrisy of slavery and urged the enslaved to rebel by any means necessary. Thanks to our friends at Old North for allowing us to share this panel with you.
Continue reading Reading David Walker’s Appeal: The Pen as the Sword (episode 240)
He Takes Faces at the Lowest Rates (episode 229)
In 1773, an ad appeared in the Boston Gazette for a Black artist who was described as possessing an “extraordinary genius” for painting portraits. From this brief mention, we will explore the life of a gifted visual artist who was enslaved in Boston, his friendship with Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet, and the mental gymnastics that were required on the part of white enslavers to justify owning people like property. Through the life of a second gifted painter, we’ll find out how the coming of the American Revolution changed life for some enslaved African Americans in Boston. And through the unanswered questions about the lives of both these men, we’ll examine the limits of what historical sources can tell us about any given enslaved individual.
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Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)
Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity. He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago.
Continue reading Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)