Tag: African American

“The Birth of a Nation” in Boston (episode 121)

“The Birth of a Nation” was one of the most controversial movies ever made, and when it premiered on February 8, 1915 it almost instantly became the greatest blockbuster of the silent movie era.  It featured innovative new filmmaking techniques, a revolutionary score, and it was anchored by thrilling action scenes shot on a never-before-seen scale, with thousands of actors and extras, hundreds of horses, and battlefield effects like real cannons.

“Birth of a Nation” was unapologetically racist, promoting white supremacy and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as the noble, heroic saviors of white America from the villainous clutches of evil black men bent on rape and destruction.  Upon the film’s 50th anniversary in 1965, NAACP president Roy Wilkins proclaimed that all the progress that African Americans had made over the past half century couldn’t outweigh the damage done by “Birth of a Nation.”

When the film debuted in Boston in April of 1915, audience reaction was split along racial lines, with white Bostonians flocking to see the movie in record numbers, while black Bostonians organized protests and boycotts, with leaders like William Monroe Trotter attempting to have it banned in Boston.


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Lewis Latimer, Master Inventor (episode 120)

African American inventor and draftsman Lewis Latimer’s parents self-emancipated to give their children the opportunities afforded to those born into freedom. A Chelsea native, Latimer’s career took him from the Navy, to a patent law firm, to the prestigious circle of Thomas Edison’s pioneers.


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David Walker’s Radical Appeal (episode 117)

David Walker was one of America’s first radical abolitionists, a free African American man who moved to Boston in 1824 to escape the danger and humiliations of life in the slave states. He became a prominent member of Black society in Boston before writing and distributing An Appeal to the Colored People of the World. This radical work called for the immediate abolition of slavery, and even advocated violence against whites to bring about emancipation. At the time, few white leaders were talking openly about ending slavery, and those who were favored gradual emancipation. Frederick Douglass would later say that the book “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” and it shook the slaveowning society of the white South to the core.


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Tent City (Episode 77)

50 years ago this week, residents of one Boston neighborhood carried out an act of civil disobedience, bringing attention to the city’s need for affordable housing.  A group of mostly African American residents occupied an empty lot where rowhouses once stood.  It was Boston’s 1968 Tent City protest, and it helped change how the city approaches development and urban planning.


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Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74)

The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony.  After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years.  In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.  

Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.


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The Execution that Almost Killed the Death Penalty in Massachusetts (Ep68)

In 1848, a murder case nearly brought an end to the death penalty in Massachusetts.  When a young black man named Washington Goode was convicted of first degree murder that year, there hadn’t been an execution in Boston for 13 years.  White men who had been convicted of the same crime had their sentences commuted to a life in prison, and tens of thousands of petitions poured in asking the governor to do the same thing for Goode.  Yet even so, he was sent to the gallows.  Why?

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Classics: Boston Resists the Fugitive Slave Act (Episode 67)

We used our studio time this week to record something special that will air next month. Without a new episode, we didn’t want to leave you without any HUB History this week. Instead, here are three classic episodes honoring black and white abolitionists in 19th Century Boston. Recorded last February, in the wake of President Trump’s attempt to implement a “Muslim Ban,” these episodes focus on Boston’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was seen as an unjust law.  

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Episode 27: Burned at the Stake!

Despite what a lot of people think, the victims of the Salem witch trials were hanged, not burned at the stake.  However, in the history of Massachusetts, two women were executed by burning them at the stake, one in 1681 and another in 1755.  If witchcraft was a crime against both the state and God, what crime could be worse in Puritan Boston?  A note about the content this week.  We frankly describe acts of brutal violence, and we at times use the racial language of our 17th and 18th century sources.  If you usually listen with children, you might want to listen to this episode alone first and decide if it’s appropriate for them.

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Episode 18: Dr. Rebecca Crumpler’s Trailblazing Career

This week, we’re going to talk about a woman who studied medicine at a time when very few women could access higher education at all, and an African-American who became a physician at a time when half of this country believed that she could be owned by another American.  Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler would study in Boston and become America’s first black female doctor.  Listen to this week’s show for her story!

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Episode 16: Our Temple of Justice is a Slave Pen! (Black History Month Special, part 3)

This week, we’re going to wrap up our series on the Fugitive Slave Act, and the efforts of black and white abolitionists in Boston to resist what they saw as an unjust law.  In last week’s show, we discussed how Lewis Hayden and the Vigilance Committee rescued the fugitive Shadrach Minkins from being returned to slavery.  This week, we’re going to learn how that act of resistance led to a federal crackdown in Boston, look at two unsuccessful rescues that followed, and see how the unrest galvanized the apathetic population of Boston into a hotbed of radical abolitionism.  Listen to this week’s episode for the exciting conclusion!

Continue reading Episode 16: Our Temple of Justice is a Slave Pen! (Black History Month Special, part 3)