We have been taught to read Boston’s history through its marked graves, memorials, and storied cemeteries. But what about the history that was intentionally buried? This research draws on original archival findings to examine how racial segregation in 18th- and 19th-century Boston extended into the realm of death, and how the burial practices imposed upon Black Bostonians reveal a structural denial of memory, dignity, and civic belonging. In forming a growing database of over 4,000 non-White individuals buried between 1700 and 1860, this project reconstructs a previously unexplored historical record: names, kinship networks, occupations, burial locations, and lives of the Black Bostonian communities meant to be forgotten.
This work rejects the premise that Black communities are absent from Bostonian history. The question is not which archives we visit, but what question we ask of the records we find. This work will be presented by Treyton Littlejohn, the International Program Coordinator for the Slave Legacy History Coalition and is included in the Boston Mayor’s Office Task Force on Reparations report on enslavement’s legacy. In asking if research can validate the knowledge held by the families and communities who long carried this history, Treyton hopes to raise questions about how public memory is constructed and what responsibilities contemporary institutions bear in restoring historical truth.
This presentation represents the view of the speaker and not necessarily that of the Slave Legacy History Coalition.