Tag: Black History Month

The Rise and Fall of Black Boston’s First Hospital (episode 294)

Despite the name, Plymouth Hospital was a South End institution.Ā  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.Ā  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.Ā  To fight against this system and provide opportunities for Black Bostonians in medicine, he founded a hospital and nursing school.Ā  However, the most radical civil rights leader in Boston would accuse Garland of reinforcing that very same system of segregated medicine.


Continue reading The Rise and Fall of Black Boston’s First Hospital (episode 294)

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.Ā  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.Ā  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 Annieā€™s experience utterly typical.Ā  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 wasnā€™t available to most of her peers.


Continue reading Annie’s Restaurant (episode 269)

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.Ā  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.Ā  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.Ā  He had entertained English nobles and American presidents.Ā  And he had raised three daughters and one son, who was a star Ivy League tackle before graduating from Harvard.Ā  If you make bread at home, or meatballs, or fried chicken, or casserole, you are the beneficiary of the technology Joseph Lee developed.Ā  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.


Continue reading Joseph Lee and his Bread Machines (episode 268)

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.Ā  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.Ā  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)

“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. Ā 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.

ā€œBirth of a Nationā€ 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. Ā Upon the filmā€™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.


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

Lewis Latimer, Master Inventor (episode 120)

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


Continue reading Lewis Latimer, Master Inventor (episode 120)

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 didnā€™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 Trumpā€™s attempt to implement a ā€œMuslim Ban,ā€ these episodes focus on Bostonā€™s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was seen as an unjust law. Ā 

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

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

This week, weā€™re going to wrap up our series onĀ the Fugitive Slave Act, and the efforts of black and white abolitionists in Boston to resist what they saw as an unjust law. Ā In last weekā€™s show, we discussed how Lewis Hayden and the Vigilance Committee rescued the fugitive Shadrach Minkins from being returned to slavery. Ā This week, weā€™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. Ā 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)

Episode 15: Resist! Shadrach Minkins and the Fugitive Slave Act (Black History Month Special, part 2)

With our new President doing his best to enforce unjust executive orders,Ā we thought this would be a good moment to revisit an era in which Boston resisted an unjust law. Ā After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, abolitionists in Boston felt that the values of Southern slave power were being forced upon a free city. Ā In 1851, Shadrach Minkins was the first fugitive to be arrested in Boston, but before he could be returned to slavery, a multiracial mob stormed the courtroom and forcibly delivered him to the Underground Railroad. Ā Listen to this week’s episode for the story!

Continue reading Episode 15: Resist! Shadrach Minkins and the Fugitive Slave Act (Black History Month Special, part 2)