In deciding to host a Black History Month special radio program, the poet Maya Angelou said, "We want to reach a time when there won't be Black History Month, when black history will be so integrated into American history that we study it along with every other history …But great change takes time, so it will be necessary to have a Black History Month until the playing field is leveled, until black history and Latino history are all part of the history, period."
Creators of the African Burying Ground Memorial Park in Portsmouth NH, which they hope to complete in 2014, note, "It's not black history or white history. It's our history."
On March 15, 1862, at the height of the Civil War, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke to an audience of 1,000 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire at the Portsmouth Lyceum on the site that is now The Music Hall on Chestnut Street. On February 13, 2012 at approximately 9 pm, the Soweto Gospel Choir and local drummer Randy Armstrong will lead African drummers in a procession of the audience of 600+ carrying lighted candles from The Music Hall along a candle lantern-lit path to the site of Portsmouth's African Burying Ground Memorial Park on Chestnut Street, the cemetery rediscovered in 2003 during street excavations. On the African Burying Ground site -- the only DNA authenticated early 18th century cemetery for persons of African descent in New England -- clergy from Portsmouth churches will read the poem "We Stand in Honor of Those Forgotten" by the Memorial sculptor Jerome Meadows and the Soweto Gospel Choir will perform an encore, "Music on Sacred Ground."
For information about the African Burying Ground, visit africanburyinggroundnh.org The Music Hall and the African Burying Ground are both sites on the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail.
Creators of the event are fully aware that things were not always so in New Hampshire when it came to African Americans, enslaved or free. In fact, in 1836, one of the first brave attempts in integrated education, the Noyes Academy prep school started in Canaan, New Hampshire, not far from Dartmouth College in Hanover, was pulled off its foundations by an estimated 500 men and 87 oxen.
Six years later, Frederick Douglass arrived in Pittsfield, New Hampshire (on the prized Canadian border so many crossed to freedom), to preach to the citizens at the suggestion of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Association. Born into slavery in Maryland on February 11, 1818, he carried the truth of that world to Northern audiences in New Hampshire, first as a 25 year old fugitive and then as a more and more fiery and eloquent abolitionist. Having ridden to town on the top of the stagecoach, being not permitted inside, Douglass was greeted by his hosts, the Hilles. But Mr. Hilles chose to absent himself from the family dinner table and made him walk the two miles to the Meeting House the next morning. (Douglass commented in his autobiography that Hilles suffered from “colorphobia”). Douglass’ speech in the Old Meeting House was politely received; but during the break before the evening lecture, he was refused service at the local tavern. The historic marker on the site in Pittsfield tells the rest of the story:
On one of these gravestones sat the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in a cold, drizzling rain after giving an anti-slavery speech in the Old Meeting House. Having been refused service at a nearby hotel, he was hungry and without shelter. Pro-slavery Senator Moses Norris, Jr., in an act of humanitarian kindness, invited the disconsolate stranger into his house for the evening. Thereafter, Mr. Douglass was treated with great respect.
Just one year earlier, Senator Norris had signed the complaint ordering the arrest of Reverend Storrs, preaching on abolition, for disturbing the peace.
Douglass may have received a better reception on his first visit to Portsmouth in 1844, but there is no more than a passing reference to that talk. In March 1862, he presented his audience with a detailed account of what life as a slave in the South was like. The Portsmouth Daily Morning Chronicle described him as “The Eloquent Champion of Freedom.”
The African Burying Ground Memorial Park to be built on the site in Portsmouth long recognized by the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail is another tangible reminder of that history – and reanimates the voices of those like Douglass who then and now spoke on their behalf.
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