Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

O March 5, 1858, William C. Nell led a protest in Boston in the form of a massive history lesson. Though the city had discontinued annual public commemorations of the Boston Massacre in 1783, declaring that all the events of the Revolutionary period would henceforth be celebrated on July 4th, Nell resurrected the earlier date, insisting that a revised observance of local history was a fitting rebuttal to the United States Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision on its first anniversary. In response to the government’s denial of Black citizenship, Nell organized a festival in honor of Crispus Attucks, a Bostonian of African and Wampanoag descent, the first American life sacrificed for the nation’s independence. Nell marshaled a crowd at Faneuil Hall, near the site that the ship Desire docked in 1638 when it brought the first enslaved Africans to New England and, in our own time, a popular tourist attraction embroiled in controversy because it carries the name of the slave trader who funded its construction. It was precisely this kind of historical strata, layering the history of Black Boston across centuries and interwoven with the stories the nation tells about itself, that Nell meant to invoke. Displaying a collection of primary documents in front of the platform, Nell narrated the story of Attucks’s heroic death, how the shops in Boston closed and bells tolled through the city on the day he was buried. But far from stroking the city’s liberationist self-image, Nell and the other