The Cambridge African American History Trail

Charlotte Hawkins Brown (55 Essex St)

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, nationally known educator, lecturer, social worker and religious leader, is best known as the founder of Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, NC, one of the oldest African American preparatory schools in the U.S. As a child, Charlotte, who showed great promise, was successful at finding mentors to encourage her. She started a Sunday school kindergarten at the Union Baptist Church and, like her friend Maria Baldwin, graduated from Cambridge English High School. In 1902, after teaching for a year in North Carolina, she started the Palmer Memorial Institute, which she named after her benefactor, Alice Freeman Palmer. As her school grew more famous, she was called around the country to speak on behalf of African American and religious education, and both civil and women's rights. She was vice president of the National Association of Negro Women and a founding member of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, a forerunner of the Southern Regional Council. 

Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, 1931 (photo)

William Wells Brown (1 Lilac Ct)

William Wells Brown was an escaped slave who became the first African American novelist. Brown, who learned public speaking in the temperance movement, moved to Boston in 1847 to become a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. A powerful orator, he gave many speeches on behalf of black education and human rights. His book Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, the first novel by a black American, appeared in 1853. At one point, before becoming an author, he was a handyman in the printing office of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the first white abolitionist martyr, whose brother Joseph, a Cambridgeport clergyman, also supported the cause. In all, he wrote more than a dozen books, pamphlets, and plays, including the first travel narrative and the first drama by an African American. 

Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, Project Gutenberg, 1852 (photo)

J Milton Clarke and Lewis Clarke (2 Florence Pl/73 Norfolk St)

Lewis and John Milton Clarke, who were among the many contributors to the antislavery cause in Cambridge, were born as slaves in Madison County, Kentucky. They made their way to Cambridge in 1843, and joined the Second Evangelical Congregational Church, which was known as the abolition church. Their pastor, the Reverend Joseph C. Lovejoy, published their book, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, in 1846. George Harris, a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is based on Lewis. In 1870, he succeeded his patron, Aaron Safford, on the Common Council, becoming the first African American elected to public office in Cambridge. He was reelected in 1872, but resigned to become a messenger at the U.S. Subtreasury in Boston. There he worked with John J. Fatal, another Cambridge African American, for thirty-three years, until his death at age eighty-two.

The Colored American Magazine, 1903 (photo)

W. E. B. Du Bois (20 Flagg St)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is considered the most influential African American thinker of the first half of the 20th century. Born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois was largely educated in Cambridge. Blacks were not welcome in Harvard dormitories at that time, so he found a room in the house at 20 Flagg Street. He graduated with honors in 1890 and spent the summer lecturing with his classmate Clement Morgan, with whom he had studied at Maria Baldwin’s house on Prospect Street. In 1895, he became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. In 1905, Du Bois helped organize the Niagara Movement with a group that included his classmate Clement Morgan and Cantabrigian Emery T. Morris. In 1909, Du Bois cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The only African American on its executive board, he served as the editor of its magazine, The Crisis. Du Bois wrote countless books and articles on the African American condition, including the celebrated Souls of Black Folk, and frequently lectured around the world.

United States Library of Congress, 1918 (photo)

Reverend J. Henry Duckrey (32 Magnolia Ave)

The Reverend J. Henry Duckrey, an early pastor of the Mount Olive Baptist Church, was the first African American to run for a seat on the Cambridge School Committee. Duckrey came to Cambridge in 1895 to lead the Mount Olive (now Massachusetts Avenue) Baptist Church, a congregation that had withdrawn from Union Baptist Church in 1890. In 1898 he laid the cornerstone for a new church at Massachusetts Avenue and Front Street. Duckrey invited Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, to use his church for speaking engagements. Washington hired Harvard students who attended Duckrey’s church to teach at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Cambridge Chronicle, 08/29/1903 (photo 1)

John J. Fatal (49 Lincoln St)

John J. Fatal, a school desegregation advocate and elected official, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to parents of African and West Indian heritage. While living in Boston, Fatal joined the Boston Vigilance Committee and helped shuttle escaped slaves to Vermont and Canada on the underground railroad. Fatal joined Joshua Bowen Smith, John T. Hilton, and William C. Nell, among others, in the fight to desegregate and improve Boston’s public schools. The struggle to end segregation lasted from 1844 to 1855 and culminated in a lawsuit brought by fellow Bostonian Benjamin F. Roberts against the city of Boston. When the suit proved unsuccessful, Fatal joined an exodus of black parents to Cambridge, where the school system was integrated. In 1870, Fatal became the first African American nominated to a political office in Cambridge. He declined the nomination, however, allowing his friend J. Milton Clarke to become the first African American to serve on the Cambridge Common Council. 

Cambridge Chronicle, 08/29/1903 (photo)

Richard T. Greener (1430 Massachusetts Ave)

Richard T. Greener, the first African American to graduate from Harvard College, had a distinguished career in public service. The family moved to Boston when Richard was nine, but “my parents found that there were no good schools for colored children, so they removed to Cambridge in order that I might attend an unproscriptive [integrated] school.” He entered Harvard in 1865, where he lived at College House and Stoughton Hall. He was admitted to the bar in 1876, served as dean of the Howard University Law School, practiced law, and held public service positions in Washington and New York. The highlight of Greener’s career came in 1898, when President William McKinley appointed him the first U. S. consul at Vladivostok, Russia. Greener served ably through the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, but was recalled in 1905. Although he attended the first meeting of the Niagara Movement, he supported neither the accommodationist position of Booker T. Washington nor the opposing views of W.E.B. Du Bois. He retired to Chicago, where he spent most of his time writing and lecturing. 

The Crisis, February 1917 (photo)

Pauline Hopkins (53 Clifton St)

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, a novelist and editor, moved to Boston as a child, and lived at 53 Clifton during her adult life. Hopkins embarked on a literary career at age twenty-four with a musical drama that was performed in Boston, but she had to support herself by working as a stenographer. Twenty years later, her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), explored the struggles of a black middle-class family after the Civil War. It led to a stint as editor of the new Colored American magazine, which was published by the Colored Co-Operative Press in Boston. The magazine urged African Americans to know their own history and assert their rights. Hopkins herself wrote carefully researched biographies of famous African American men and women of the abolitionist era. Three of her novels were serialized in the magazine: Hagar’s Daughters, A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice; Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest; and Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self. All dealt with interracial relationships, which led to cancellations by some white readers. The Colored American magazine was purchased secretly by Booker T. Washington in 1904. Hopkins, who was sympathetic to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement, was relieved of her post. She started her own publishing firm, P. E. Hopkins & Co., in 1905 and later was the editor of New Era magazine in Boston. Neither venture was successful, and Hopkins returned to stenography. 

The Colored American Magazine, May 1901 (photo)

Harriet Jacobs (17 Story St)

Harriet A. Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. She became orphaned, and was passed down to the Norcom family. To avoid the attentions of her new owner, Jacobs took a white lover and bore him two children. However, the man, a future congressman, broke his promise to free them. In 1835, Jacobs escaped and spent the next seven years hiding in a crawl space above her grandmother’s storeroom. There she kept watch over her children, who had been purchased by their father and sent to live in the house. Reading, writing, and sewing to pass the time, she gained the literary experience that enabled her to write her book years later. Jacobs was freed in 1852, and for the next five years wrote her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, which is now ranked with Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and William Wells Brown’s Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter as a major contribution to the genre of slave narratives. She used her prominence to advantage, doing relief work for black soldiers and helping create schools for blacks after the Civil War, later moving to Cambridge. 

Gilbert Studios, Journal of the Civil War Era, 1894 (photo)

Lunsford Lane (44 Webster Ave)

Lunsford Lane was a successful businessman who purchased his freedom and then had to flee the South to escape the anger of resentful whites. With money earned by serving his master’s guests and curing tobacco, he was able to purchase his freedom. He began to keep a store and in 1839 bought a house in Raleigh. Lane’s prosperity began to attract unfavorable attention, and in 1840, he was forced to leave the state by whites who feared that his example might incite a slave rebellion. He lived in Boston for a year, and after coming back to Raleigh to purchase his family, he was tarred and feathered before he escaped. He moved back to Boston to lecture at the Anti-Slavery Society, and the book he wrote about his experiences, The Narrative Life of Lunsford Lane, was published in 1842 and sold widely in America and England. Lane then lived in several parts of Cambridge before moving to Rhode Island later in life.

"Lunsford Lane; or, Another helper from North Carolina" by William George Hawkins, 1863 (photo)

William H. Lewis (226 Upland Road)

William H. Lewis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was the first African American to serve as assistant attorney general of the United States. While at Harvard, he was considered the best center in the history of its football team, and became the first African-American selected to be an All-American. Lewis, a Republican, served on the Cambridge Common Council from 1899 to 1901 and then in the legislature for one term. In the 1890s, Lewis joined Clement Morgan, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, George W. Forbes, and Emery T. Morris in the discussions that led to the founding of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1903, however, Lewis joined the more conservative Bookerites, as those who subscribed to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist views were known. Lewis lost his legislative seat in the Democratic sweep of 1902, but with Washington’s help was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt as assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. In 1911, President William Howard Taft named him assistant attorney general of the United States. This was the highest government position thus far achieved by an African American. After the next election, Lewis returned to Boston to practice law, where he often took difficult cases involving African Americans.

Massachusetts Historical Society, 1903 (photo)

Bishop George A. McGuire (137 Allston St)

George Alexander McGuire, an Episcopal priest, was the minister of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge and later founded the African Orthodox denomination, which was the religious arm of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. The year after he moved to Boston in 1908, he became minister of St. Bartholomew’s. The new congregation was made up of African Americans and immigrants from the West Indies and Canada who had formerly belonged to St. Peter’s Episcopal on Massachusetts Avenue. In New York, Garvey, the charismatic leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), made McGuire chaplain-general and “titular archbishop of Ethiopia.” McGuire left the Episcopal ministry to found churches under the auspices of the UNIA. In 1921 he organized these congregations into the African Orthodox Church. By 1934, there were approximately 30,000 members, with thirty congregations in the United States, the West Indies, South America, and Africa. 

Terry-Thompson, A.C. The History of the African Orthodox Church, 1956 (photo)

Clement G. Morgan (265 Prospect St)

Clement Garnett Morgan, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, was the first African American elected to the Board of Aldermen in Cambridge. He attended Harvard with W.E.B. Du Bois and was elected class orator by his fellow seniors in 1890. A Republican, he served on the Cambridge Common Council in 1895 and 1896 and on the Board of Aldermen from 1897 to 1899. Alongside former classmate W.E.B. Du Bois and several other notable African-Americans, he was a founder of the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that advocated for expanded civil and political rights for African Americans. The Niagara Movement and its newspaper, the Boston Guardian, stressed a policy of social and political freedom for all. After the movement dissolved, Morgan became one of the original officers of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. He maintained a law practice in Boston and was active in community affairs until his death. 

Harvard College Class Album, 1890 (photo)

Emery T. Morris (30 Parker St)

Emery T. Morris was a prominent member of the Niagara Movement, which was an early civil rights organization. Morris, who was educated in the Cambridge public schools, became active in politics at an early age. In 1905 he joined W.E.B. Du Bois and Clement Morgan, among others, to found the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and an oppositional voice to Booker T. Washington, who was less concerned about political rights and instead advocated for economic rights for African Americans. After the breakup of the Niagara Movement in 1907, Morris split from Du Bois and joined William Monroe Trotter to found the National Negro Political League (NNPL), a rival civil rights organization, in 1910. Unlike the NAACP, which was interracial, the NNPL was led and controlled by African Americans. Later in life, he assembled one of the most extensive antislavery libraries in New England.

Cambridge Chronicle, 11/02/1907 (photo)

Patrick H. Raymond (10 Pleasant St)

Patrick H. Raymond, the first African American fire chief, was born in Philadelphia, the son of the Reverend John and Susan Raymond. His father, a runaway slave from Virginia who became a well-known abolitionist in New York City, was one of the early pastors of the African Meeting House in Boston. Around 1847, the Raymond family moved to Cambridge, where they lived on Washington Street near Kendall Square in the “lower Port,” Cambridge’s first African American neighborhood. In 1869, he became the editor of the weekly Cambridge Press. In 1871, Mayor Hamlin Harding, a former editor of the paper, appointed him chief engineer of the Cambridge Fire Department. Over the next seven years, Raymond was able to triple the annual budget of the department, creating two new fire companies and building new firehouses on Portland Street and Western Avenue and in Brattle and Inman squares. After Raymond was replaced as chief in 1878, he continued as editor and business agent of the Cambridge Press until 1890.

Cambridge Fire Department (photo)

Alberta V. Scott (28 Union St)

Alberta Virginia Scott, a resident of Cambridgeport, was the first African American graduate of Radcliffe College. When she was six years old, her family moved to Cambridge, where they lived in several locations in the “lower Port,” a traditionally black neighborhood near Kendall Square that has been replaced with office buildings. At Union Baptist, where her deacon father worked, she taught Sunday school under the guidance of her friend Charlotte Hawkins. Scott graduated with distinction from the Cambridge Latin School in 1894 and entered Radcliffe College, where she studied science and the classics and belonged to the Idler and German clubs. When she finished college in 1898, she was only the fourth African American to graduate from a women’s college in Massachusetts. At first she taught in an Indianapolis high school, but in 1900 Booker T. Washington recruited her to teach at the Tuskegee Institute. Scott’s promising future was tragically cut short. After a year in Alabama, she fell sick and returned to Cambridge, where she died at her parents’ home at 37 Hubbard Avenue on August 30, 1902. 

Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, 1898 (photo)

Joshua Bowen Smith (79 Norfolk St)

Joshua Bowen Smith was a confidant of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner and one of the best-known public figures of his day. While in the employ of Robert Gould Shaw, Sr., he met the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, George Luther Stearns, and Theodore Parker, as well as Sumner, the future senator. After working with H. R. Thacker, a caterer, Smith opened his own establishment in 1849. He provided commencement dinners for Harvard College, catered municipal functions, and oversaw some of the most celebrated banquets in Boston history. His business enabled him to employ fugitive slaves while he kept a watchful eye on the movements of bounty hunters, who searched for their prey in Boston restaurants. In 1869, Smith joined Senator Sumner and Governor John Andrew to raise money for the monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Jr., of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, that was placed on Boston Common in 1897. Smith continued to work closely with Senator Sumner, advising him on issues relating to manumission rights, which were resolved with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Sumner, who died before the bill became law, remembered Smith in his will, leaving him a valuable painting, The Miracle of the Slave by Tintoretto. Smith was elected to the state legislature in 1873 and 1874 and served as chair of the Federal Relations Committee.

Massachusetts State Archives, 1874 (photo)

Rev. P. Thomas Stanford (117 Dudley St)

Rev. P. Thomas Stanford, author, pastor, community activist, lived at 117 Dudley Street in the latter part of his life. After growing up in Boston, he ended up in New York City, where, due to the kindness of his mentors Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, he was educated at Suffield Institute in Suffield, CT. He received a call to the ministry and was ordained pastor of a church in Hartford, CT in 1878. From there he went to Canada, and to England, where he achieved his fame as a powerful speaker and writer. Upon coming to Boston, he united with the Congregationalists and founded St. Mark Congregational Church in Roxbury. Stanford then migrated to Cambridge, in 1896, where he started the Union Industrial Church and Stranger's Home, a training ground for homeless and wandering women and children. A writer, he authored two books and wrote many articles, and even contributed to his neighbor Pauline Hopkins' magazine, The Colored American.  

Documenting the American South, 1897 (photo)

Franklin H. Wright (40 Magee St)

Franklin Hamilton Wright, a lifelong resident of Riverside, was an early member of the City Council and one of the founders of the Cambridge Community Center. Wright joined the Republican City Committee and was elected to the Common Council in 1915. Wright was elected to the City Council from Ward 7, the Riverside neighborhood. He was the only African American councilor elected before proportional representation was adopted in 1940. He served two more terms but was defeated in the 1923 election by his neighbor Timothy F. Murphy. During his tenure on the council, Wright introduced orders that led to the construction of the shelter at Russell Hoyt Field. Later, he joined the Reverend E. K. Nichols, pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church, and twenty-five of his fellow parishioners to found the Cambridge Community Center. Wright was an officer of the African American Elks Lodge, Pocahontas Chapter, and helped organize the Crispus Attucks Elks Lodge in Everett.

Official Souvenir Program, 22nd Annual Convention, IPBO Elks of the World, Boston, 8/21/1921 (photo)