Black New England

Black New England uses the biographies of five New Englanders—Quock Walker (c. 1753– ?), David Walker (1795–1830), George T. Downing (1819–1903), Eugene Gordon (1891–1974), and William Worthy (1920–2014)—to argue that Black New Englanders played a defining role in the liberal reform culture with which the region is known. Political Liberalism in New England did not emerge from a benevolent, ideologically driven whiteness indigenous to the region’s Protestant, evangelical, western European “founders.” Rather, these Protestant, evangelical western European “founders” owe much of their Liberalism to the “colored” people in their midst. Research will include extensive work in state and local archives, as well as the archives at Harvard and Radcliffe. Students will exercise and develop extensive historical research skills, including how to document and describe the lives of African-descended people whose stories are often obscured by the archive.