On Saturday, October 24th, the National Park Service, along with a coalition of other historical organizations and universities, hosted a public symposium at Suffolk University in Boston entitled “Abolitionism in Black and White: The Anti-Slavery Community of Boston and Cambridge.”

This day-long series of talks and discussions was spearheaded by Longfellow NHS, Boston African American NHS and Boston NHP. Said Jim Shea, one of the NPS organizers: “It was an important convergence of public historians, teachers, academics and students to hear some of the country’s leading scholars discuss the topic of slavery and the abolitionist movement.”

The symposium, which drew an audience of nearly 200 people, focused on the movement in nineteenth-century Massachusetts as an extensive integrated network that included free blacks, former slaves, white politicians, writers, artists, lawyers, ministers, and singers. Together these reformers sought to end slavery and realize America’s founding ideals. They made Boston the first city to desegregate public schools and transportation and to legally recognize interracial marriage, a beacon for the rest of the nation.

Historians James Oliver Horton (George Washington University) and Lois E. Horton (George Mason University) opened the symposium with an overview of the anti-slavery movement. John Stauffer (Harvard University) and Sandra Sandiford Young (Boston College) discussed the significance of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and the black and white abolitionist community in greater Boston. Other sessions during the day examined anti-slavery music, abolitionism in popular culture, and women in the movement.

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Name: Jim Shea