Civil Rites

Local lore you never knew

oston’s tortured history with race is contradictory and complicated. It’s also largely untaught. The nation’s two most influential civil-rights leaders spent formative years here, for example. A freed slave who was the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill lived here, too. So did a Civil War soldier who was the first black to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a black inventor who revolutionized Massachusetts industry. Faneuil Hall, the “Cradle of Liberty,” was built with money from the slave trade. The pen with which Abe Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation? You’ve walked right past it after Red Sox games. You can even see the burial chamber of a black king who ruled an empire that stretched from Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea in the sixth century BC. It’s all part of history you never learned.

The pen Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation? We’ll tell you where in town to find it.
 

The key to the prison cell where John Brown was held before being hanged for his anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry is in a museum on Newbury Street you’ve walked right by but never knew was there.
 

Not many Bostonians know that Malcolm X lived here for much of his life—and his political and religious epiphanies. Here’s where.
 

So did Martin Luther King—at the same time. (We don’t think they hung out.) And he lived in the same place where Babe Ruth stayed during home games.
 

America’s first black Phi Beta Kappa didn’t go in for accommodationist racial policies. He once threw a stink bomb into a meeting being held by Booker T. Washington. Then he helped fount the NAACP. He lived here too.
 

We’ll show you the basement apartment where America’s first black president lived when he was a student at Harvard Law School—and tell you how much he owed in Cambridge parking tickets by the time he left.
 

You know about the Freedom Trail. Here’s the freedom trail you haven’t heard about: the one that commemorates the affluent free black community on Beacon Hill—including the escaped slave who hid explosives in his front stoop as a surprise for bounty hunters.
 

The first black to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor had to wait 35 years for it. But you can see where he lived any time.
 

You didn’t learn this in school: It was a black former slave who’s credited with killing the British commander at the Battle of Bunker Hill, turning the tide of the battle and the early stages of the Revolutionary War. And he’s buried in the ‘burbs.
 

The burial chamber of a king of the Nubian empire, which stretched from Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea in the sixth century BC, has somehow ended up in a neo-Gothic mansion in Roxbury. Here’s where.
 

The real story of an overlooked ‘hood.
 

The home of an antislavery founder of the GOP.