Description
The button marks the year 1638 when a small group of Africans were arrived in Boston aboard a cargo ship name “Desire.” BOSTON’S FIRST BLACK COMMUNITY: Eventually, the Africans formed Boston’s first Black community. It took a while, because the Africans were not free. Their owners controlled where they went and when. The Africans rarely were seen around each other. They lived distances apart and there were not that many of them. Eventually, Black men and women got together despite their owner’s wishes. They got together, fell in love and had children. This is how Boston’s First Black Community got its start.
Many lived on Beacon Hill and the West End. The City of Boston Massachusetts was incorporated in 1822. Boston was founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers from the English town of the same name. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston.
Today, the “Black Boston” area includes Nubian Square Roxbury. The “Black Boston” brand name was defined in a 2011 State of Black Boston report as an area inside zip codes 02119, 02120, 02121, 02124, 02125 and 02126, where residents are predominately Black, adding to the 350,000 Black residents living in Greater Boston.
ADD TO CART and complete the order form with your shipping address. The logo on the 1638 button is custom trademarked art piece registered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by BlackBoston.com.
BACKSTORY
An Early African Journal entry written by John Winthrop,1630 to 1694, the first Governor of Massachusetts.
“In 1637 approximately 250 captives of the Pequot War — primarily women and children, as the men had largely been killed — were remitted to the Massachusetts and Connecticut authorities “to be disposed aboute in the townes” as household servants. Massachusetts colonial governor John Winthrop noted, however, that 17 captured Indian “male children” were part of that year’s first trade shipment to the West Indies; the ship Desire returned in February 1638 with the colony’s first shipment of enslaved Africans. Built in a Marblehead, Massachusetts, shipyard, the Desire was the first American-built slave ship. The Desire’s arrival in Boston Harbor in 1638, with a cargo of Africans who had been exchanged in the West Indies for indigenous Pequot prisoners of war, was a historic moment that presaged Boston’s age of slavery and New England’s complicity in the transatlantic trade in humans.”
