The Boston African American National Historic Site, in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts's Beacon Hill neighborhood, interprets 15 pre-Civil War structures relating to the history of Boston's 19th century African-American community, including the Museum of Afro-American History's African Meeting House, the oldest standing African-American church in the United States.
The various structures are linked by the Museum's 1.6 mile (2.5 km) Black Heritage Trail, and include:
- 54th Regiment Memorial
- African Meeting House - part of the Museum of African American History
- Abiel Smith School - houses the Museum of African American History
- Charles Street Meeting House
- John Coburn House
- Lewis and Harriet Hayden House
- George Middleton House
- Phillips School
- Smith Court Residences
- John J. Smith House
Most of the sites along the trail are not open to the public, except the African Meeting House and the Abiel Smith School, as well as the 54th Regiment Memorial.
Park rangers provide guided tours of the sites along the trail. Visitors can pick up the self-guided trail map and obtain information at the Abiel Smith School.
Famous quotes containing the words boston, african, american, national, historic and/or site:
“I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of trashy, sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the cliché in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didnt need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulderin that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)
“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)