“How to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement”

Boston.com offers an article by Madeleine Aitken detailing an important shift in historical storytelling by the Old North Church’s historical wing, now called Old North Illuminated:

Nearly a decade ago, the church opened a Colonial-themed chocolate shop where re-enactors in traditional costumes ground cacao by hand and told tourists about the chocolate trade and its relevance to Boston. The store was called Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop, named for Captain Newark Jackson, who they believed to be a key figure in both the historic church and Boston’s 18th century chocolate trade with the British.

The church commissioned Prof. Jared Hardesty to do some deeper research into Jackson for the chocolate-shop employees to use.

This research eventually turned into “Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate,” a book Hardesty released in the fall of 2021 [review quoted here]. The book exposed Jackson as not only being a cacao trader, but a human trafficker and a slave holder — he transported, owned, and traded enslaved people. . . .

“The board made the decision to take Captain Jackson’s name off of the shop and off of the program, but there was a strong desire to still tell the story, just in an honest and comprehensive way,” said Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, the organization that works to preserve and share the church’s story.

Maddy Rodriguez, the chair of the board of Old North Illuminated, said finding out about the true history of Jackson was a “shock.”

“I think it was really jarring because of the fact that up to that point, the chocolate program had been super successful. It was a unique opportunity for guests, especially families, to engage with the history of Old North,” Rodriguez told Boston.com. “To hear that the person that we had decided to name the exhibit after was involved in smuggling human beings in the slave trade was just completely opposite to that intent, that mission, that previous feeling that we had had.”

So they pivoted, re-envisioning how to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement.

That admirable decision has resulted in several educational units for different grades, a new interpretive plan, a revamped audio tour, and a “complete redesign of the exhibit and signings inside the church,” scheduled to debut in the summer of 2023.