“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.

“Slavery and Its Legacies at Old North” panel, 16 Oct.

On Wednesday, 16 October, the Old North Church hosts a panel discussion on “Slavery and Its Legacies at Old North: Confronting the Past, Envisioning the Future.”

The event description says:

Captain Newark Jackson was a merchant, mariner, and congregant of Old North Church in the 1730s and 1740s who made and sold chocolate near Clark’s Shipyard in the North End. In 2013, Old North Church & Historic Site opened a living history chocolate experience named after the seemingly innocuous seafarer and cacao importer. Over the past seven years, Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate has become an integral part of the historic site and a beloved gem along the Freedom Trail. The story of colonial chocolate and Jackson is woven into the story of Old North Church.

In 2016, historian Jared Hardesty became intrigued with this man about whom very little was known. So began a three-year international research project that revealed significant insights into Old North’s past that affects its future. Jackson’s personal history, as that of Old North and the city of Boston, reveals a complicated past involving slave owning and slave trading that weighs upon the present and alters our sense of ourselves.

The panelists include:

• Prof. Hardesty, author of Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston, now at Western Washington University
• Prof. Jonathan Chu of University of Massachusetts, Boston
• Madeleine Rodriguez, associate at the Foley Hoag law firm
• Rt. Rev. Gayle E. Harris, Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts

Their conversation will address “how a historic site comes to terms with information that alters its self-identity, its interpretation, and its public face,” examining “the complexity of past narratives, the impact of the past upon the present, and the necessity of history in correcting a fractured identity.” There will be time for questions and comments from the audience.

The event is scheduled to take place from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M. It is free, but attendees can register to attend through this page.

Preserving the Memories of Lesser-Known Bostonians

This month the city of Boston announced that it had established a “pattern library” for city websites and applications.

One purpose is to ensure that city websites have a common look so citizens recognize them as official and familiar. Another is to cut down on the number of decisions that city employees and contractors must make in setting up a new webpage.

Boston’s pattern library is named Fleet. That name also probably has two purposes. One is to signal the speed that it’s supposed to bring to the task of communicating with constituents.

The second is to keep alive the memory of Peter Fleet, the enslaved engraver and printer who worked on the Boston Evening-Post and many books and pamphlets in eighteenth-century Boston. In making that announcement, the city linked to this Boston 1775 posting about Peter Fleet.

So that’s cool.

Another piece of news this week: The Old North Church has received a generous “Mars Wrigley Confectionery US, LLC Forrest E. Mars, Jr. Chocolate History Research Grant” to fund new research into the life of Capt. Newark Jackson, owner of a chocolate mill in the North End in the early 1700s, and to share that work with the public in various forms, including a comic. I played a small part in that grant application and look forward to tasting the results.