Collect Day #40, VALERIE CUNNINGHAM
O Almighty God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: grant that we may honor the work of Valerie Cunningham who brought to light the history of the black community in Portsmouth, NH. Through her dedication to the truth may others be able to recognize the achievements and contributions that many people in the black community have brought to the State of New Hampshire; through Christ our Lord, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
DAY #40, March 31, 2018
Portsmouth
VALERIE CUNNINGHAM
Angela Matthews
As a teenager growing up in Portsmouth, Valerie Cunningham was proud of her family’s African American heritage, but she was also curious about local Black history. While working at Portsmouth Public Library, she discovered Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth. From Brewster’s stories about local Blacks, Valerie found clues to a history that until then had been invisible. She began a quest that would consume the rest of her life as researcher, historian and chronicler of Black Portsmouth from 1645 to present day.
Valerie spent years documenting the stories of Africans and Black Americans through probate and church records, from broadsides and news archives at the Portsmouth Athenaeum and from oral histories she conducted with several Portsmouth Black elders.
More than any other individual, Valerie brought momentous change to Portsmouth and New Hampshire. Her work has influenced how the earliest African Americans are perceived, as courageous, determined, philanthropic and — most important – arriving on the block in 1645. She is described by local historian Dennis Robinson as the person who changed everything, referring to her book Black Portsmouth as “the bible.”
In addition to her achievements as a public historian and preservationist, Valerie was also a founding member of the Seacoast Council on Race and Religion (SCORR) convened by St. John’s Episcopal Church and a diversity of community activists in response to the March 7, 1965 assault on civil rights demonstrators walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Meanwhile, Valerie also served a term as branch secretary of the Seacoast National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which her parents had helped to start in 1959.
Cunningham’s first publication describing slavery in the colonial seaport appeared in the quarterly journal, Historic New Hampshire, in 1989. During the 1990s, Valerie’s work was expanded as a curriculum guide with co-author, Mark J. Sammons, and distributed to the region’s schools and libraries; then, again with Sammons, the book Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African American Heritage was published in 2004. In addition, Valerie led efforts to establish the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail with the installation of two dozen bronze historic site markers all around Portsmouth. Her purpose in documenting and making visible this forgotten past is to remind us all of what is possible.
