By Deborah McDermott, reprinted from SeacoastOnline.com, Sept. 2, 2018
PORTSMOUTH — These are uneasy days to be a person of color, said JerriAnne Boggis. There is a sense that it’s important to watch your back, a knowledge that there is pushback “on all the advances and growth we’ve made. It seems like we’re regressing. There’s not one black person I’ve spoken to who is not cautious of where we are now.”
She herself received a phone call last month, after she attended a conference on diversifying the state’s workforce, in her capacity as executive director of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. Her name and others were circulated on a white supremacist website as a result.
The call came from a white woman who screamed at Boggis, telling her, “I’m trying to kill her white babies, that my existence was a detriment to her and her children’s lives. And then she said, ‘We have more guns than you, and we’re coming.’ I heard the fear in her voice that was at the heart of this.”
The organization’s February tea talks and symposia are more and more well attended as people come to understand the history they’ve never been told. The BHTNH is a model recognized nationwide of interracial cooperation with “white allies” working hand in glove with their African American counterparts. There are stories, of one man working to change the minds and spirits of Ku Klux Klan members, of a white person with a black friend “who will begin to understand when they see things happening on TV, that that could be their friend those things are happening to,” said historian Valerie Cunningham, who founded the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail.
“This is why we can’t stop. We don’t know when some tiny sliver is going to change someone’s heart,” Boggis said.
That is why Boggis, Cunningham and board president the Rev. Robert Thompson say the BHTNH’s mission is ever vital – to tell the untold stories of the African Americans who lived and worked and raised families and contributed to their communities in New Hampshire. And still do.
Key to this effort is its recent purchase of the building at 222 Court St. in downtown Portsmouth, not far from where ships carrying slaves once arrived and near the African Burying Ground and itself an 18th century home to two enslaved people owned by a local minister.
The $675,000 purchase was finalized July 31. The BHTNH raised more than 10 percent of the down payment through private donations, has a banking partner to hold the first mortgage and has received $450,000 from the state’s Community Development Finance Authority in tax credits. Under this program, businesses get a 75 percent credit on certain state taxes against a donation made to nonprofit organizations.
“One of the nice moments of synchronicity was that we learned about the tax credits the same day the governor wrote a proclamation honoring Juneteenth” – the annual celebration of the end of slavery, Thompson said.
Fundraising is ongoing, said Boggis, as board members work to sell the tax credits to businesses across the state and raise additional funds toward the purchase. Boggis said the board will meet in September for a strategic planning session and is expected to embark on a public fundraising phase next year.
“But we’ll accept donations any time,” she said with a laugh.
Under terms of the sale, former owner and local attorney John McGee has been given six months to wrap up his practice, so the BHTNH is not expected to move in until the first of the year.
The purchase of the building allows the BHTNH to have its own home for the first time since Cunningham formed the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail more than 20 years ago. In fact, said Thompson, this most recent chapter in the organization’s saga is directly due to Cunningham and her commitment to finding those untold stories and telling them – significantly with the book she co-authored, “Black Portsmouth.”
“This is the logical outcome of the extraordinary work done by Valerie, who simply asked where were the people who looked like her in the city of Portsmouth,” he said. “Having a building will enable us to have a home for this ongoing journey. It says, ‘This is valuable and worthy of a prominent place in our city and our state.’”
“Portsmouth has all these historic houses, and they have the names of historic white people like Langdon and Whipple and Moffatt-Ladd,” Boggis said. “They are a concrete connection to white history. The house we own has black history. Two enslaved people lived there. Once we hang our shingle out on that building, we are visibly marking that spot, claiming it to all who come by: this is here, a place to tell the story, a place to share the story.”
The building will house, in addition to offices and research space, an interpretive learning center, where the BHTNH intends to expand on the story of New Hampshire’s black history being told already through walking tours in Portsmouth and around the state.
“For us, it is intended to be a place where the community not only can find materials that speak to specific sites, but it will also carry on the story. It will be interpreting who we are and what we wish to become,” Thompson said. “We may have a bed, for instance, that was known to be used by slaves traveling through the state on the Underground Railroad. We want to provide information that is accessible to the public and scholars.”
For Cunningham, it is important that the center concentrate not only on early periods of the state’s history, but more modern times as well “so that doesn’t become the forgotten past.”
“I want people to know that I grew up in segregated New Hampshire. That de facto segregation had as much of an effect here as legal segregation did in South Carolina or Georgia,” she said. “You can’t get a job. You can’t go into a public barber shop. That happened in New Hampshire, not just in the South. It’s important that we preserve the documentation and oral histories now for the future.”
Another key venture of the BHTNH is the expansion of black history beyond Portsmouth – work that is progressing now that a permanent home will allow it to document and store. Academics, individual scholars, historical societies and volunteer historians are amassing the stories of black residents throughout the Granite State. Currently, the trail is collecting documents from towns where there is well-established information. In addition to Portsmouth, this includes Exeter, Greenland, Newmarket, Canterbury, Keene, Jaffrey, Mason, Andover, Canaan, Newport, Warner, Pittsfield and Hancock – where the Canterbury will hold its first walking tour beyond Portsmouth on Sept. 9.
As time, resources and collaborations continue, more towns will be added, with information posted on the BHTNH website and in each town. Eventually, trail markers like those in Portsmouth will be installed at various important sites, and plans call for a statewide audio tour.
The BHTNH also hopes to develop curriculum in coordination with local schools so the state’s schoolchildren – black and white – know of the contributions of their community’s founding black founding fathers and mothers.
“We’re committed to our work. We have stories we want to tell,” Thompson said. “By sharing a truer history of the state, we are working toward eliminating stereotypes and we start thinking differently about who our neighbors are. He cites the petition for freedom penned in 1779 and signed by 20 Portsmouth slaves. “What if we know these people who lived in our neighborhood wrote this declaration of independence? That blows out the notion that black people were illiterate and didn’t care about their freedom.”
Still, it can be disquieting to know many of the same problems that plagued black people centuries ago remain issues today. Cunningham said she was secretary of the Portsmouth chapter of the NAACP in 1963.
“If I had known then that I would be sitting here today talking about the same old thing, I’d have stayed home watching soap operas,” she said with a laugh. “But you keep going. Those people who came before me, they cared. So I have to take off my jammies and go out and do the work.”
Boggis said you never know when that tiny sliver will penetrate the heart.
