Exploring Dover’s Black History Tour

Lives Bound Together: The Washingtons & Ona Marie Judge in NH Special Ona Judge Day Tour Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Sonya Martino During the Spring of 1796, George Washington’s final months in office, Ona Judge, an enslaved woman owned by the First Family, escaped the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia with the aid of that city’s free Black community and made her way to Portsmouth. On this tour, you will hear the true story of Ona’s quest for freedom and…

Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Nur Shoop Colonial Portsmouth newspapers testify to the local slave trade, runaways, abolitionists, and anti-abolitionist activities, followed by conflicting opinions of the Civil War. In the 20th century, the legacy of that early history was reflected in news about de facto segregation in housing and public places. This tour includes many of those historic landmarks from the early nineteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Kevin Wade Mitchel as Jack Staines Seafaring was one of the most significant occupations among both enslaved and free Black men between 1740 and 1865. Black seamen sailed on whalers, warships, and privateers. Some were enslaved and forced to work at sea, but by 1800 most seamen were free to seek adventure and economic opportunity aboard ship. On this tour, you will meet Jack Staines, husband to Ona Judge Staines, the President, and Martha Washington’s…

Tour Guides: Rekha Mahadevan or Laramie Wilson Local newspapers carried merchants’ ads for ships returning to the port of Portsmouth laden with cargo from trade ports on the West Coast of Africa, the West Indies, and the middle Atlantic coastal cities of Colonial America. Visit local wharves and auction sites related to the Atlantic Slave Trade, where a captive could be exchanged for “cash or good lumber” to serve in the master’s house or work on the docks or aboard…

Sankofa Tour Guide: Daniel Comly At the turn of the 19th century, Black abolitionists are changing public attitudes about slavery and challenging racial bias in the courts. In Portsmouth, never enslaved and newly freed Black adults share households with still enslaved children and elders. It is a time of possibilities, hope, and tension. True stories about these families will describe how a community of African refugees were claiming their place as Americans.

Presented in collaboration with the Prescott Park Arts Festival, BHTNH will feature the star-studded Disney Pixar film, Soul, to kick off the 2022 Juneteenth celebration. As a special offering for the community, this movie will be shown on Friday evening instead of the typical Monday night of the movie series.   Everybody has a soul. Joe Gardner is about to find his. Joe is a middle-school band teacher whose life hasn’t quite gone the way he expected. His true passion is jazz and he’s good.…

By all accounts, the idea for a memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment he commanded emerged soon after Shaw, two other officers, and 74 Black soldiers died during the initial attack on a fort that protected Charleston’s harbor.  After local opposition prevented a monument in Beaufort, South Carolina, it fell to Boston’s Joshua Bowen Smith (1813-79), an African American caterer to bring the monument to fruition. This tour takes us to the home,…

Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Nur Shoop Colonial Portsmouth newspapers testify to the local slave trade, runaways, abolitionists, and anti-abolitionist activities, followed by conflicting opinions of the Civil War. In the 20th century, the legacy of that early history was reflected in news about de facto segregation in housing and public places. This tour includes many of those historic landmarks from the early nineteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Kevin Wade Mitchel as Jack Staines Seafaring was one of the most significant occupations among both enslaved and free Black men between 1740 and 1865. Black seamen sailed on whalers, warships, and privateers. Some were enslaved and forced to work at sea, but by 1800 most seamen were free to seek adventure and economic opportunity aboard ship. On this tour, you will meet Jack Staines, husband to Ona Judge Staines, the President, and Martha Washington’s…

Sankofa Scholar & Tour Guide: Angela Matthews Institutionalized slavery in Colonial America provided immense wealth and material culture to many European immigrants and their descendants in the Americas, as Portsmouth’s house museums bear witness. This tour brings into focus an economic system dependent upon the international slave trade with its constant supply of kidnapped unpaid African workers and their descendants, who, against the odds, created one of this country’s oldest Black communities.