Beacon Hill as a Palimpsest

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Three different photos of the African Meeting House taken at different periods in history, yet maintaining much of its original appearance.

However, although the long and tumultuous history of the struggle of African Americans may seem far from the state of Beacon Hill today, the degree to which these important landmarks of African American history have been preserved and recognized in its streets serve well in bringing such history to life and reminding residents and visitors alike that it is very much real, tangible, and even present today. Beacon Hill seems to be the perfect embodiment of the palimpsest– while so much of the underlying history of the neighborhood remains present and preserved, new histories and stories are being rewritten and superimposed upon it every day. There seems to be no other place in which the temporal layers of a place are so relevant and visible as these landmarks within the Historic Site, as we walk on the very grounds that these prominent civil rights activists walked on a century ago, and physically inhabit the exact spaces in which they sought rest and safety. To be standing on the very same floorboards of the African Meeting House where prominent abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison fought against slavery over a century ago, and free black men were recruited for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the first official African-American military units in the United States; to walk around the same two and a half floors of the museum-turned-Abiel Smith School that the students of the first public school for free black students attended classes just under two centuries ago; and to walk along the same front porches that welcomed countless 18th and 19th century runaway slaves and abolitionists into safe quarters- all of these experiences are enabled by the preservation and restoration of key sites that today serve as the temporal and spatial intersection of this rich history and a continually evolving present. Simultaneously, the very people that walk these grounds as visitors or inhabitants paint a new ‘version’ of Beacon Hill, no longer just a neighborhood of free black men, but a historic palimpsest filled with a portion of the incredibly diverse, modern-day population of Boston that lives to recreate parts of the old and both learn and retell the stories that unfolded in the very same space a century ago. The current Beacon Hill is neither what it was a century ago nor what it is in a single given day today – it cannot be simplified into either. Rather, it is a mix of both, a product of the constant interblending of the past and the evolving present.

A close-shot video clip of author's feet walking on the original floorboards of the African Meeting House, the oldest surviving black church building in the US. The ground featured in the clip is the same ground walked on by many prominent abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The meeting house underwent a recent $9.5 million restoration, and the over two century-old floorboards of the first floor of the house were preserved in its original state.

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The Museum of African American History was once the Abiel Smith School, the first black public school that replaced the school in the basement of the African Meeting House. The school remained Boston's black public school until public schools were racially integrated in 1855. Today, the school has been turned into a Museum with exhibits on the two and a half floors of the building that once contained classrooms.

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The frame, almost resembling a piece of modern art, reveals the underlying layers of brick and paint under the currently recreated walls of the African Meeting House.

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The overlap of the Boston city tour bus with the Charles Street Meeting House, the home of a long segregationist tradition of church seating and the struggle against it, provides a snapshot of the different temporal layers that intersect in Beacon Hill. What was once a site of extreme segregation and racial tension is now frequented by modern-day tourists that can only hear about and imagine the deep history hidden behind the walls of these preserved structures. A palimpsest that has come to life!