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Speaker 1: It's night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
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Speaker 2: Thank you for the.
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Speaker 3: News, Suzanne. It is night Side with Dan Ray. I'm Bradley j for Dan. By the way, if you need to leave the radio, you can listen to WBZ anywhere using the iHeartRadio app. If you don't have it and you're not driving right now, download it right now, otherwise you might forget. So this is Juneteenth, and your understanding of Juneteenth might be a bit abstract. So the goal now is to kind of bring that into sharper focus, maybe help you feel it a little bit.
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Speaker 2: And our guest is.
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Speaker 3: Joel McCall, who it makes me feel like a lazy bum. He's done so many things. Award winning educator and project developer with a Reldland business group in Roxbury, co founder of SOS Living Museum, he does the Hidden History of Black Boston tours. He's with the Nubian Writers Group, self published author. There's a technology chairperson with the Black Community Information Center. And I actually had to leave some stuff out because you do so much. Thanks for being with us, Joe McCall.
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Speaker 4: Thank you, Bradley.
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Speaker 3: Is it appropriate to say happy June teenth? Is it a happy occasion or somber remembrance or somewhere in between.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, it is layered. You know, for most folks in the black community, it's it's been a longer tradition than the recent you know, state recognition for what it is. But usually what we'll do is we'll call it a commemoration. Okay, I've heard that before.
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Speaker 3: So when you greet somebody on June tenth, what's the appropriate way to say it's if not happy Juneteenth, what would you say.
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Speaker 4: Well, it's really just an in gathering of family and community and friends, So it'd be the same as what you'd say on any kind of get together.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, So before we get into the details of June, Jasen, start to feel it a little bit more. Tell me about your hidden history of Black Boston tours.
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Speaker 4: Well, you know, I started out in two thousand and three, leaving a decade worth of corporate life, and I was doing back office accounting, and I said, I can't do this anymore. And I never was a particularly good student or trained in history, but I went on a little trip to the to the South to visit my family and I started doing my own family tree, my own genealogy and from that point on, I came back to Boston from Prince George, Maryland, from Loudon County, Virginia, even Greensboro's North Carolina, and I said, I gotta, I gotta teach the rest of the community this this genealogy stuff. And a new thing called YouTube and Google had just come around the corner, and so I went about turning my my professional life towards of public a public tract of teaching history and uh technology. I was showing people how to use Windows two thousand and so forth in little community uh computer centers. But on the weekends, some of the artifacts that I'd grabbed up, like a Jesse Owen stall or you know, uh Plymouth rock ship from museum stores and auction sites and you know, antique stores. I would bring those around to anyone who would have me. Public libraries, elementary schools. Some of my public school teachers started inviting me to just talk about black His Street, and soon it turned into walking tours of the North End and Beacon Hill. And in the last three years we got a charter van for fourteen passengers and we've been kicking it since.
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Speaker 3: What are a couple of the maybe one thing you see in the north end, one on Beacon Hill and one on the South end.
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Speaker 2: To give us an idea of what's on the.
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Speaker 4: Tour sure well, having everything to do with these freedom moments, including Juneteenth. There is a man who has overlooked who was buried in Cops Hill Cemetery in the North End. There are ten thousand folks buried up there, and one thousand of them are black folks. And I walk folks over there and talk about one Prince Hall. You might have heard of him from the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, the African Lodge. And this guy in the seventeen eighties and nineties was Martin Malcolm and Ella Baker all wrapped into one person in the activity, the activism that he was doing, and the citizen making that he was making in the gaps of the early Commonwealth, the early state of Massachusetts. On Beacon Hill, I love to talk about Harriet and Lewis Hayden, major radical underground activists providing sanctuary for black folks, creating some really positive actions, and one of the folks who stayed and we could talk about it later, but the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty really put a shutter into the black community that was that was pushed over there out of the north end the first Black community formation into the north slope of Beacon Hill, which was actually the second Black community formation. But there were some things that are kind of vibing like today with the political moves and ebbs and flows, were remind.
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Speaker 2: Us of the details of that act you just mentioned.
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Speaker 4: Sure, sure, So you've got we're entering the eighteen hundreds, and every addition to the United States after the original thirteen states is a compromise between kind of freeish northern power and slaver planter power in the south. So you add one state to the north, to the south, all the way up to the Missouri compromise. Maine is added free Missouri as slave. It's going all the way to the Mississippi. During that other compromises were made to balance the power that was being negotiated in the United States. You got your San Francisco forty nine ers for the eighteen forty nine ers in the gold and that's when the frontier is being pushed right over top of the Loko to people. And it's a real decision all the way up to the Civil War about how will how will the powers be. One of the compromises was a Fugitive Slave Act, which basically said in eighteen fifty that any white folks could basically go into the northern states that were non slave and point out a black person on the street and say, I'm going to bring you down to the commissioner. In Boston, it was Court Street and where the old Boston Public School administration building was until they moved it into my neighborhood in Roxbury, there was a courthouse and so they would drag the black person there. They couldn't testify, and the judge if he said to the slave catcher, yeah, this is a citizen here, he'd be paid five dollars. But if he decided, yeah, that you can bring them down to Long Wharf and put them on a ship in like twelve years, a slave kidnap them and bring them back into servitude. In the South, they were paid ten dollars, right. And so there's these structural incentives and things that are baked into this Fugitive Slave Act, which radical white abolitionists and black folks and Beacon Hill they put up these broadsides that says caution colored people look out for slave catchers and the churches that had been established by the mid eighteen hundreds in the north slope of Beacon Hill they emptied out these These were dangerous times and a lot of folks were trying to get further up north. So I take people on a walking tour that loosely follows the Black Freedom Trail in Beacon Hill, but we cover a little more than the two hundred and so years. We do the full fourth.
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Speaker 3: I think it's important for everyone to realize, in the fullness of time or history, this is just a blip a goo there.
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Speaker 2: If you're a boomer.
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Speaker 3: If you're a boomer, you may have a great grandparent who, for a small part of their life was alive during slave times.
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Speaker 2: Isn't that kind of correct? It's not that absolutely, it's not that.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, the the you know, generalation generationally, the thirty years or so between generations, if we moved that way. You know, my grandfather was born in nineteen fourteen. He is a World War Two, a veteran, and you know, fought in a segregated army. And his father and his grandfather and that man's father, my fourth great grandfather was in the US Colored Troops for Maryland and the thirty ninth Maryland, and you know when that's really what put me onto this amazing sense of history and that you know, no one could knock me off my block if I knew my own family tree. And I tried to tie this stuff to the more universal and national things that are going on. And so you've got a lot of folks. You know, generally people don't understand that with black folks, our average tenure, except for Native people, is the oldest in the United States. So when you take immigrant races on average, with the great immigrations of the nineteen tens, in eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds, they're babies, you know. They they've come from Eastern Europe and Polish and Jewish and Italian and so forth. But African Americans go goes back to eight seventeen sixty seven. If you've got someone of descent who was transshipped and enslaved, landed somewhere in Charleston and Richmond or Annapolis, Boston, New York, Providence, and so forth, this is just a little bit of family lines. And to pick up where Juneteenth was reconstruction, you know, the eighteen sixties or the eighteen seventies and eighties. You're almost within two living memories of that, so that that's very insightful observation.
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Speaker 3: Let's take a break and we'll get into some of the events, a bit of a timeline regarding events related to Juneteenth.
00:11:49
Speaker 2: After this on WBZ.
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Speaker 1: Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
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Speaker 3: Radley for Dan on night Side, and quickly reminder you can listen to Nightside anytime anytime at Nightside on demand dot com. And another quick reminder, I'll be back in tomorrow into the studio here at six for Jay talking. We continue with our guest, our excellent guest, Joel McCall, talking about Juneteenth. We're going to get into the timeline first of all the events related to that, because I want you friends to be able to go to your your barbecue tomorrow knowing all about Juneteenth and be able to impress your friends. Now, we had emancipation Proclamation. Let's start there right out of the gate January one, eighteen sixty three. You can talk about what was going on at that time, and then move into the next events, which might be the surrender the least surrender later on, and then what exactly happened in Texas and when that was So let's start with a little talk about what was going on circup Emancipation Proclamation.
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Speaker 4: So, you know, it's interesting in my leader and I was talking about doing that kind of thing that's turned into a pilgrimage of visiting my great aunt Martha down in Suitland, Maryland and discovering African American genealogy. And in going to Annapolis, I uncovered the the link to the thirty ninth US Colored Troupe that my third great grandfather was a participant in Lincoln's army. And I started to learn a lot about what was going on in the Civil War. But the particulars about the Emancipation Proclamation, if you take it just a moment to read it and look at it, it's kind of remarkable and even more remarkable for those folks in border states Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, these these border states. Abraham Lincoln didn't want to offend the planter ruling class, the slave owning class, because he had already sent all of these these uh uh train lines and ships to shut off New Orleans and and and kind of, you know, surround the Confederate States of America. But what the debates going on in the political leadership in the state of Maryland was like, how much money we're going to lose if we go with the North versus going with the South, the Confederate States of America versus the Union or the northern the Northern United States of America. So I'm rambling, but the the long and the shortages. When I read that they emancipation proclamation, he basically says to everyone who is enslaved in a foreign country, right, I'm paraphrasing, but he's saying, everyone in the enemy's territory who is enslaved, you are free. Right. So the Confederacy of America, which has its own capital, its own money, which includes one hundred dollars bills with smiling plowing slaves on the front of it, with John Calhoun and a Greco Roman goddess and so forth, they have their own capital, their own flag, their own political system. He's saying everyone there in territory, he is not one yet except for in some of the parishes in Louisiana. He's not completely defeated. There is no appomatics. Yet he's saying, you all are free. That's January eighteen, sixty three. The most important and interesting part about it, that has everything to do with all the civil rights movements and freedom moments that were to come in the next one hundred and fifty years, is that he has a semicolon right in the middle of that clause saying you are free. Right. What he does in between is he says everyone else is accepted from this. So my people in Prince George County, Maryland, actually the status of enslavement was held. It was upheld actually by the Emancipation Proclamation. And so the twist here is that the second part he says is basically, go back to work for the harvest that's coming up. Do not be island, and you can look for work with the armies that are coming through, the Northern army that's coming through, and you are to find a way to negotiate and work for good wages. So there's all this flattening of what will an African who is enslaved in the South become, right. I don't know if you've ever been to a immigration a citizenship I guess they call it a citizenship ceremony. I had an African American. I hadn't been the one until a friend of mine's trinidady, and mother was becoming a citizen, and there was a lot of training, and then there was this one incredible day where they kind of turn Fanuel Hall into an actual courthouse and there's a judge there. They give they renounce their citizenship from other places, and they get their flag and their papers and all these documents, and it's a it's a remarkable day. But it struck me as I sat there, this is you know, six seven years or six or seven years before COVID, as I sat there, that there was no preparation for this class of African Americans. In the Emancipation Proclamation, in the Massachusett State Constitution, which a lot of people say was the fore maayir of abolition in the North, Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of Freedom, who was a British general outside of Virginia. This semi colon that's read in Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is a real sticking point, you know. And I don't know if i'm I'm you know, that's good.
00:19:08
Speaker 2: Thank you for that.
00:19:09
Speaker 3: Now on April nine and sixty five, Lee surrenders. And there are certain areas that are relatively unaffected by that, and.
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Speaker 2: For example Texas, and yeah, Texas didn't.
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Speaker 3: The slave population didn't really find out about it until later when General Gordon Granger went down there. And as I understand that, Texas was a place where enslavers went because there weren't many Union troops. It was seen as kind of a sanctuary and that was kind of the last holdout. And then General Granger stood in Texas I think it was Galveston and read a little thing that said, people at Texas are informed that, in accordance with the proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
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Speaker 2: And there you have Juneteenth, correct, you do.
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Speaker 4: And it's a remarkable moment in African American history. You know a lot of people are like, why are you celebrating something that was late? Why are this and that? And you know, I try to point out the really beautiful part about it is the name. The name is coming from black creativity. You know, June and nineteenth, Juneteenth match together. It's it's just another you know way. You know, when I start my Black history tours for the North End, we start over by Haymarket and I have people take a minute to really marvel at what the Jewish community did when they set up their block long New England Holocaust Memorial, and they put these big stones that from their own language, they use the word shoa, which is to represent what occurred to them during the great disaster in World War two, when their people were ripped from their homes and put on trains and brought to the concentration and death camps. And they make these chimneys and they have missed in them, and they put all the tattoo numbers of all the inmates are etched into these columns, these chimney columns. And people don't understand that. You know, Texas, Texas was probably one of the least affected by the Civil War, but that was because they had been messing with dreams of their own, independent of their own nationhood.
00:21:43
Speaker 3: To do right there, I need to break and that's a good spot to do it. We'll continue and get a little more focused on what life as a slave is like and what the things that make this such a big deal. After this on WBZ.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Night with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio, we.
00:22:05
Speaker 3: Continue with our guests Joel McCall as we really learn more about Juneteenth and try to remind ourselves how important it was. And in order to do that, I want you to understand what slavery was more than you may. You may intellectually understand it, but not viscerally, and I'd like you to viscerally understand it. If there's one museum we go to in the United States, I would say the Civil Rights Museum is the most moving museum. It's at the Lorraine Hotel where doctor Martin Luther King was assassinated, and it's a big deal. The thing that struck me right off the bat in that museum is there's a cutaway of a slaver ship and you see the horrific way that folk people who were captured and kidnapped and brought over here to be slaves.
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Speaker 2: It was torture.
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Speaker 3: It was so wildly inhumane, and I'd love you to speak about that. And I'm sure you've been down to that museum. I hope you have. If you, if you have talked about that museum, because it is quite meaningful, and then maybe dispel some myths that I've heard, Well, slavery wasn't that bad. I mean I've actually heard those things. I hear people say that maybe you can make them understand. Yeah it was that bad.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, the uh I haven't been to that museum. I actually there was an old nonprofit that I worked for and we took two mini vans of black youth from from Roxbury and Dorchester down all the way down to Angola Prison, Memphis. We went to d C, We went to Greensboro visiting all these sites and yeah, that was a very striking moment. And concerning the slaving system, I take a moment to talk about an eight year old child who was ripped from a family in West Africa and put on a slaver called the Charming Phyllis. Now, if you take one of those long bendy busses MBTA buses in Boston and turn it on its side, that's about the dimension of this slaver. And I explained to people, you know, imagine ninety six different Africans being captured and put into the belly of that slaver. And hold your thought for a second. Because when that Charming Phyllis ship that was captained by Peter Gwynn, it was insured in the project. The whole shipping venture was funded and overseen by Thomas Fitch. He had instructions on what to do and how to harvest black bodies and West Africa and bring them across the ocean when it landed, and what is today Neeland Street. And if you go to the Piafang Arch, the arch that you enter Chinatown with all pon the towns have an arch in Boston. You go two blocks in there's a little plaque that denotes where this slaver came in. The slave ships were called slavers, and this eight year old child disembarked and there were seventy five souls left from the ninety six that were transhipped over four weeks. Now. Because they didn't want the slaves to rebel and be coordinated, they tried to coast up and down and mix the different ethnicities so that you didn't have all Euroba, you didn't all Mende, you didn't have all Bambi Lake peoples, so that they could unite and try to overthrow, which they often did, which is not told about a lot of the resistances. But I tell people this child would be purchased by John Wheatley and he would name her after the charming Phyllis, and so that became known as the Great Poetess Phyllis Wheatley. She was enslaved in that household along with other enslaved Africans. But they threw Greek, Latin, Roman, English obviously at her, and she was just a multi genius. But I have people just pause at this eight year old soul seeing the attrition that is, the loss of life that was normal ninety six to seventy five, that rate sometimes even greater. How did she sleep on that, that slaver who took care of her? You know, there's a lot of lessons in the humanitational pull that we just flatten right by when it's you know, slavery is slavery is slavery. And that's a big part of my overall presentation is to try to do exactly what you're asking me here, is to to un whitewash it, to not let it be so you know, mythological and abstract.
00:27:34
Speaker 2: You were allowed to beat your slave?
00:27:37
Speaker 4: Correct, yes, actually there. You know, Virginia was one of the earliest colonies to decree that anything that came out of the enslaved African woman's womb would inherit the status of the mother. Boston codified slavery in sixteen forty one. The first colony to actually say slavery is fine, we will as long as you know it's justly done, and people sell themselves to us right at the beginning of the archive. It's completely misleading and poor history. But yeah, there were laws that protected for any infraction, and a lot of the slave narratives that come up from the Works Progress administration talk about this, any small slight offense, dropping a biscuit, you know, doing any type of thing. Harriet Tubman, a mistress, was threatening to beat one of the enslaved Africans who was in the same place as she was. She jumped in front of them and they threw a stone and it hit her in her head and she would always fall on her Nineteen Freedom travels on the underground railroad to free enslaved Africans in Maryland, bring them up to sanctuary in Philadelphia and so forth. And also Mum bet Elizabeth Freeman, who is well known in western Massachusetts, is one of the early slave cases that kind of ushered ind the disfavor of slavery in Massachusetts. She was also attacked physically by her mistress and that's what actually put her over the top. It wasn't just overhearing you know, the American Revolution and freedom of this and freedom that. So violence could come from any angle at any time, anywhere, and so this has everything to do with you know, community relations where you know folks carrying death on their hip in the form of racist police officers and that type of brutality. This, this is an unbroken chain, a long genealogical thread of pressures in the black community.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: And all right, I'm gonna ask a question after and you give me the answer after, give your time to think about it. You may have I'm sure you've had to deal with this question before. Of course, many of our forefathers had slaves and they're forgiven because so many people had them at the time.
00:30:25
Speaker 2: Is that legitimate or do.
00:30:26
Speaker 3: You have to subtract some points when you take a look at the legacy of some of these slave owners. I'll ask your answer your response to that after this.
00:30:37
Speaker 2: On WBZ.
00:30:40
Speaker 1: It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news Radio.
00:30:45
Speaker 3: Bradley J for Dan Tonight on Night's Side, our guest is Joel McCall. We're talking about Juneteenth and events surrounding it and concepts surrounding it. Before the break, I asked.
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Speaker 2: Joel, Joel, how would you wish.
00:30:58
Speaker 3: That American would think about their forefathers, the ones that own slaves?
00:31:06
Speaker 2: How would you ask them to deal with that?
00:31:11
Speaker 4: I have to fail. That's a that's a very big question, Bradley, It's a good question. And you know, I'm thinking that the case that comes to mind immediately is the Georgetown University when they dug into the history of slaving and their their university. The sale of two hundred and eighty two enslaved Africans actually kept Georgetown afloat, and you know, so there is a real repair that is owed, you know, to these families who have been locked into to this irrelation from that point, and that's where I want to distinguish. Actually, about six or seven years ago, I came across randomly in the Brookline Library. I was waiting for someone, and I read Frederick Olmsted, the guy who made Central Park and also the Boston Common the whole Emerald necklace going all the way to Franklin Franklin Park. He wrote a journal visiting the South, and he was struck by how Southern planters referred to black people as annuities. Right, So there are many layers. To just imagine this breeding Africans in the northern Upper South in Virginia and Maryland and walking them in koffls all the way to the king cotton fields in the South, in the Carolinas, in Mississippi and Alabama. There is no grammar and there's no language that even describes that. We have a little bit in the history books about the trailer tears. But the population of enslaved black folks from eighteen hundred, which was at six hundred thousand, unnaturally increased to four million on the eve of the Civil War. This creates a relation for all Americans, whether you are the one with the deed and the owner and you're giving it in your will to your three year old granddaughter these African bodies, or you can see this kawfl walking down the road to be put into plantation. Slavery from the Upper South, as that is not me right, and so this passes into lynching. They had lynching postcards where white folks of all classes, all backgrounds would have a picnic and a day of observ a cultural kind of ritual thing. And so you know not to not to harp on it too much, but again that genealogical thread needs real repair, and it needs recognition in the first place. Right, And so in so many of our our educational spaces, this is not there's not even grammar given to define the reality of it.
00:34:45
Speaker 3: And so let me ask you this. We have to make sure there's plenty of time for it. Some municipalities have and institutions voluntarily put together their own reparative programs, test horses, and some provide a type of conversation through targeted housing education grants and things like that. No federal reparations for slavery in the United States. Would you like to see that? And if so, have you thought about the logistics of it, how it would work?
00:35:18
Speaker 4: You know, I think I better spend my own energy, and black energy could be better spent. You know. The interesting thing that I've found is that, for example, they're in Medford and the Isaac Royal House, a white lead nonprofit, basically white facing. In the seventies and eighties, they did a very radical thing. They said, this Isaac Royal House, we usually tore folks through the mansion, and we need to include the twenty seven enslaved Africans on this five hundred acre farm, right, here in Medford, Massachusetts, standing all the way down to the Mystic River. We need to include these antiguin enslaved Africans who were dragged up to New England by the Isaac Royal family and and they kind of are a national example for other nonprofit museums to be inclusive in their history. It's not replacing their talk about, you know, the china in the living room, in the master bedroom and all of that, but it's also saying there was an enslaved girl who was responsible for turning on the candles in the morning and doing this type of stuff during full surveillance under the four Uh you know, white people from the Isaac Royal enslaving family. What was her life like? Just looking into that and asking those questions is the big enough pivot, I think, uh for for you know that type of.
00:36:57
Speaker 2: Thing, I take. I take it.
00:36:59
Speaker 3: You don't feel that that is a worthwhile goal. It's just not doable. It's time and money could be better spent.
00:37:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's it's a whole other language. And you know, it has everything to do with the the segregation that Americans live under today, where there are white folks who who have no interaction with black folks so that there's no ground to get grip right, and I think you know, it always starts young and it includes this inclusive Uh. These inclusive educational forces is really where I spend my time. I think there's a role for everyone. You know, I'm not against a federal holiday for Juneteenth, uh, for for these reparative energies. You know, I think there there are ways that black folks can can better focus our energy.
00:38:05
Speaker 2: And I understand.
00:38:06
Speaker 3: Can you take fifteen seconds just to tell folks how to find you and perhaps go on your Hidden History of Black Boston tour.
00:38:14
Speaker 4: I'm so grateful, Bradley Reidrine dot com. That's R E I D R e N dot com. I got my contact phone number, email all the information out There'd be glad to take small groups on charter van tour or walking.
00:38:31
Speaker 3: Towards so you can also just google Hidden History of Black Boston tourist.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: I bet.
00:38:36
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us on this Juneteenth.
00:38:41
Speaker 2: Joel McCall really appreciate it.
00:38:44
Speaker 4: Take care, Thank you all right.
00:38:48
Speaker 2: Henry David Thurreau.
00:38:50
Speaker 3: Was the literary superstar or a fraud or fraudish there's a case for both sides, and we have a cool guest coming in who's an expert. And I actually was a first person interpreter of Henry David throw coming up on w b Z
Speaker 1: It's night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: Thank you for the.
00:00:07
Speaker 3: News, Suzanne. It is night Side with Dan Ray. I'm Bradley j for Dan. By the way, if you need to leave the radio, you can listen to WBZ anywhere using the iHeartRadio app. If you don't have it and you're not driving right now, download it right now, otherwise you might forget. So this is Juneteenth, and your understanding of Juneteenth might be a bit abstract. So the goal now is to kind of bring that into sharper focus, maybe help you feel it a little bit.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: And our guest is.
00:00:40
Speaker 3: Joel McCall, who it makes me feel like a lazy bum. He's done so many things. Award winning educator and project developer with a Reldland business group in Roxbury, co founder of SOS Living Museum, he does the Hidden History of Black Boston tours. He's with the Nubian Writers Group, self published author. There's a technology chairperson with the Black Community Information Center. And I actually had to leave some stuff out because you do so much. Thanks for being with us, Joe McCall.
00:01:10
Speaker 4: Thank you, Bradley.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: Is it appropriate to say happy June teenth? Is it a happy occasion or somber remembrance or somewhere in between.
00:01:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is layered. You know, for most folks in the black community, it's it's been a longer tradition than the recent you know, state recognition for what it is. But usually what we'll do is we'll call it a commemoration. Okay, I've heard that before.
00:01:43
Speaker 3: So when you greet somebody on June tenth, what's the appropriate way to say it's if not happy Juneteenth, what would you say.
00:01:52
Speaker 4: Well, it's really just an in gathering of family and community and friends, So it'd be the same as what you'd say on any kind of get together.
00:02:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, So before we get into the details of June, Jasen, start to feel it a little bit more. Tell me about your hidden history of Black Boston tours.
00:02:15
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I started out in two thousand and three, leaving a decade worth of corporate life, and I was doing back office accounting, and I said, I can't do this anymore. And I never was a particularly good student or trained in history, but I went on a little trip to the to the South to visit my family and I started doing my own family tree, my own genealogy and from that point on, I came back to Boston from Prince George, Maryland, from Loudon County, Virginia, even Greensboro's North Carolina, and I said, I gotta, I gotta teach the rest of the community this this genealogy stuff. And a new thing called YouTube and Google had just come around the corner, and so I went about turning my my professional life towards of public a public tract of teaching history and uh technology. I was showing people how to use Windows two thousand and so forth in little community uh computer centers. But on the weekends, some of the artifacts that I'd grabbed up, like a Jesse Owen stall or you know, uh Plymouth rock ship from museum stores and auction sites and you know, antique stores. I would bring those around to anyone who would have me. Public libraries, elementary schools. Some of my public school teachers started inviting me to just talk about black His Street, and soon it turned into walking tours of the North End and Beacon Hill. And in the last three years we got a charter van for fourteen passengers and we've been kicking it since.
00:04:14
Speaker 3: What are a couple of the maybe one thing you see in the north end, one on Beacon Hill and one on the South end.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: To give us an idea of what's on the.
00:04:22
Speaker 4: Tour sure well, having everything to do with these freedom moments, including Juneteenth. There is a man who has overlooked who was buried in Cops Hill Cemetery in the North End. There are ten thousand folks buried up there, and one thousand of them are black folks. And I walk folks over there and talk about one Prince Hall. You might have heard of him from the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, the African Lodge. And this guy in the seventeen eighties and nineties was Martin Malcolm and Ella Baker all wrapped into one person in the activity, the activism that he was doing, and the citizen making that he was making in the gaps of the early Commonwealth, the early state of Massachusetts. On Beacon Hill, I love to talk about Harriet and Lewis Hayden, major radical underground activists providing sanctuary for black folks, creating some really positive actions, and one of the folks who stayed and we could talk about it later, but the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty really put a shutter into the black community that was that was pushed over there out of the north end the first Black community formation into the north slope of Beacon Hill, which was actually the second Black community formation. But there were some things that are kind of vibing like today with the political moves and ebbs and flows, were remind.
00:06:09
Speaker 2: Us of the details of that act you just mentioned.
00:06:12
Speaker 4: Sure, sure, So you've got we're entering the eighteen hundreds, and every addition to the United States after the original thirteen states is a compromise between kind of freeish northern power and slaver planter power in the south. So you add one state to the north, to the south, all the way up to the Missouri compromise. Maine is added free Missouri as slave. It's going all the way to the Mississippi. During that other compromises were made to balance the power that was being negotiated in the United States. You got your San Francisco forty nine ers for the eighteen forty nine ers in the gold and that's when the frontier is being pushed right over top of the Loko to people. And it's a real decision all the way up to the Civil War about how will how will the powers be. One of the compromises was a Fugitive Slave Act, which basically said in eighteen fifty that any white folks could basically go into the northern states that were non slave and point out a black person on the street and say, I'm going to bring you down to the commissioner. In Boston, it was Court Street and where the old Boston Public School administration building was until they moved it into my neighborhood in Roxbury, there was a courthouse and so they would drag the black person there. They couldn't testify, and the judge if he said to the slave catcher, yeah, this is a citizen here, he'd be paid five dollars. But if he decided, yeah, that you can bring them down to Long Wharf and put them on a ship in like twelve years, a slave kidnap them and bring them back into servitude. In the South, they were paid ten dollars, right. And so there's these structural incentives and things that are baked into this Fugitive Slave Act, which radical white abolitionists and black folks and Beacon Hill they put up these broadsides that says caution colored people look out for slave catchers and the churches that had been established by the mid eighteen hundreds in the north slope of Beacon Hill they emptied out these These were dangerous times and a lot of folks were trying to get further up north. So I take people on a walking tour that loosely follows the Black Freedom Trail in Beacon Hill, but we cover a little more than the two hundred and so years. We do the full fourth.
00:09:01
Speaker 3: I think it's important for everyone to realize, in the fullness of time or history, this is just a blip a goo there.
00:09:08
Speaker 2: If you're a boomer.
00:09:09
Speaker 3: If you're a boomer, you may have a great grandparent who, for a small part of their life was alive during slave times.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: Isn't that kind of correct? It's not that absolutely, it's not that.
00:09:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, the the you know, generalation generationally, the thirty years or so between generations, if we moved that way. You know, my grandfather was born in nineteen fourteen. He is a World War Two, a veteran, and you know, fought in a segregated army. And his father and his grandfather and that man's father, my fourth great grandfather was in the US Colored Troops for Maryland and the thirty ninth Maryland, and you know when that's really what put me onto this amazing sense of history and that you know, no one could knock me off my block if I knew my own family tree. And I tried to tie this stuff to the more universal and national things that are going on. And so you've got a lot of folks. You know, generally people don't understand that with black folks, our average tenure, except for Native people, is the oldest in the United States. So when you take immigrant races on average, with the great immigrations of the nineteen tens, in eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds, they're babies, you know. They they've come from Eastern Europe and Polish and Jewish and Italian and so forth. But African Americans go goes back to eight seventeen sixty seven. If you've got someone of descent who was transshipped and enslaved, landed somewhere in Charleston and Richmond or Annapolis, Boston, New York, Providence, and so forth, this is just a little bit of family lines. And to pick up where Juneteenth was reconstruction, you know, the eighteen sixties or the eighteen seventies and eighties. You're almost within two living memories of that, so that that's very insightful observation.
00:11:41
Speaker 3: Let's take a break and we'll get into some of the events, a bit of a timeline regarding events related to Juneteenth.
00:11:49
Speaker 2: After this on WBZ.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
00:11:57
Speaker 3: Radley for Dan on night Side, and quickly reminder you can listen to Nightside anytime anytime at Nightside on demand dot com. And another quick reminder, I'll be back in tomorrow into the studio here at six for Jay talking. We continue with our guest, our excellent guest, Joel McCall, talking about Juneteenth. We're going to get into the timeline first of all the events related to that, because I want you friends to be able to go to your your barbecue tomorrow knowing all about Juneteenth and be able to impress your friends. Now, we had emancipation Proclamation. Let's start there right out of the gate January one, eighteen sixty three. You can talk about what was going on at that time, and then move into the next events, which might be the surrender the least surrender later on, and then what exactly happened in Texas and when that was So let's start with a little talk about what was going on circup Emancipation Proclamation.
00:13:06
Speaker 4: So, you know, it's interesting in my leader and I was talking about doing that kind of thing that's turned into a pilgrimage of visiting my great aunt Martha down in Suitland, Maryland and discovering African American genealogy. And in going to Annapolis, I uncovered the the link to the thirty ninth US Colored Troupe that my third great grandfather was a participant in Lincoln's army. And I started to learn a lot about what was going on in the Civil War. But the particulars about the Emancipation Proclamation, if you take it just a moment to read it and look at it, it's kind of remarkable and even more remarkable for those folks in border states Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, these these border states. Abraham Lincoln didn't want to offend the planter ruling class, the slave owning class, because he had already sent all of these these uh uh train lines and ships to shut off New Orleans and and and kind of, you know, surround the Confederate States of America. But what the debates going on in the political leadership in the state of Maryland was like, how much money we're going to lose if we go with the North versus going with the South, the Confederate States of America versus the Union or the northern the Northern United States of America. So I'm rambling, but the the long and the shortages. When I read that they emancipation proclamation, he basically says to everyone who is enslaved in a foreign country, right, I'm paraphrasing, but he's saying, everyone in the enemy's territory who is enslaved, you are free. Right. So the Confederacy of America, which has its own capital, its own money, which includes one hundred dollars bills with smiling plowing slaves on the front of it, with John Calhoun and a Greco Roman goddess and so forth, they have their own capital, their own flag, their own political system. He's saying everyone there in territory, he is not one yet except for in some of the parishes in Louisiana. He's not completely defeated. There is no appomatics. Yet he's saying, you all are free. That's January eighteen, sixty three. The most important and interesting part about it, that has everything to do with all the civil rights movements and freedom moments that were to come in the next one hundred and fifty years, is that he has a semicolon right in the middle of that clause saying you are free. Right. What he does in between is he says everyone else is accepted from this. So my people in Prince George County, Maryland, actually the status of enslavement was held. It was upheld actually by the Emancipation Proclamation. And so the twist here is that the second part he says is basically, go back to work for the harvest that's coming up. Do not be island, and you can look for work with the armies that are coming through, the Northern army that's coming through, and you are to find a way to negotiate and work for good wages. So there's all this flattening of what will an African who is enslaved in the South become, right. I don't know if you've ever been to a immigration a citizenship I guess they call it a citizenship ceremony. I had an African American. I hadn't been the one until a friend of mine's trinidady, and mother was becoming a citizen, and there was a lot of training, and then there was this one incredible day where they kind of turn Fanuel Hall into an actual courthouse and there's a judge there. They give they renounce their citizenship from other places, and they get their flag and their papers and all these documents, and it's a it's a remarkable day. But it struck me as I sat there, this is you know, six seven years or six or seven years before COVID, as I sat there, that there was no preparation for this class of African Americans. In the Emancipation Proclamation, in the Massachusett State Constitution, which a lot of people say was the fore maayir of abolition in the North, Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of Freedom, who was a British general outside of Virginia. This semi colon that's read in Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is a real sticking point, you know. And I don't know if i'm I'm you know, that's good.
00:19:08
Speaker 2: Thank you for that.
00:19:09
Speaker 3: Now on April nine and sixty five, Lee surrenders. And there are certain areas that are relatively unaffected by that, and.
00:19:21
Speaker 2: For example Texas, and yeah, Texas didn't.
00:19:25
Speaker 3: The slave population didn't really find out about it until later when General Gordon Granger went down there. And as I understand that, Texas was a place where enslavers went because there weren't many Union troops. It was seen as kind of a sanctuary and that was kind of the last holdout. And then General Granger stood in Texas I think it was Galveston and read a little thing that said, people at Texas are informed that, in accordance with the proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
00:20:01
Speaker 2: And there you have Juneteenth, correct, you do.
00:20:07
Speaker 4: And it's a remarkable moment in African American history. You know a lot of people are like, why are you celebrating something that was late? Why are this and that? And you know, I try to point out the really beautiful part about it is the name. The name is coming from black creativity. You know, June and nineteenth, Juneteenth match together. It's it's just another you know way. You know, when I start my Black history tours for the North End, we start over by Haymarket and I have people take a minute to really marvel at what the Jewish community did when they set up their block long New England Holocaust Memorial, and they put these big stones that from their own language, they use the word shoa, which is to represent what occurred to them during the great disaster in World War two, when their people were ripped from their homes and put on trains and brought to the concentration and death camps. And they make these chimneys and they have missed in them, and they put all the tattoo numbers of all the inmates are etched into these columns, these chimney columns. And people don't understand that. You know, Texas, Texas was probably one of the least affected by the Civil War, but that was because they had been messing with dreams of their own, independent of their own nationhood.
00:21:43
Speaker 3: To do right there, I need to break and that's a good spot to do it. We'll continue and get a little more focused on what life as a slave is like and what the things that make this such a big deal. After this on WBZ.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Night with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio, we.
00:22:05
Speaker 3: Continue with our guests Joel McCall as we really learn more about Juneteenth and try to remind ourselves how important it was. And in order to do that, I want you to understand what slavery was more than you may. You may intellectually understand it, but not viscerally, and I'd like you to viscerally understand it. If there's one museum we go to in the United States, I would say the Civil Rights Museum is the most moving museum. It's at the Lorraine Hotel where doctor Martin Luther King was assassinated, and it's a big deal. The thing that struck me right off the bat in that museum is there's a cutaway of a slaver ship and you see the horrific way that folk people who were captured and kidnapped and brought over here to be slaves.
00:23:03
Speaker 2: It was torture.
00:23:04
Speaker 3: It was so wildly inhumane, and I'd love you to speak about that. And I'm sure you've been down to that museum. I hope you have. If you, if you have talked about that museum, because it is quite meaningful, and then maybe dispel some myths that I've heard, Well, slavery wasn't that bad. I mean I've actually heard those things. I hear people say that maybe you can make them understand. Yeah it was that bad.
00:23:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, the uh I haven't been to that museum. I actually there was an old nonprofit that I worked for and we took two mini vans of black youth from from Roxbury and Dorchester down all the way down to Angola Prison, Memphis. We went to d C, We went to Greensboro visiting all these sites and yeah, that was a very striking moment. And concerning the slaving system, I take a moment to talk about an eight year old child who was ripped from a family in West Africa and put on a slaver called the Charming Phyllis. Now, if you take one of those long bendy busses MBTA buses in Boston and turn it on its side, that's about the dimension of this slaver. And I explained to people, you know, imagine ninety six different Africans being captured and put into the belly of that slaver. And hold your thought for a second. Because when that Charming Phyllis ship that was captained by Peter Gwynn, it was insured in the project. The whole shipping venture was funded and overseen by Thomas Fitch. He had instructions on what to do and how to harvest black bodies and West Africa and bring them across the ocean when it landed, and what is today Neeland Street. And if you go to the Piafang Arch, the arch that you enter Chinatown with all pon the towns have an arch in Boston. You go two blocks in there's a little plaque that denotes where this slaver came in. The slave ships were called slavers, and this eight year old child disembarked and there were seventy five souls left from the ninety six that were transhipped over four weeks. Now. Because they didn't want the slaves to rebel and be coordinated, they tried to coast up and down and mix the different ethnicities so that you didn't have all Euroba, you didn't all Mende, you didn't have all Bambi Lake peoples, so that they could unite and try to overthrow, which they often did, which is not told about a lot of the resistances. But I tell people this child would be purchased by John Wheatley and he would name her after the charming Phyllis, and so that became known as the Great Poetess Phyllis Wheatley. She was enslaved in that household along with other enslaved Africans. But they threw Greek, Latin, Roman, English obviously at her, and she was just a multi genius. But I have people just pause at this eight year old soul seeing the attrition that is, the loss of life that was normal ninety six to seventy five, that rate sometimes even greater. How did she sleep on that, that slaver who took care of her? You know, there's a lot of lessons in the humanitational pull that we just flatten right by when it's you know, slavery is slavery is slavery. And that's a big part of my overall presentation is to try to do exactly what you're asking me here, is to to un whitewash it, to not let it be so you know, mythological and abstract.
00:27:34
Speaker 2: You were allowed to beat your slave?
00:27:37
Speaker 4: Correct, yes, actually there. You know, Virginia was one of the earliest colonies to decree that anything that came out of the enslaved African woman's womb would inherit the status of the mother. Boston codified slavery in sixteen forty one. The first colony to actually say slavery is fine, we will as long as you know it's justly done, and people sell themselves to us right at the beginning of the archive. It's completely misleading and poor history. But yeah, there were laws that protected for any infraction, and a lot of the slave narratives that come up from the Works Progress administration talk about this, any small slight offense, dropping a biscuit, you know, doing any type of thing. Harriet Tubman, a mistress, was threatening to beat one of the enslaved Africans who was in the same place as she was. She jumped in front of them and they threw a stone and it hit her in her head and she would always fall on her Nineteen Freedom travels on the underground railroad to free enslaved Africans in Maryland, bring them up to sanctuary in Philadelphia and so forth. And also Mum bet Elizabeth Freeman, who is well known in western Massachusetts, is one of the early slave cases that kind of ushered ind the disfavor of slavery in Massachusetts. She was also attacked physically by her mistress and that's what actually put her over the top. It wasn't just overhearing you know, the American Revolution and freedom of this and freedom that. So violence could come from any angle at any time, anywhere, and so this has everything to do with you know, community relations where you know folks carrying death on their hip in the form of racist police officers and that type of brutality. This, this is an unbroken chain, a long genealogical thread of pressures in the black community.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: And all right, I'm gonna ask a question after and you give me the answer after, give your time to think about it. You may have I'm sure you've had to deal with this question before. Of course, many of our forefathers had slaves and they're forgiven because so many people had them at the time.
00:30:25
Speaker 2: Is that legitimate or do.
00:30:26
Speaker 3: You have to subtract some points when you take a look at the legacy of some of these slave owners. I'll ask your answer your response to that after this.
00:30:37
Speaker 2: On WBZ.
00:30:40
Speaker 1: It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news Radio.
00:30:45
Speaker 3: Bradley J for Dan Tonight on Night's Side, our guest is Joel McCall. We're talking about Juneteenth and events surrounding it and concepts surrounding it. Before the break, I asked.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: Joel, Joel, how would you wish.
00:30:58
Speaker 3: That American would think about their forefathers, the ones that own slaves?
00:31:06
Speaker 2: How would you ask them to deal with that?
00:31:11
Speaker 4: I have to fail. That's a that's a very big question, Bradley, It's a good question. And you know, I'm thinking that the case that comes to mind immediately is the Georgetown University when they dug into the history of slaving and their their university. The sale of two hundred and eighty two enslaved Africans actually kept Georgetown afloat, and you know, so there is a real repair that is owed, you know, to these families who have been locked into to this irrelation from that point, and that's where I want to distinguish. Actually, about six or seven years ago, I came across randomly in the Brookline Library. I was waiting for someone, and I read Frederick Olmsted, the guy who made Central Park and also the Boston Common the whole Emerald necklace going all the way to Franklin Franklin Park. He wrote a journal visiting the South, and he was struck by how Southern planters referred to black people as annuities. Right, So there are many layers. To just imagine this breeding Africans in the northern Upper South in Virginia and Maryland and walking them in koffls all the way to the king cotton fields in the South, in the Carolinas, in Mississippi and Alabama. There is no grammar and there's no language that even describes that. We have a little bit in the history books about the trailer tears. But the population of enslaved black folks from eighteen hundred, which was at six hundred thousand, unnaturally increased to four million on the eve of the Civil War. This creates a relation for all Americans, whether you are the one with the deed and the owner and you're giving it in your will to your three year old granddaughter these African bodies, or you can see this kawfl walking down the road to be put into plantation. Slavery from the Upper South, as that is not me right, and so this passes into lynching. They had lynching postcards where white folks of all classes, all backgrounds would have a picnic and a day of observ a cultural kind of ritual thing. And so you know not to not to harp on it too much, but again that genealogical thread needs real repair, and it needs recognition in the first place. Right, And so in so many of our our educational spaces, this is not there's not even grammar given to define the reality of it.
00:34:45
Speaker 3: And so let me ask you this. We have to make sure there's plenty of time for it. Some municipalities have and institutions voluntarily put together their own reparative programs, test horses, and some provide a type of conversation through targeted housing education grants and things like that. No federal reparations for slavery in the United States. Would you like to see that? And if so, have you thought about the logistics of it, how it would work?
00:35:18
Speaker 4: You know, I think I better spend my own energy, and black energy could be better spent. You know. The interesting thing that I've found is that, for example, they're in Medford and the Isaac Royal House, a white lead nonprofit, basically white facing. In the seventies and eighties, they did a very radical thing. They said, this Isaac Royal House, we usually tore folks through the mansion, and we need to include the twenty seven enslaved Africans on this five hundred acre farm, right, here in Medford, Massachusetts, standing all the way down to the Mystic River. We need to include these antiguin enslaved Africans who were dragged up to New England by the Isaac Royal family and and they kind of are a national example for other nonprofit museums to be inclusive in their history. It's not replacing their talk about, you know, the china in the living room, in the master bedroom and all of that, but it's also saying there was an enslaved girl who was responsible for turning on the candles in the morning and doing this type of stuff during full surveillance under the four Uh you know, white people from the Isaac Royal enslaving family. What was her life like? Just looking into that and asking those questions is the big enough pivot, I think, uh for for you know that type of.
00:36:57
Speaker 2: Thing, I take. I take it.
00:36:59
Speaker 3: You don't feel that that is a worthwhile goal. It's just not doable. It's time and money could be better spent.
00:37:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's it's a whole other language. And you know, it has everything to do with the the segregation that Americans live under today, where there are white folks who who have no interaction with black folks so that there's no ground to get grip right, and I think you know, it always starts young and it includes this inclusive Uh. These inclusive educational forces is really where I spend my time. I think there's a role for everyone. You know, I'm not against a federal holiday for Juneteenth, uh, for for these reparative energies. You know, I think there there are ways that black folks can can better focus our energy.
00:38:05
Speaker 2: And I understand.
00:38:06
Speaker 3: Can you take fifteen seconds just to tell folks how to find you and perhaps go on your Hidden History of Black Boston tour.
00:38:14
Speaker 4: I'm so grateful, Bradley Reidrine dot com. That's R E I D R e N dot com. I got my contact phone number, email all the information out There'd be glad to take small groups on charter van tour or walking.
00:38:31
Speaker 3: Towards so you can also just google Hidden History of Black Boston tourist.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: I bet.
00:38:36
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us on this Juneteenth.
00:38:41
Speaker 2: Joel McCall really appreciate it.
00:38:44
Speaker 4: Take care, Thank you all right.
00:38:48
Speaker 2: Henry David Thurreau.
00:38:50
Speaker 3: Was the literary superstar or a fraud or fraudish there's a case for both sides, and we have a cool guest coming in who's an expert. And I actually was a first person interpreter of Henry David throw coming up on w b Z
