It was Monday, April 23, 1928. The Providence Public School Committee was holding its regular meeting at Central Fire Station on the eastern edge of Burnside Park. The room was packed. Charity Bailey (1904-1978), an accomplished pianist and recent graduate of Rhode Island College of Education, was there to give a public statement against Superintendent Isaac Winslow, who, according to multiple accounts, told Bailey that he would not appoint a Black teacher to work in the school system. Bailey, at 23 years old, had already shown herself as a gifted musician and educator. In the years leading up to the hearing, she performed with her sister Amy at the Pond Street Church and delivered a memorable performance of the spiritual “Wish I Could Die in Egypt Land” for National Music Week at Brown University’s Sayles Hall. A writer for the Providence Journal captured the scene: “Both in the rendition of the weird, dirgelike piano accompaniment and in her singing of the haunting, plaintive melody, Miss Bailey approached an artistic triumph. Prolonged applause compelled her to give an encore number, the only one of the evening.” At the same time, Bailey applied for teaching jobs. Despite strong letters of recommendation from her professors, supervisors told her that there were no vacancies. And so, Bailey advertised as a governess.  A year later Bailey was fed up. She and a member of the school committee met with Winslow, who explained that Bailey had fulfilled all of the requirements but was “not in a group of candidates eligible to become teachers.” Bailey and her mother then contacted attorney Joseph G. LeCount, legal counsel and cofounder of the Providence Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the oldest NAACP branches in the country.  On April 23rd, a crowd of teachers, students, and community members filled the school committee’s meeting room in the fire station to capacity. LeCount set-up an improvised witness stand. He questioned Bailey first, then Winslow. The following day the Providence Journal printed a partial account of Winslow’s testimony. A few blocks over at the Evening Tribune, the paper’s news editor, John Carter Minkins, an African American, published a big story with extensive testimony from Bailey and Winslow, as well as reactions from the crowd. “I think it’s a lot of bunk,” said one committee member after listening to Winslow defend himself.  Later, local activists leveraged Bailey’s case to mobilize Black voters toward the Democratic Party. They ousted at least one member of the school committee who had backed Winslow and elected Democrats into high offices in exchange for support on civil rights.  Like so many promising educators at that time, Bailey left the oppressive culture of Providence for New York City, where she worked for the Federal Works Progress Administration, studied piano at Juilliard, and taught music at The Little Red School House.  Between 1954 and 1956, Bailey hosted the television show, Sing a Song, a pioneering, interacial children’s program. She recorded albums and published a bestselling book, Playtime with Music, in which she shared her progressive philosophies. Bailey challenged the traditional teachings of music appreciation. As she argued in Playtime, musical rhythm and word pattern should be felt and enjoyed by children without preliminary instruction because, “Children, like all of us, do best and learn most from that which they love to do.”

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Grace Lee Boggs was an activist for equality and labor justice, working with her husband James Boggs in Detroit, and reached a global community with their campaign for workers' rights and understanding across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Boggs was born over her father's Westminster Street Chinese restaurant, Chin Lee, in 1915. Her father had immigrated from China, first to the West Coast and finally to Providence, where he became a successful restaurant entrepreneur, connected to the Chinese commercial community in Rhode Island and in his home country. The family lived on Somerset Street in South Providence for a number of years before moving to New York City, where another Chin Lee Restaurant was opened. Despite the family's financial success, young Grace felt the sting of racism and sexism growing up.

Grace attended Barnard College and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. She lived and worked as a labor and civil rights activist in Chicago, New York, and finally Detroit, where she met and married auto worker and labor leader James Boggs. Her life was spent advocating for workers rights, critiquing the capitalist economic system, and working for interracial and cultural understanding. Grace died in 2015 in Detroit.

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“The public mind was awake” in Rhode Island, wrote Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895), “and one class of its people at least was ready to work with us to the extent of seeking to defeat the proposed constitution,” which would disenfranchise Black men. When news broke that the People’s Party had voted to exclude Black men from the vote, much to the chagrin of Thomas Wilson Dorr, abolitionists like Douglass and Abby Kelley flocked to Rhode Island to protest. 

The road to Rhode Island proved challenging for Douglass, as travel posed a particular set of dangers for African Americans. He remembers being dragged out of his seat several times for “the crime of being colored.” And, he was forced to sleep on the deck of the ship, while his fellow white abolitionists were welcomed in the cabin below. 

The abolitionists quickly discovered their task would be a difficult one. Douglass writes that “the contest was intensely bitter and exciting. We were as usual denounced as intermeddlers . . . and were told to mind our own business, and the like, a mode of defense common to men when called to account for mean and discreditable conduct.” But Douglass and his compatriots were not so easily dismissed. “We cared nothing for the Dorr party on the one hand, or the ‘law and order party’ on the other. What we wanted, and what we labored to obtain, was a constitution free from the narrow, selfish, and senseless limitation of the word white.”

The new constitution adopted in 1843, which included suffrage for Black men, was a victory for abolitionists like Douglass. Reflecting on their impact, Douglass wrote in 1881 that “our labors in Rhode Island during this Dorr excitement did more to abolitionize the State than any previous or subsequent work.”

This site in Woonsocket hosted the Anti-Slavery Convention in the fall of 1841.

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The congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church was born from the first independent African-American church in Providence. In 1819, black congregants withdrew from the First Baptist Church and built the African Union Meeting and Schoolhouse. In 1884, an independent congregation born from this community was organized under the name Ebenezer, worshipping on A Street and later at 135 Dodge Street in the city’s West End. The beautiful and unusual Richardsonian Romanesque church the congregation now occupies at 475 Cranston Street was originally built for the Cranston Street Baptist Church, a white congregation formed by missionary Moses H. Bixby in 1869. New York architect Arthur Bates Jennings designed the church, which was dedicated in 1893. By 1969, the white congregation had dwindled and the church buildings were sold to neighboring Ebenezer, which had grown to be one of the largest and most active African-American congregations in the city. Reverend Carl H. Balark Jr. has led the church since 1992 and continues the tradition of strength and action. He was the first African-American to lead the Rhode Island Council of Churches. Notable speakers at the church include Jesse Jackson and Sallye Davis, who spoke in 1971 to raise funds for the legal defense of her daughter, activist Angela Davis. Mrs. Davis said at Ebenezer’s pulpit, “If Angela gets out [of jail] tomorrow, I would carry on the fight. We can’t be content until all of us are free.”

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Rainbow-colored homes spring up from the street grid in New Bedford’s West End like children’s play blocks. However, underneath the colorful patina of the Temple Landing Apartments lays a dramatic history of protest, neglect, and reuse.

To understand the full history of these bright new houses you must travel back half a century to the summers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the Civil Rights era, Black residents of New Bedford increasingly voiced their discontent over high unemployment and discriminatory hiring practices, poor public schools, and inadequate, unsafe housing.

In a series of actions called “the rebellion” by protestors and “the riots” by many others, the summer of 1970 erupted in arson, looting, sniper fire, and street confrontations in an increasingly hostile relationship between New Bedford’s Black residents and the police department. At one point, the National Guard was placed on alert in nearby Fall River.

These conflicts started in a variety of ways. Protests arose over the arrests of young African American men without obvious justification, and again when three white teenagers from surrounding towns drove into the neighborhood and shot indiscriminately into a crowd, killing one bystander and wounding several others. A white resident driving through the area told police he had been shot in the ankle as he passed the protest headquarters. The following day, New Bedford and state police raided the building, targeting the Black Panther-affiliated organizers. Twenty-one people were arrested, including unaffiliated activists, community supporters, and bystanders, and were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, anarchy, and riots.

Following this unrest, a group of community members established the United Front Development Corporation, which supported the construction of more and higher quality housing in the neighborhood on the site of the New Bedford Cordage Company, established in 1842 by ship owners and captains who needed rope for whaling vessels. The company grew and eventually filled a four-acre parcel bounded by Court, Emerson, Ash, and Kempton Streets, before closing in 1964. In 1973, a massive fire destroyed a two-block section of the vacant rope factory, and the remainder was demolished, along with older, blighted housing to make way for the United Front Homes.

The project was progressive and experimental for its time. Closed off from the general street grid, the 200-unit affordable housing development was accompanied by green space, a community center, and a daycare facility.

However, these 200 units did not meet the demands of the housing shortage. Meanwhile, the closed-off nature of the compound prevented police from driving through the development. Crime flourished, much of it committed by the United Front street gang, further damaging the development’s reputation. In 2008, a quarter of all shootings in New Bedford took place in United Front.

The tide began to turn after 2009, when several gang members were arrested. In 2010, the Boston-based group Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) extensively renovated the complex, partnering with United Front Development Corporation to improve 138 units, demolish 62 others, and build 35 new units. The net loss of 27 units was caused by reopening the complex to the street grid, connecting United Front with the rest of the city, and making crime prevention easier.

The new developers, eager to shed the connotations that United Front carried, renamed the development “Temple Landing” after Lewis Temple, the African-American inventor of the toggle harpoon that revolutionized whaling. Crime in the neighborhood has decreased since the opening of the new units, but only time will tell if this project serves the community better than its predecessor.

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Fed up! Perhaps they didn't hear you the first time. Every so often, you have to redeliver the message. That’s exactly what happened in 1975, when a Third World Coalition led by Black students occupied University Hall for 38 hours. Black, Latino, and Asian American students’ snaked through University Hall, equipped with their voices and drums reverberating, a robustly creative ruckus of music, dance, and rhythmically sounded demands.

Equal access, visibility, and services; are these reasonable demands? Brown University’s planned budget cuts would decrease financial aid, student services, ultimately reducing the population of minority students, staff, and faculty. In an attempt to persuade the University to rethink their decision, students formed an alliance demanding to view the budget, and to be part of the conversation.

For two months students of color attempted to have a seat at the administration’s table to address their concerns, but access was denied. They assembled and deliberated, but the administration didn't budge. They organized campus rallies, but the students’ demands were unmet. They put forth a list of demands, most notably an increase in scholarship funding from the administrations’ amount of $3.3 million to $3.5 million. They also demanded that the Black student body proportionately reflect the national percentage of Blacks in the United States—which echoed a demand from 1968. Despite the students’ orderly negotiations and clearly outlined requests, plans remained in place to proceed with the budget cuts.

Nearly 3,000 students went on strike on April 14, 1975, ditching pencils for picket signs to stage a protest. With very little revision, the Advisory and Executive Committee passed a new budget. Had every option been exhausted? University Hall housed the office of the president of Brown and other administrative offices, and was a place for the students to be heard. The students believed that confrontation demonstrated their seriousness and commitment. On April 24, 1975, students occupied University Hall for nearly two days, insisting the university fulfill the promises they made to Black students during a 1968 walkout.

The 1968 walkout, staged by twenty-three Black women of Pembroke College in solidarity with Black male students from Brown University, demanded several changes in the admissions process. The Dean of Admissions refused the first and most important demand: an increase of the black student population to eleven percent enrollment for the class of 1973. On December 5, 1968, the Brown Daily Herald reported, “A substantial majority of black undergraduates at Brown and Pembroke will dissociate themselves from the University at noon today…” The debate around Black presence and representation in education—and by extension in America—was not new. In 1961, Malcolm X spoke at Brown on racial oppression, Black Muslims, and, in his eyes, the need for dis-integration of Blacks in America to move toward liberation.

The irony of Brown University’s complicated relationship with Black America is the role of Black Americans from the institution’s birth. University Hall, the oldest, and until 1832, the only building on Brown University’s campus, was financed with revenue from the slave trade and built in part by Black slave hands. In recent years, Brown has commissioned a slave memorial in an effort to recognize the Brown family’s role in the slave trade.

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“I would have been a millionaire today if I had bent to prejudice.” So said George Thomas Downing, prominent African American Rhode Island restaurateur and civil rights champion. From behind the curtains of his lavish Sea Girt Hotel, built on this site in 1854 and destroyed by arson just six years later, Downing fought against racial injustice in a life-long struggle that would eventually ruin his fortunes and cause the demise of his hotel.

George T. Downing was born in New York City, in 1819, into a family of successful restaurateurs. His father, Thomas Downing, helped elevate the city’s street snack, the oyster, into the world of fine dining. His luxurious Wall Street oyster house served pickled oysters and jellied turkeys to Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, and the city’s elite. George owned his own restaurant in New York City before moving to Newport in the 1840s to open an offshoot of his father’s oyster house, catering to big city gentry on holiday.

The oyster house has a long history in African American heritage, particularly in Rhode Island. Emmanuel Manna Bernoon, an emancipated slave, had opened one of the first restaurants in the United States, an oyster and ale house, in 1736 on Towne Street (now Main Street) in Providence. By the 1840s, oysters had become a shared passion for rich and poor. For many black entrepreneurs like Downing, oysters became the foundation on which they built their culinary empire.

Downing’s crowning centerpiece was the Sea Girt Hotel. Catering to a white clientele, the grand five-story building included large stores, a restaurant, accommodation for gentlemen boarders and families, and served as the Downing residence. Martin R. Delany, the African American intellectual, said of Downing’s Newport enterprise: “This fashionable establishment is spoken of as among the best conducted places in the country, the proprietor among the most gentlemanly.”

The Sea Girt served the community until an arsonist burned it down ten days before Christmas in 1860. While the culprit was never caught, many believed that the fires were lit in retaliation for Downing’s staunch advocacy of civil rights. A “race man” like his father and grandfather before him, Downing was keenly interested in the treatment of African Americans. As one of America’s earliest civil rights activists, Downing led the campaign for the desegregation of Newport schools and was instrumental in getting the first African American into the Diplomatic Corps.

His political concerns led him to Washington, where he made alliances with white abolitionists and other African American activists. In 1865, he became the manager of the Members’ Dining Room for the U.S. House of Representatives, a position he held for twelve years. There, he was able to wield his influence through political ties and friendships, such as the one he shared with Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. During his time in Washington, he worked for the passage of public accommodation laws in the capital city.

Downing died in 1903, a “galvanizing and enduring symbol of African American entrepreneurship and culinary excellence.”

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"I remember being much pleased with my nice clothes, and still more so, as I saw so many boys and girls of all sizes at the school, all dressed so nice and clean. … I thought it was one of the most charming sights I had ever beheld." - William J. Brown, 1883

For many free African Americans such as William J. Brown living in Providence in the 19th century, education was more than just a form of social mobility; it was a way of securing autonomy and dignity. Brown attended school at a variety of institutions around Providence, including the Old Brick School House. For most of his young life education was expensive and available primarily through private institutions or individual tutors. The financial burden of schooling was often too much for students, many of whom were also expected to work to help support their families.

Students of color had an especially hard time, as private institutions could legally deny enrollment to anyone they saw as "not fit" for their schools. Occasionally, philanthropic women of society endeavored to establish "African schools," but they were often short lived. Another popular option, Sabbath schools, taught literacy through religious lessons, but only for a few hours on Sundays. Quaker schools would sometimes accept black students, although doing so made it difficult for them to retain teachers. As Brown tells us, "it was considered a disgraceful employment to be a teacher of colored children," and pupils were punished for addressing their teacher in public.

Finally, in 1828, the Rhode Island Schools Act passed, providing state funding for a centralized public education system—but also legalizing its segregation. The city purchased the Old Brick School House—built in 1769 to house a private and a "public," fee-charging, grammar school—and refashioned the space into a separate public school for pupils of color called the Meeting Street Grammar School. The site was a great success, and in its first year had 100 registered students with 60-70 regular attendees, among them such notable alumni as Brown and Sissieretta Jones, the nation's first Black opera diva. A plaque commemorating Jones’ career can be viewed at the corner of South Court and Pratt Streets.

By 1836, attendance at the school had declined to between 15-35 after a disagreement between the black community and the current schoolmaster. A second school, the Pond School, on the west side of Providence, opened as an alternative for disgruntled students. Before long, both schools were thriving.

In 1865, Rhode Island outlawed segregated schools, and the Meeting Street School became public and integrated. Due to its placement in a predominantly black neighborhood, and the subsequent withdrawal of white children after the law passed, the school was still attended by mainly African Americans until it was discontinued in 1887.

William J. Brown made it his mission to obtain an education at any cost, often alternating attending school with working to pay off his tuition bills, until the age 20. He eventually set up a successful shoe repair shop, adding to the small but proud group of educated free black business owners in Providence. The Old Brick School House went on to become a cooking school and then a "fresh air school" for tubercular children. It also housed a school specializing in the needs of developmentally disabled children, before being turned over to the Providence Preservation Society in 1960. It now functions as their headquarters.

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