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African-American history

Was Jackie Kennedy the 1st Black First Lady?

When First Lady Jackie Kennedy visited England in 1961, society photographer Cecil Beaton met her at a dinner party. In his journal he commented she had a ‘Negroid’ appearance.

The first black First Lady? Jacqueline Kennedy. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

Beaton detected what some claim is Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s African heritage. That would make her the first black First Lady well before Michelle Obama moved into the White House.

Jackie was related to the van Salee family, according to the New York Genealogical and Historical Society. Anthony and Abraham van Salee were among the first settlers of New Amsterdam, renamed New York in 1664. Their father was Jan Janszoon, a Dutch pirate who converted to Islam and went native in North Africa. Historians believe he fathered Anthony and Abraham with a mistress of mixed race.

Anthony van Salee came to New Amsterdam at 22 – perhaps the first Muslim in the New World. He then found success as a prominent landholder and merchant.

Anthony consequently defended minorities. Contemporaries described him as ‘tawny,’ ‘half-Moroccan,’ ‘a former black slave’ and ‘mulatto.’

One of the van Salee descendants, John Van Salee De Grasse, received a formal education as a doctor. He then joined the Medical Society of Massachusetts and served as surgeon for the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.

How, exactly, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was related to Anthony or Abraham van Salee is unclear, at least to the New England Historical Society. (Perhaps a genealogist can help us out.)

Under the ‘one drop’ racial code, all she needed was one distant ancestor from sub-Saharan Africa to be considered black. The code, first enacted as law in Tennessee in 1910, decreed that a person with one drop of black blood was to be considered black.

Jackie’s father, John Vernou Bouvier, had such a swarthy complexion that people called him ‘Black Jack.’ Jackie’s classmates at Miss Porter’s School asked her if he was really white.

1st Black First Lady?

Jackie Kennedy took on the First Lady role when African-Americans agitated for equality under the law.

President Kennedy supported (though somewhat tepidly) anti-discrimination laws. And so the New York Genealogical and Historical Society approached Jackie Kennedy hoping to discuss her African ancestry. Perhaps, they thought, it could help get a Civil Rights bill passed.

But Jackie Kennedy described her van Salee ancestors as ‘Jewish.’

She wouldn’t be the first person with African blood to inhabit the White House. The van Salee descendants also included President Warren G. Harding, as well as the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys and Humphrey Bogart.

President Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a mixed-race woman who he enslaved.

And since nearly 4 percent of European-Americans have African ancestors, the United States probably had more than one black First Lady.

Beaton, by the way, did not limit his catty remarks to Jackie Kennedy. He described Audrey Hepburn as looking ‘Mongolian’ with a huge mouth.

Here’s his complete description of the first black First Lady Jackie Kennedy.

Huge, baseball-player’s shoulders and haunches, big boyish hands and feet; very dark, beautiful receptive eyes looking roguish or sad — sometimes they pop too much — mouth very large and generous, with a smile turning down at the corners in an inverted laugh; a somewhat negroid appearance; the suspicion of a moustache, and very black hair.

You might also enjoy this story about Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s wedding here. This story about the first black first lady was updated in 2023.

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Leonard Black, A Suffering Slave Who Overcame Many Trials

Leonard Black couldn’t read or write when he escaped slavery in Maryland, but he found a way to pay for his education. He then told the story of his cruel masters in a booklet printed by a New Bedford printer.

Leonard Black developed into an inspirational minister who preached that all men are equal before God. He also taught that slavery required ignorance.

The slaves are taught ignorance as we teach our children knowledge. They are kept in darkness, and are borne down under a cruel, cruel oppression! All human rights are denied them as citizens! They are not recognized as men! My old master frequently said, “he did not believe a d–d nigger had any soul!” They are made to undergo everything as a beast. Having a full, perfect, undeniable right to stand out before God as MEN, the cruel, God-defying white man, without semblance of right, with no pretence [sic] but might, has prostituted them to the base purpose of his cupidity, and his baser beastly passions, reducing them to mere things, mere chattels, to be bought and sold like hogs and sheep!

Leonard Black, Slave Boy

Leonard Black was born into slavery in 1820 in Maryland, 60 miles south of Baltimore. As a young child, the slaveowner sold his mother and sister in New Orleans. At six years old, he had to work for a Mr. Bradford, which separated him from the rest of his family.

“No one, who has always enjoyed the right of liberty, can realize the horrors of slavery,” he wrote.

To be at the will of another, to be owned like a cow or horse, and liable at any moment to the highest bidder, to be transported to a distant part of the country, leaving the dearest relatives behind; to be, in fine, ground down mentally and physically by the untold curses of slavery, may be a very pretty thing to the masters of the “peculiar institution,” but it is death to the slaves.

Mrs. Bradford beat him and made her 10-year-old son beat him and spit in his face. One day she ordered him to take a bushel of corn upstairs, but he couldn’t do it. She hit him with the johnny-cake board, cutting his head so badly it bled more than a quart.

After two years Mr. Bradford placed Leonard Black with his father, fearing Mrs. Bradford would kill him. Mr. Bradford’s father was worse than Mrs. Bradford. The old man had been a professor of religion. Black called him a ‘backslider’ and a ‘wanderer from God.’

Backslider

Leonard Black lived with the senior Bradford for 7-1/2 years, during which he had no hat and no pants, but only a pair of shoes and a lindsey slip. He had to eat his meals, mere scraps from the table, while standing. He slept on a piece of carpet on the hearth. His job was to fetch wood, and one winter day he came inside to get warm.

He wrote

Old Mr. Bradford followed me in, and said: “If you want to be warmed, I’ll warm you.” He took the tongs, heated them in the fire, and branded my legs; and the scars are there to this day. I could not sit down in consequence of the wound.

When the old man died, he was sent to work for a Mr. Gardner, who was just as cruel.

After 13 years he returned to Mr. Bradford and his four older brothers. Three of them escaped and went North. A preacher who came to visit Mr. Bradford’s daughter alleviated Leonard’s sufferings from time to time. He gave him money with which he bought books. In 1836, Leonard Black converted to Christianity, inspired by the 8th verse of the 23d chapter of Matthew,

*I experienced a hope under a slave man,” and “Give us of your oil, for our lamps have gone out.”

Freedom

The African Church in Boston

Finally, in 1837, Leonard Black escaped. He walked to Boston, working odd jobs along the way and evading his captors. In Boston he asked for his brothers, and he learned of a George Black, a minister living in Portland, Maine. While boarding with an African-American woman he tracked down Black, who offered to pay his fare to Portland.

He learned Black wasn’t his brother, a disappointment. However, Black and his family kindly took him in. They made clothes for him and taught him to read. He got jobs as a farm laborer and as an engineer in a steam factory.

In 1838, he moved to Boston with George Black, who became the minister of the African Meeting House on Belknap Street.

Try, Try Again

Leonard Black married one of George Black’s daughters, and they lived with David Walker, the African-American whose anti-slavery pamphlet resulted in a price on his head in the South. He worked on the wharves and as a servant, but decided he wanted to be a preacher.

Francis Wayland

Leaving his family in Boston, he moved to Providence, where he lived with Francis Wayland, president of Brown University. He studied the Bible at the Meetinghouse Street Church. He moved his family from Boston, got a job working for a stone mason and told the pastor he wanted to be a minister. The church brethren gave him a hearing and decided he wasn’t ready.

Discouraged, Leonard Black sold his books and went to work on a canal boat until an accident nearly cost him his life. After working on the canal for three weeks a horse fell on him and kicked him in the head.

He despaired while he recovered slowly. His wife was pregnant, he had no money and he couldn’t work. Wayland and others helped him and his family through those hard times, and he decided to try the ministry again.

Life and Sufferings

In 1847 he went to New Bedford to dictate his story, published s The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery. Written by Himself. In the run-up to the Civil War, at least 80 such slave narratives went into print to inspire enthusiasm for the abolitionist movement.

It worked for Leonard Black. He preached in Nantucket, then in 1850 he became a Baptist minister at the Third Stonington Church in Stonington, Conn., where he doubled the membership to 60 adults.

He found a sanctuary and a ministry at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., but only for a short time. Congress enacted The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Free states to return runaway slaves to their owners. Leonard Black feared for his life and his freedom, so he resigned the ministry and lived quietly in New York for the next 12 years.

In 1873 he and his wife moved to Petersburg, Va., where he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church and again doubled the size of the congregation.

He died on April 28, 1883, and more than 5,000 people attended his memorial service. Every store that employed an African-American closed that day.

This story was updated in 2021.

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Edwin Henderson Proves Black Men Can Jump

In 1906, many white Americans believed black Americans didn’t do well at sports. An African-American physical education teacher named Edwin Henderson would spend the next 60 years proving them wrong.

Edwin Henderson

He was at Harvard that year, learning to coach basketball. It was then a new game invented just 15 years earlier by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Mass. Naismith’s teacher, Luther Gulick, didn’t think anyone but white people could play it. “Games demanding team play are played by the Anglo-Saxon peoples, and by these peoples alone,” Gulick said.

Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, thought sports were just for white people. He told the Harvard Class of 1906 “…the time given to athletic contests… (is) part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors.”

Edwin Henderson

Edwin Henderson thought differently. He believed athletic competition enabled African-Americans to show their quality of character, and he enlisted athletic achievement in the crusade for equal opportunity. He wanted black athletes to win scholarships at predominantly white college in the North.

Basketball was largely unknown in the South, where Edwin Henderson was born in 1883. He graduated first in his class at Miners Teachers College in Washington, D.C., where in 1904, he got a job as a physical education teacher. He attended Dr. Dudley Sargent’s School of Physical Education at Harvard for three summers.

Henderson in basketball uniform

Sargent, a medical doctor, taught physical training for many years at Harvard. (The university denied him a professorship because he served on the faculty committee that banned football, then a rough, brawling game.)

Then when Edwin Henderson returned to Washington, D.C., he started a basketball league that played against clubs on the Eastern Seaboard. He taught Duke Ellington how to play basketball. He also taught Charles Drew, who won an athletic scholarship to Amherst College. Drew then became a medical doctor and developed large-scale blood banks at the beginning of World War II, saving thousands of lives.

The Power of Sports

Henderson also started the Eastern Board of Officials, which trained highly qualified African-American referees. For many years he headed of the Department of Physical Education in Washington, D.C.’s segregated school system. He campaigned to break down the restrictions of the local branch of the American Athletic Union on interracial competition.

Henderson came to believe in the power of sports to break down prejudice – and that star athletes instilled more pride in African-Americans than black musicians, artists or writers.

Quiet and modest with a good sense of humor, he was a prolific writer. For 60 years he wrote more than 3,000 letters to the editor protesting discrimination against African-Americans in sports competition, restaurants and theaters. During his long career promoting physical education among black students, he fought for civil rights. He started the first NAACP chapter in Falls Church, Va.

Hall of Famer

In 1939 he wrote a book, The Negro in Sports, commissioned by Carter Woodson, the Harvard-trained Ph.D. known as the father of black history. Henderson extolled the success of African Americans in intercollegiate sports at white colleges. He described how Matthew Bullock played football and ran track at Dartmouth. At Amherst and Harvard, William H. Lewis became the first black All-American in football. Ted Cable also starred in track at Harvard. Ernest Marshall, a Williams graduate, coached football before entering medical School.

William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson also excelled at Amherst. Later, as a high school teacher, he convinced Charles Hamilton Houston to attend Amherst. Houston then earned a law degree, and his legal victories won him the nickname “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”

On Feb. 5, 1974, Edwin Henderson was inducted into the National Black Sports Hall of Fame in New York City, along with Bill Russell, Muhammed Ali and Jackie Robinson.

“I never consciously did anything to be first. I just happened to be on the spot and lived in those days when there were few people doing those things which I was doing,” he once said.

Edwin Henderson died in 1977, at age 93.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Louisa May Alcott, Dangerous Fanatic, Kisses a Baby

In 1863, Louisa May Alcott horrified a Virginia woman by kissing a baby. The woman was white, the baby was black.

Louisa May Alcott as a Civil War Nurse

Alcott had volunteered as a Civil War nurse at Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. She called it the “hurly burly hotel.” The cold, poorly ventilated, dirty space had no provisions for bathing. The staff tended as many as 400 men in all stages of suffering, disease and death.

Louisa May Alcott, a dyed-in-the-wool abolitionist, had lived in New England all her life. She was warned not to talk too ardently on the subject of slavery, so as not to offend Southern sympathizers in the nation’s capital. But she just couldn’t help herself.

The Fanatical Louisa May Alcott

In Washington, she was intrigued by her “colored brothers and sisters,” so unlike the people she knew in “moral Boston.” In her Civil War Memoirs, she wrote,

I had not been there a week before the neglected, devil-may care expression in many of the faces about me, seemed an urgent appeal to leave nursing white bodies, and take some care for these black souls. … I liked them… The girls romped with their dusky sweethearts, or tossed their babies, with the tender pride that makes mother-love a beautifier to the homeliest face. The men and boys sang and whistled all day long; and often, as I held my watch, the silence of the night was sweetly broken by some chorus from the street, full of real melody, whether the song was of heaven, or of hoe-cakes.

As she listened, she wrote, she felt, “that we never should doubt nor despair concerning a race which, through such griefs and wrongs, still clings to this good gift, and seems to solace with it the patient hearts that wait and watch and hope until the end.”

She expected people to accuse her of prejudice against African-Americans, but the opposite happened.

She “daily shocked some neighbor by treating the blacks as I did the whites,” she wrote. “The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street; whereat the blood of two generations of abolitionists waxed hot in my veins, and, at the first opportunity, proclaimed itself, and asserted the right of free speech as doggedly as the irrepressible Folsom herself.”

Georgetown’s Union Hotel. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

More Shame

She happened to catch up a little black baby toddling around the nurses’ kitchen one day when she went to make gruel for some of her patients. A Virginia woman standing by stuck her nose in the air and sniffed disparagingly. “How can you?” she said. “I’ve been here six months and never so much as touched the little toad with a poker.”

“More shame on you, Ma’am,” replied Louisa May Alcott, and then kissed the baby with ardor.

She didn’t get the hoped-for reaction.

“This rash act, and the anti-slavery lecture that followed, while one hand stirred gruel for sick America, and the other hugged baby Africa, did not produce the cheering result which I fondly expected; for my comrade henceforth regarded me as a dangerous fanatic, and my protege nearly came to his death by insisting on swarming up stairs to my room, on all occasions, and being walked on.”

Louisa May Alcott came down with typhoid after a few weeks at the hospital and nearly died. All her hair fell out and her father brought her back to Concord. The book she wrote about her experience, Hospital Sketches, brought her first critical acclaim.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Green Book Guides African-Americans to Safety in New England (and Elsewhere)

African-Americans driving through New England from the 1930s to the 1960s carried the Green Book to guide them to friendly hotels, restaurants and service stations.

It was a time when they might find themselves in sundown towns, which banned minorities from within municipal limits after dark. The practice wasn’t limited to the Jim Crow South — it happened in New England, too.

James Loewen, a historian who researches sundown towns, found evidence of a sign in Connecticut that said, “Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark.”

Always alert to potential embarrassment or danger, African-Americans carried blankets, packed lunch and even toted cans of gasoline when they took to the road.

And they carried the Green Book.

The Green Book

Victor H. Green was an African-American letter carrier in New York City. Among his deliveries were Jewish guides that told Jewish readers what restaurants and hotels didn’t admit them. He asked his colleagues in the postal service to help him by asking around on their routes about good places to stay. He then published the first Green Book in 1936, focusing on metropolitan New York City.

The 10-page book, which sold for 25 cents, included listings for restaurants, service stations, hotels, tourist homes, taverns, liquor stores, beauty parlors, nightclubs, drugstores and tailors.

It included a quotation from Mark Twain on its cover:

Travel is fatal to prejudice.

Expansion

The Green Book expanded over the years to include every U.S. state. It also included advertisements for lodgings, for Ford automobiles and for service stations. During World War II, Victor Green suspended publication, but by 1949 it ran to more than 80 pages.

Esso (now ExxonMobil) promoted the Green Book because of the work of James ‘Billboard’ Jackson, the company’s first black marketing specialist. Esso sponsored the guide, telling its black customers it allowed them to ‘go further with less anxiety.’ African-American drivers could buy the Green Book and get maps at Esso stations. Shell, on the other hand, had a reputation for turning away black customers.

Green’s timing was good. African-Americans were buying cars as soon as they could afford them to avoid the indignities of traveling on trains or buses. The interstate highway system was still in the future, so motorists had to drive through unfamiliar towns where they might not be welcome.

Journalist George Schuyler, a Rhode Island native, explained in 1930,

…all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult.

Obsolescence

Green looked forward to the day people wouldn’t need the Green Book. In the 1949 edition he wrote,

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.

The year the Civil Rights Act passed, 1964, was the Green Book’s last. By then Civil Rights activists demanded equal access and discouraged voluntary segregation.

Jim Crow Bible

Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe

During the Jim Crow era, the Green Book was the Bible of black travel. Today it is a guide to a past that hasn’t completely vanished.

In the 1949 Green Book, for example, listings for the African-American neighborhood in Boston’s South End include eight hotels and guest houses, nine restaurants, a couple of barbers, the Savoy Nightclub (where Malcolm X once shined shoes) and a half-dozen tailors.

Charlie’s, one of the restaurants listed on Columbus Avenue, was where Sammy Davis. Jr., used to tap dance for change as a young boy. Charlie’s, now known as Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe, closed in 2014 but reopened under new ownership.

As New Haven revives the jazz that once made it a mecca for musicians, the 1949 Green Book limns the Dixwell neighborhood where Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday performed. There was the Phillis Wheatley Hotel, the Dr. M.F. Allen tourist home, the Belmont Restaurant, the Elks Nightclub and Lillian’s Paradise.

The Monterey Café, where owner Rufus Greenlee danced with Josephine Baker, lasted long enough to foster New Haven’s Hip Hop scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Providence

Most of the accommodations listed in the Green Book in New England were small hotels and tourist homes owned by African Americans. In cities, they were usually found in marginal or minority neighborhoods.

One notable exception was the Providence Biltmore, an elegant 19-story hotel in the middle of downtown. It was built in 1922 after the Providence Chamber of Commerce campaigned for a signature hotel where people could gather for important civic and cultural events.

The hotel had an open occupancy policy, accepting both black and white guests. But it took a step further by actually paying for a listing in the Green Book. Beginning in 1941, it simply reads, “Biltmore” under the heading “Providence.”

The Providence Biltmore closed in 1975, but reopened four years later after renovation and a landmark designation. It changed hands, underwent another renovation, changed hands again, and was renamed Graduate Providence.

Oak Bluffs

Today, the Town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard is a resort community visited by such prominent African-Americans as Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 1956, it provided even more of a reprieve for upper-middle-class African-Americans like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote speeches on the porch of an Oak Bluffs cottage.

In 1948, Dorothy West wrote a novel about the town’s social life, The Living Is Easy. That year the Green Book listed eight places where cottages could be rented in Oak Bluffs. (You can watch an online documentary about Oak Bluffs for free here.)

The Shearer Cottage on Martha’s Vineyard catered to black vacationers starting in 1912. Charles and Henrietta Shearer built their wooden tourist home in the Highlands area of Oak Bluffs. Charles had been born into slavery but graduated from Hampton Institute in Virginia, then worked as a teacher.

Shearer Cottage is still in business and still run by the Shearer family.

Ironically, the Green Book didn’t list the Shearer Cottage until 1963, along with such establishments as Brownie’s Cottage, Cinderella Cottage and Dunmere-By-The-Sea.

Rock Rest

Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine

One New England destination popular among African-Americans did not list in the Green Book: Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine. Clayton and Hazel Sinclair once owned the 2-1/2 story wooden Cape, running it as a guest house from 1946 to 1977. They advertised by sending postcards to their mailing list.

Clayton worked as a chauffeur in New York, Hazel as a ladies’ maid to a family that summered in Maine. When Clayton and Hazel decided to relocate, Clayton found a dilapidated house on Route 103 and Kittery and promised to fix it up. He did, and Hazel’s reputation as a cook drew enough guests to run Rock Rest as a business in the summer. Clayton Sinclair also worked in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Hazel catered in the off season. Today the house is on the National Register of Historic Places. On June 4, 2022, two historic markers were scheduled to be unveiled commemorating Rock Rest.

For an interactive map showing places listed in a 1956 Negro Travelers’ Green Book, click here. View the text of the 1949 Green Book, courtesy The Henry Ford, here.

Photos: Oak Bluffs by Elkman at Wikipedia, Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe by John Phelan at Wikipedia. Rock Rest By Robm154 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35858018.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about New England’s sundown towns (which only allowed white people to stay after dark) here.

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Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Elizabeth Buffum Chace belonged to old and distinguished Rhode Island families, but she was distrusted and shunned because of her ardent opposition to slavery.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace

Her ancestor Daniel Gould came from England and settled in Newport in 1637. He became a member of the Society of Friends and married the daughter of John Coggeshall, the first president of the Aquidneck Colony who was also a Quaker.

Newport, which is on Aquidneck Island, was a slave market. Between 1709 and 1807, Newport merchants sponsored more than 900 voyages to Africa and brought more than 100,000 slaves to the Americas.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace had reason to believe her Quaker ancestors ‘were somewhat implicated in the African slave trade.’

Quakers couldn’t sanction the practice, though, and by 1727 began to speak out against the slave trade. In 1780, New England Quakers abolished slavery among its members.

An Abolitionist Is Born

Elizabeth Buffum was born on Dec. 9, 1806, in Smithfield, R.I., to Arnold Buffum and Rebecca Gould Buffum.

She described how she came to be an ardent abolitionist in her book, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences, which she wrote at the age of 85.

When her father was a child, she wrote, it wasn’t unusual for slaves from New York to flee to Rhode Island. A slave family escaped and lived on her grandfather’s farm. Arnold Buffum’s opposition to slavery grew stronger as he aged, and he became the first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Though Quakers officially opposed slavery, they viewed the Buffums with suspicion. They avoided the Buffums because they argued for the immediate abolition of slavery. Many Quakers believed in the gradual abolition of slavery, and that slaves should go to African colonies.

Quaker ministers urged Elizabeth to keep quiet. Her Quaker brother-in-law told her slaves shouldn’t be free because, “I shouldn’t want to see a black man sitting on the sofa beside my daughter.”

The Chace house. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

At 23, she married Samuel Chace, the son of Oliver Chace, who founded several textile mills. Warren Buffett founded Berkshire Hathaway on the Chace mills. The Chaces were also an old Quaker family strongly opposed to slavery.

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace moved to Valley Falls, R.I. They then had 10 children after the first five died.

Jim Crow

The Chaces opened their home to abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Abby Kelley, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone.

Frederick Douglass

They didn’t just fight slavery, they battled racism. In her book, Elizabeth Buffum Chace described how they stood up to Jim Crow in Massachusetts. As she and her husband entered a railroad car in Taunton,

Samuel Rodman, an Anti-Slavery man from New Bedford, and a highly respectable, well-dressed colored man and his wife, from the same town, took seats therein also. The conductor came and ordered the colored people to leave the car. We all remonstrated, of course, but without avail. He called the superintendent, who peremptorily repeated the order. They got out quietly, and we did the same, (but not so quietly,) and retired to the waiting room, leaving the car empty.

The railroad officials added a car for the African-American couple, and the Chaces joined them. “We found them intelligent, agreeable companions,” she wrote.

Underground Railroad

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace also became conductors on the Underground Railroad as more and more people escaped slavery.

Often, she wrote, they were carried by small coastal vessels from Virginia at Norfolk or Portsmouth and carried to New England – Fall River, New Bedford and Cape Cod.

In Fall River, they’d find shelter with Nathaniel B. Borden and his wife — Elizabeth’s sister Sarah — and sent in a closed carriage at night,

…with Robert Adams, a most faithful friend as their conductor. Here we received them, and, after preparing them for the journey, my husband would accompany them a short distance, on the Providence and Worcester railroad, acquaint the conductor with the facts, enlist his interest in their behalf, and then leave them in his care, to be transferred at Worcester, to the Vermont road, from which, by a previous general arrangement, they were received by a Unitarian clergyman named Young, and sent by him to Canada, where they uniformly arrived safely.

She used to give them an envelope with her address on it so they could mail it from Toronto to let her know they’d arrived safely.

Midnight Visitors

They were once awakened in the middle of the night by a mother and her two boys. She had escaped slavery in Maryland, moved to Fall River and quietly earned a living as a laundress. A notorious slave-catcher started snooping around her neighborhood asking about her.

Her friends sent her to the Chace’s house in Valley Falls, where they awaited the arrival of her oldest son, who would bring their belongings.

We kept them three or four days, in hourly fear and expectation of the arrival of the slave-catcher; our doors and windows fastened by day as well as by night, not daring to let our neighbors know who were our guests, lest some one should betray them. We told our children, all, at that time, under fourteen years of age, of the fine of one thousand dollars, and the imprisonment of six months, that awaited us, in case the officer should come, and we should refuse to give these poor people up.

Finally, the 17-year-old son arrived with their belongings and money raised by their neighbors in Fall River.

Once, a light-skinned African-American stayed at their house for 10 days pretending to be a fugitive slave. He was actually an escaped burglar. The Chaces found him very well-mannered and entertaining.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Buffum Chace fought against racial discrimination in the schools and for women’s rights and prison reform.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace died on Dec. 12, 1899. Today , the Elizabeth Buffum Chace House in Warwick, R.I., shelters and aids victims of domestic violence.

Her son Arnold Buffum Chace became a famous mathematician and chancellor of Brown University. Her daughter, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, became a prominent author. Two of her grandchildren became renowned professors and another grandson was a U.S. Collegiate Tennis champion and is credited with bringing ice hockey to the United States.

This story about Elizabeth Buffum Chace was updated in 2023.

Image of Elizabeth Buffum Chace PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13709459.

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