Boston – Mass Bay Region – Eastern/Central Massachusetts
Worcester Black History Trail
The Worcester Black History Trail is a collaborative undertaking of the College of the Holy Cross, the Worcester Branch NAACP, and Laurel Clayton Project with the support and assistance of the Office of the Worcester City Manager and the Worcester Parks & Recreation Department. Its goals have been to document and highlight historical sites important to understanding the experience of people of color in Worcester from the colonial period through the present through placement of history markers and digital dissemination of Worcester Black History.
Black Heritage Trail (Boston)
The trail winds through the Beacon Hill neighborhood and links more than 15 pre-Civil War structures and historic sites, including the 1806 African Meeting House, the oldest surviving Black church in the United States (which for a time was a synagogue too). Designed as a walking trail up and down some steep hills. But you can bike it and more and make an afternoon of it. The Boston Freedom Trail intersects it.
Prince Hall Masonic History Tour
Prince Hall founded the first African American Masonic Order, in the 1770s. There now are some 5,000 lodges and 47 grand lodges trace their lineage to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts. “ The ride visits three sites of importance for Prince Hall’s legacy. It visits his burial site at Copps Hill burial ground in the North End, visits the Prince Hall memorial on Cambridge Common, and finishes at the Prince Hall Masonic Cemetery in Arlington.
New Bedford Black History Trail
There are a lot of Black history sites in New Bedford, since it was both an abolitionist hot spot and an underground railroad stopping place. Frederick Douglass was a presence here too.
Concord African American History Bike Tour
This tour covers Concord’s rich African American and Abolitionist sites. It is a guided tour with a small fee run by the Concord Visitors Center. Many sites are also within biking distance of the Old North Bridge and Concord Center.
Boston-Cambridge African American Bike Tour
This bike tour, designed by Cycling Through History, covers African American sites including and beyond Beacon Hill to include Prince Hall’s burial site in the North End, and many sites in Cambridge and the South End.
Nantucket’s Black Heritage Trail
The 10 sites are divided between downtown and New Guinea, the neighborhood where the island’s black population lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. Guided tours leave from the Whaling Museum; visit sites including the Florence Higginbotham House, which was built by a freed slave named Seneca Boston in 1774; and end at the African Meeting House, a school, church, and social center of the black community dating back to the 1820s.
Martha’s Vineyard African American Trail
The African-American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard is focused on preserving the complex history and many contributions of people of African descent who have lived on the island. The trail, which includes locations in every town, comprises 30 sites but continues to grow Among the trail’s highlights are the homes where Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson stayed, as well as the Oak Bluffs residence of author Dorothy West, a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance.
Connecticut River Valley and Western Massachusetts
Florence (Northampton) Black History Route
This route starts and ends at the Sojourner Truth statue in Florence MA. In the 1850s, the village had a large population of self-emancipated former slaves Others, like Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles, were among the nation’s leading black activists in the struggle to end slavery.
Upper Housatonic Valley (Great Barrington MA and surrounding towns)
The African American Heritage Trail encompasses 29 Massachusetts and Connecticut towns in the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, and celebrates African Americans in the region who played pivotal roles in key national and international events, as well as ordinary people of achievement. Among the key 48 sites along the trail: W.E.B. Du Bois boyhood Homesite, a national landmark property in Great Barrington, and the Burghardt homestead where young Du Bois lived for a time.