Race and Slavery at First Church in Roxbury

This powerful presentation by Harvard PhD candidate Aabid Allibhai, the Rev. Mary Margaret Earl, and Byron Rushing, lifelong activist and former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, tells the story of the enslaved people linked to First Church in Roxbury. Groundbreaking research by Aabid Allibhai, commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Church, explores just how entwined Boston's elite was in slavery - and an institution of unfree labor stretching to every corner of the Boston area.
Given at Putnam Chapel, Unitarian Universalists Urban Ministry in Roxbury, on December 6, 2023, this presentation is the final lecture in our 2023 lecture series Enslavement & Resistance: New England 1620-1760. As well as taking us to the origins of slavery, it asks: how do we face our past today? How do our institutions, and we ourselves, face an uncomfortable history?
You can read Aabid Allibhai's groundbreaking report, Race & Slavery at the First Church in Roxbury: The Colonial Period (1631-1775), documenting the 58 enslaved Indigenous and African people here. www.uuum.org/_files/ugd/7b9fd...
.
The Boston Globe covered the launch of the report on February 6, 2023, and its findings that Roxbury First Church's earliest parishioners "owned" at least 58 enslaved Indigenous and African people. Read its account here.www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/0...
Find out, too, about the Unitarian Universalist Church at Roxbury and its many diverse programs www.uuum.org and the Roxbury Historical Society / roxburyhistoricalsociety .
About the presenters
Aabid Allibhai is a public historian and Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, studying the history of slavery and abolition in New England. His research has been funded by several institutions including the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Center for American Political Studies. Allibhai has twice been awarded Harvard College’s Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where he graduated with honors.
Byron Rushing, who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for over thirty years, is also former president of the Museum of African American History in Boston and current president of the Roxbury Historical Society. Through his life he has been a champion for justice.
The Rev. Mary Margaret Earl has served as executive director and senior minister of the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry for eight years. In this ministry, she has worked to strengthen bonds between UUs and the Roxbury neighborhood where the UUUM operates. She has served on the Faith in Solidarity leadership team and the Roxbury Cultural Network. Prior to her arrival at the UU Urban Ministry, she spent ten years at a faith-based nonprofit in Rhode Island serving the homeless community. She is past president of the board of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, recipient of the Heroes of Faith Award from the Rhode Island State Council of Churches for her interfaith work, and received a Courage of Conscience award from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA. She is a longtime vegan committed to standing up for nonhuman animals.