There is work to be done.

I live in New England. Each little village has a “town history”. The town histories have lots and lots of problems. One is that they generally say, “this area was not home to indians,” even though the first chapter is inevitably filled with indian stories. To ameliorate the conflict, the point is often made that the indians didn’t live here. They sometimes “moved through” this area, but they didn’t stay for long. It is a convenient fabrication.

Another vexing part of the town histories is the absence of black people. One of the most famous citizens of the town I live in was a black man that died in the 1700s. He was a tanner, and there are a number of documents related to him as well as some objects that are kept in our local library. What is strange is that while there were black people here in the 1700s, and there are black people here now, there is almost no record of the black people who lived in town between then and now. Isn’t that… funny? OK, not funny. Isn’t that weird? Would you believe “sinister”? Isn’t that sinister?

I didn’t see the movie In the Heart of the Sea, but I have known the story of the Essex my whole life, and had read the first mate’s account when I was a kid. It is only when Nathaniel Philbrick wrote his book that I realized that many of the men on the Essex were black Nantucketers.

I would love it if we used Black History Month to do some of the overdue historical research that needs to be done. An essential part of any American History class ought to be that there is no America without black people.

I’ve shared the photo below before. It’s the one I use as my profile picture. The man at the left in the bowler hat is my paternal great-grandfather. He was born in Boston in 1855, soon after our family had immigrated from Ireland. Guess at his age and you have the approximate date of the photo.

This is a work crew of the Boston Water Department. There are two African-Americans in the picture. You can speculate about the picture. Are most of the men Irish immigrants? European immigrants? Native born Americans?

Here’s one guess that I think is solid. The black men in the picture come from families that had been in the country longer than my great-grandfather’s.

There have been black people in Boston for its entire history, but the basketball team is named the “Celtics”. What the fuck is that about?