The Freedom Trail that winds through the sidewalks of downtown Boston connects 17 historic sites tied to the city’s colonial history as the incubator of the American Revolution. But the nearly 4 million annual visitors who walk the 2.5-mile path rarely hear the story of slavery, which touched nearly every aspect of Massachusetts' society and economy during that time.
GBH News’ new interactive map changes that.
Produced with a Boston University journalism class, the map (and the accompanying stories) digs into how each site on the trail has roots in enslavement. GBH News’ investigations editor Paul Singer led the project and worked with about 15 BU students who did original research to find the hidden histories of slavery in Boston.
Through Singer’s relationship with the BU journalism faculty, the Freedom Trail initiative became a special project for the students.
Some of the sites had done a lot of this work themselves and were able to share their findings. Others, like the Old Corner Bookstore and the Boston Common, required students to work through troves of documents themselves and read historical texts looking for clues.
Tanisha Bhat, a BU senior, said the research could be challenging. “I worked on the history of the Massachusetts State House, which was built in the 1790s,” said Bhat, a journalism and political science major. “We were trying to find records from that time to see who contributed money towards it and who actually did the physical labor.”
She and her team visited the Massachusetts Archives where they discovered original parchment documents about the building of the State House, but they couldn’t decipher the old cursive handwriting style and lettering.
“A month or two into our investigation, we found a typed copy at the Massachusetts Historical Society,” she said. “I learned that we have to have patience. As long as you do due diligence as a journalist, then you will eventually get what you need.”
While the State House was not built by slaves, Bhat and her team found that the family of architect Charles Bulfinch enslaved six people and he was an active player in the slave economy in the years after the State House was built.
By highlighting Boston’s complex history, from the enslaved people who harvested the wood for the USS Constitution and those who mined silver for Paul Revere's kitchenware, the timeline exposes long-known, but well-shrouded stories of Boston’s reliance on slavery.
“Nothing the students found was new — the story has been known for 200 years,” said Singer. “The thing that is most interesting to me is just how hard people have worked all of these years to erase these stories.”
GBH News became aware of the story in November 2022 when education editor Meg Woolhouse reported that the Old North Church was beginning to tell a different story about its history — one that acknowledges that its operations were inextricably tied to the slave trade.
“That inspired the question, ‘what about the rest of the Freedom Trail?’” said Singer. “If the economic system of the city was that entrenched in the slave trade, it couldn't be only Old North Church.”
“We hope our work changes the narrative around the Freedom Trail,” he said. “We don’t want to denigrate the grand historical experiment of democracy that those people were launching, which was and is a phenomenal and beautiful thing — but we want to complicate the story a little bit. We want to provide voice and recognition to the contributions made by people who have been largely erased — but who were foundationally important to the creation of this country.”
Explore the interactive map here.
