Old North Church, a beacon of freedom, grapples with its own ties to slavery

Nearly a decade ago, Boston’s Old North Church opened a Colonial-themed chocolate shop named for Captain Newark Jackson, a prominent early member of the historic church and a pillar of Boston’s lucrative chocolate trade with the British in the 1700s.

For years, Colonial re-enactors in traditional costumes at Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop would grind cacao by hand and tell tourists stories of the chocolate trade.

What those re-enactors never said was that the chocolate trade was built on the backs of enslaved adults and children. Now, as the historic church uncovers and reckons with its past, it's not hiding those grim details. And it's welcoming students to study and reflect on the paradox of a landmark church dedicated to freedom whose members prospered from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In 2018, historian and author Jared Ross Hardesty's team of researchers discovered Jackson bought slaves in Barbados and traded them to plantation owners in Suriname for cacao beans to bring home, which he documented in the book "Mutiny on the Rising Sun."

“Essentially we found an entire smuggling ring,” Hardesty said. “And a central part of the way this entire smuggling operation worked was around the exchange of human beings.”

Last year, in response, Old North Church began a broader rethinking about how to re-tell the complicated parts of its history of how slavery intertwined with the cries for freedom fueling the American Revolution. Not an easy task, considering that the church’s original steeple, the famous spire that signaled “one if by land, two if by sea” to Paul Revere, was built with the proceeds from enslaved labor.

As a first step, Old North closed the chocolate shop paying tribute to Jackson.

“We just didn't want to continue glorifying this person that we had kind of plucked from obscurity, who it turned out didn't deserve the pedestal,” said Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Church Illuminated, the foundation that operates Old North Church as a tourism and educational venue.

Stewart said the foundation also revamped its exhibition inside the church. Tourists can now take a self-guided tour and see where wealthy merchants prayed in luxurious pews, as well as the benches in the cold upstairs gallery where everyone else, including slaves, sat for church services.

Visitors also learn that the church’s early merchants were involved in the logwood industry, which “depended on the extensive labor of enslaved Africans shipped to Belize.”

The church also overhauled the educational curriculum it uses for high school students on field trips. In October, it hosted its first class of high schoolers using the new materials that explore slavery and human trafficking to help them study the chocolate industry’s modern-day connections to illegal child labor practices.

“It's complicated at Old North because Old North is such a symbol of freedom,” said the Rev. Matthew Cadwell, the vicar to Old North Church’s Episcopal congregation that still meets there.

For decades, the church has been a celebrated stop along Boston’s Freedom Trail, where it sits near a statue of Revere on horseback in the city’s North End, commemorating his ride that signaled the start of the Revolutionary War.

Cadwell said it has taken too long for Boston, a prosperous city in one of the most politically liberal regions of the nation, to get to this point of reckoning.

“New England, in general, has done an excellent job of whitewashing our history, reshaping the historical narrative to suggest that slavery was maybe only a southern problem,” he said recently. “In fact, it touched every area of Boston, including the church. And so that's been an important learning and a difficult learning for us at Old North.”

Stewart said the programming changes were expensive, and they come as pressure mounts for the city to consider reparations to address the historic damage caused by slavery.

In October, activists chained themselves to Faneuil Hall for eight hours, demanding a name change for the landmark. Peter Faneuil owned slaves and had deep ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The Rev. Kevin Peterson, one of the Faneuil Hall protesters and the founder of the New Democracy Coalition, said Boston has told a one-sided and self-flattering history along the Freedom Trail for generations. The city’s story is so incomplete that he said he still encounters people who are surprised to learn slavery was common here.

“Faneuil Hall is just a metaphor for the larger issues related to this idea that freedom was founded at around the time that Boston was founded. That's a canard. It's a lie to say that Boston was founded in freedom,” Peterson said. “We have not had enough discussion in Boston about the nature of racial repair, the subject has been ignored for so long by those who run institutions in this city.”

Imari Paris Jeffries, executive director of Embrace Boston — the group that will soon unveil a monument to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil right leaders on Boston Common — said Americans for generations have been socialized with stories about Revere's ride and freedom narratives, so he doesn't expect people to suddenly accept that everything they've learned isn't completely true or accurate overnight.

"I mean, it's so contrary to who we are as humans," he said. "And so I think I think there's a way in which you build trust with people so that you can engage in these conversations and a fuller understanding. And they're doing it at Old North Church."

Jeffries said he knows Stewart and has faith in her leadership of the Old North foundation through these changes.

Cadwell, Old North’s vicar, said he's been part of the talks underway in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts about racial repair and reparations. And he said he views Old North as "part of the longer American story and the fact that we're ever-growing toward a deeper kind of freedom and liberation.”

On the Old North Church grounds, Jackson’s chocolate shop has been turned into a gift emporium hawking T-shirts, commemorative ornaments — and fair-trade chocolate.

The church receives half a million visitors annually, and on a recent afternoon many marveled at its austere beauty and historical significance.

Clint Thornburg, visiting from Pennsylvania, said she thinks the more history the church unearths and shares, the more visitors will come. Thornburg’s wish is for a national dialogue about race and moving forward as a nation.

“It's remarkable, really, with how divided things are now, a lot of people compare it to the Revolution and the Civil War,” she said. “But back then we sat in church next to each other ... and now, that doesn't really happen.”

Christine Postilli stood in the cold snapping photos of the exterior. The New Yorker, visiting Boston for the weekend, said she felt deeply inspired by the church’s freedom story and at the same time mindful of what she called the “sins of the past.”

“It's a very, very happy thing when people come together and fight for something together,” she said. “That’s not something we're experiencing much in this country anymore.”

Then she dashed off to see a nearby Revolutionary War cemetery.