The first Africans arrived on Nantucket in the 1600s as slaves to the white settlers. In 1764 a census recorded a black population of 44 and in 1773 Nantucket finally abolished slavery, it was ten years before the state of Massachusetts finally abolished the practice. Africans and African Americans on Nantucket usually worked as tradespeople, laborers, sheep and livestock raisers, and later as whalers and mariners.
The African Meeting House: built in the 1820's in the flourishing black neighborhood called “New Guinea” where 274 black residents lived, constituting 4 percent of the island’s population. At the time, Nantucket was a premier whaling port, and the black residents toiled in every aspect of the industry. A few even prospered, and at least one whaling ship with a black captain and an all-black crew set sail from the island and there were a number of black owned shops in town.
The meeting house was a hub for minorities of color. It was originally built to be a school for children of minority races. When local penny schools refused admittance to minority children, the island’s minorities, abolitionists, Baptists, and Unitarians responded by working together to make the school for minorities bigger, grander, and more desirable than its white equivalents. It became a multi purpose building. On Sundays it was used for Baptist church services and in the evenings it was used as a meeting house.
It wasn’t long after it was built before the African School became Nantucket’s first integrated school. Then a founder of the meeting house, sued for admission to the public high school for his daughter, as a result, in 1846 Nantucket became one of the first districts in the country to desegregate its schools. Sadly it took over one hundred and thirty years for the rest of the country to follow suit.
After the closing of the African school, the building on the corner of York and Pleasant Streets continued to play a role in the life of Nantucket’s black community. In 1848 James Crawford became pastor of the Pleasant Street Baptist Church, which met in the building. Born into slavery in Virginia, the Rev. Crawford had escaped by going to sea and leaving his ship in Providence, Rhode Island. In Nantucket, where he worked as a hairdresser — he operated in both the black and white communities — preaching regularly in the Summer Street Baptist Church as well as at the town asylum for the indigent.
In 1933, Mrs. Florence Higginbotham, an African American who owned the house next door, purchased the Meeting House and its two outbuildings. It continued to be used as a social center, but after World War II, it was rented out as a garage, and then a storage shed and bicycle repair shop. Mrs. Higginbotham died in 1972, leaving her son, Wilhelm, as her sole heir who honored her request to retain the Meeting House property, underscoring what she recognized as its historic significance. The businessman who had stored his bicycles there began research that led to its inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Her heirs sold these historic sites to the Museum of African American History in 1989. They are the only public structures remaining on the island that is identifiably central to the history of the African community of the 18th and 19th centuries.
About the house next door, 27 York Street: The house was built sometime before the Revolutionary War, after the property was purchased in 1774 by Seneca Boston, an African American. Seneca was a weaver and formerly enslaved man who purchased the land a decade before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. Seneca Boston’s grandfather or uncle was a slave named Prince Boston. Prince was part of the crew of a 1770 Nantucket whaling voyage, and in 1773 he made history by refusing to turn over his earnings to his white “master” and obtaining his freedom from the Swain family through a lengthy court battle.
William Swain had freed Prince’s parents in 1760, with the stipulation that each of their children serve the Swain family until age twenty-eight, which for Prince would have been 1778. Through litigation, Prince was able to obtain his freedom five years earlier. This result was consistent with a developing legal principle in Massachusetts and England that allowed blacks access to courts to litigate issues of freedom. Instead, he went to court and won both his earnings and freedom, making him the first black slave to win his freedom in a U.S. jury trial.
Absalom Boston, the well-known Nantucket whaling captain, was one of the six children of Seneca Boston and his wife, Thankful Micah, a Wampanoag Indian, who all lived in the house at 27 York Street. Absalom spent his early years working in the whaling industry. In 1822, Absalom became the captain of The Industry, a whaleship manned entirely with an African-American crew. The six-month journey returned with 70 barrels of what oil and the entire crew intact. Absalom retired from the sea after The Industry returned to Nantucket from its historic voyage. His voyage to the Atlantic whaling grounds as captain of the ship Industry with its all black crew was significant, not because of the modest amount of oil brought back, but because he represented a continuing historical tradition of black seamanship in the whaling industry. Black seamen were subject to being kidnaped and murdered on the high seas. Although the Atlantic slave trade had become unlawful in 1808, an illegal trade continued, which placed all black seamen in jeopardy.
By the time Absalom reached the age of 20, he acquired enough money to purchase property in Nantucket. Ten years later, he obtained a license to open and operate a public inn. He concentrated on becoming a business and community leader, and also ran for public office. Together with fellow captain, Edward Pompey, he led the Nantucket abolitionist movement. He was also a founding trustee of Nantucket's African Baptist Society, and the African Meeting House. Absalom Boston was widowed twice. His first wife was Mary Spywood; his second was Phebe G. Spriggins; and his last wife was Hannah Cook, who outlived him, as did children of his second and third marriages.
In 1845, after his daughter Phebe Ann Boston was barred from attending a public school, he was the one who successfully brought a lawsuit against the Nantucket municipal government to integrate the public education system years before the state integrated all it’s schools, and more than one hundred years before the nation integrated all its schools.
Except for a period of less than one year, the The Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House was owned by African-Americans for the next two centuries. For more information about Florence Higgenbottom check out: http://www.afroammuseum.org/higginbotham.htm