Boston sheds more light on its relationship to slavery

“The image of Northern cities like Boston as centers of abolitionist activity has overshadowed the history of their role in slavery,” said Jared Hardesty, an associate history professor at Western Washington University and author of “Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston.” Segregationist laws, racial violence, and the trafficking of Black people into bondage in the early 1800s contributed to the erasure of the history of slavery in the North; white abolitionists preferred to focus on antislavery sentiment here, Hardesty said.