In front of you rises a plain brick building raised in 1806 by Beacon Hill's free Black community, the oldest surviving African American church in the nation. The African Meeting House was the center of Boston's African American community for half a century, the site of schools, religious services, political meetings, and social gatherings in a community that was legally free but practically constrained in nearly every sphere of Boston life. William Lloyd Garrison launched the New England Anti-Slavery Society here in 1832 in the meeting house's basement.
Frederick Douglass spoke here. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Black regiment recruited in the North, was organized in large part from the community of Boston's Black neighborhood, and the men who volunteered here are commemorated in the Augustus Saint-Gaudens relief on Boston Common. The Black Heritage Trail, a 1.6-mile walking route through the north slope of Beacon Hill, connects fourteen sites associated with Boston's nineteenth-century Black community, including the home of Lewis Hayden, the Smith Court residences, and the Abiel Smith School, the first public school in the country built for Black children.
The African Meeting House is a museum; walk through it and read the stories on the walls.