Black Heritage Trail, Boston, MA

The Black Heritage Trail® explores the history of the 19th century free Black community of Boston. The trail consists of 14 sites, and begins at the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Beacon Street and finishes at the Museum of African American History which includes the African Meeting House and the Abiel Smith School. Self-guided tours can be conducted at any time, Monday through Sunday. Maps and site brochures can be obtained at the Abiel Smith School during site hours.

Sites on the Black Heritage Trail® include:

• Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial
• George Middleton House
• Phillips School
• John J. Smith House
• Charles Street Meeting House
• Lewis and Harriet Hayden House
• John Coburn House
• Smith Court Residences
• Abiel Smith School
• African Meeting House

The sites along the Black Heritage Trail are part of Boston African American National Historic Site is comprised of the largest area of pre-Civil War black owned structures in the U.S. It has roughly two dozen sites on the north face of Beacon Hill. These historic buildings were homes, businesses, schools, and churches of a thriving black community that, in the face of great opposition, fought the forces of slavery and inequality.

Florida Black Heritage Trail Guide

The Florida Black Heritage Trail Guide features historic black American sites from Pensacola to Key West and includes profiles and biographical sketches of many distinguished and accomplished black Floridians. Available for free at VISITFLORIDA.com, the guide also includes four self-guided driving tours and features vivid color photographs.

Sites in the book include:

• Eatonville, the country’s oldest black municipality and home of noted writer Zora Neale Hurston;
• the Julee Cottage Museum in Pensacola, home of Julee Panton, a “free woman of color” that lived in the early 1800s and purchased the freedom of fellow enslaved blacks;
• American Beach, a predominantly black oceanfront resort established by Abraham Lincoln Lewis, who in the 1930s founded the Afro-American Insurance Company of Jacksonville.
• the Black Archives Research Center and Museum at Florida A & M University, the oldest historically black public university in the state of Florida.