African American History Posts

Attributions  Coverage of Anita Hemmings at Vassar is taken from period newspapers found at the Boston Public Library, the Chronicling America newspaper database at the Library of Congress, Newspaperarchive.com and Newspapers.com.  “Irreproachab…

Jill Sim looks at family connections to Boston Brahmin religious circles, and a segregated church culture during the period of rapid change given by immigration waves to Boston.  Within the complexities of a family’ of color’s tenuous standing in t…

My great-great grandfather Robert Williamson Hemmings (1841-1908), as he looked c. 1886. Jill looks at Boston Brahmins, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant class, and their ordered-up caste structure of the 19th century in the context of the Hemming…