Charles L. Roberts: Newport can follow ancestors’ footsteps, learn their stories

I’ve always been inspired by James Baldwin’s quote – and perspective – “We carry our history with us. We are our history.” Baldwin argues that history is not a distant, finished event, but a living force that shapes our lives and informs our present reality. It’s not something that we can ignore, leave behind, or take for granted; instead, it’s something we carry with us. It shapes us as individuals, as a community, and as a nation state. This is why I have made carrying forward our collective history my life’s work (after all, we are all a part of it). For too long, it has been varnished, oppressed, or forgotten.

I’m excited to share with WUN readers that RISHM is embarking on our 2^nd annual season of hosting the Newport Black History Walking Tours beginning Memorial Day weekend, and our 3^rd annual Newport Juneteenth Celebration – Free Family Fun for All – which will be held on Saturday, June 21^st in Washington Square (more on that in another Voices episode.).

For this Voices article, I wanted to give WUN readers an exclusive peek into the Newport Black History Walking Tours and why they’re so meaningful and important to our community. In late January, I wrote to WUN readers about why marking the landscape is so key to understanding our collective history. More than six years ago, instead of settling into a comfortable retirement after a busy career in the music business, I made a commitment to myself and to our community to deliver on this promise.

Since 2019, I have worked closely with local historians, and graduate students from Roger Williams University, to research and develop the Newport Black History Walking Tours.^† During that time, the non-profit I founded, Rhode Island Slave History Medallions (RISHM), has produced and installed 16 granite and bronze monuments across Rhode Island, with many more planned. Each marker is embedded with unique interactive QR code guides you to our website that physically memorializes the stories of colonial Indigenous and African-American history in the state of Rhode Island, and of course specifically that of the rich port city of Newport. Both our city and state were complicit and dominant in the colonial slave trade. Eight of these granite markers installed are featured stops on RISHM’s Black Newport Black History Walking Tour.

So much of Newport’s beautiful, preserved colonial architecture was built by forced labor. Our cobblestone streets were paved with the funds collected from the taxes of human cargo.  For this reason and many others, these early enslaved Newporter’s deserve our respect and our acts of remembrance.

I will share some little-known highlights with WUN readers to motivate you to take the guided tour or perhaps enjoy a self-guided tour by scanning the QR codes on our markers. Either way, you’ll be following in the footsteps of the enslaved and free Indigenous and African Americans who walked these streets during the colonial era. You’ll learn their names, and some fascinating details my research teams have uncovered about their daily lives.

Exclusive for WUN: Cliff (Walk) Notes for Newport Black History Walking Tours

We start our tour at Bowen’s Wharf, near where our first marker was installed. We visualize what the bustling wharf was like in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, and discuss the ships that carried human cargo from West Africa, in trade for the rum manufactured in Newport as part of the Triangular Trade.

The colonists settled on Aquidneck Island in 1638. They bought Aquidneck Island for 20 hoes, 10 coats, and a total of 45 fathoms of white (beads) from Narragansett Sachem Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomoh, who later succeeded him as grand sachem (we refer to him now Miantonomi.) The deed was negotiated by Roger Williams. In 1639, William Coddington chose to settle in Newport because of its unique and excellent harbor. By the late 17^th century, this was one of the most vibrant trading harbors in the New England colonies.

About 60% of slave trading voyages that launched from North America embarked from Rhode Island, and, painful to comprehend, most of these were from Newport Harbor. By 1755, one-fifth of the Newport population was Black laborers. Their enslavement fueled nearly every industry in Newport. Just think about their lifestyles at that time: dock laborers, sailors, and ship riggers, candle making, rum distilling, barrel making, cigar rolling, the carriage making, building and brick laying, furniture making, domestic work, and agricultural products all produced by the free labor of an enslaved population.

Our next stop on the walking tour is Trinity Church (founded in 1698). While there, we discuss the meaning behind the soul effigy symbol that appears on almost every hand-carved grave in Trinity’s historic cemetery, and on the tombstones in God’s Little Acre, located in Newport’s Common Burial Ground. RISHM’s soul effigy on our medallions symbolizes the 17th century belief that one’s soul was being carried to heaven on the wings of angels. 

Here we introduce our guests to the story of two enslaved African brothers: Pompe Stevens, who carved and signed the gravestone of his brother Cuffe Gibbs, a slave of the Gibbs family of Trinity Church. Signing his brother’s gravestone was a silent act of resistance. It was his humble attempt to honor their family ties and their cultural heritage. Many members of Trinity Church’s congregation owned slaves for domestic and commercial labor and were involved in the global trafficking of humans.

Across our tour stops, we share stories of people whose endurance and perseverance sustained them and enabled their families to continue. There are many Indigenous & African-American stories to be told on School Street, Division Street, and Clarke Street. Many of our tour guests have told us that they have walked these streets hundreds of times, and they never knew what really happened here.

The mission of RISHM’s Black History Walking Tours is to recognize and educate the public about the people and places in Newport that played a dominate role in the slave trade, and to share and commemorate the documented stories of real-life colonial free and enslaved Indigenous and African- Americans who made significant, but lesser-known, contributions to Newport, and to the state.

For more information or to schedule a tour, visit www.rishm.org/tours.

^† I’d genuinely like to thank our expert tour guides, historians, and the RWU community for their support of our research over the past few years.

 Charles L. Roberts is Executive Director and Founder of Rhode Island Slave History Medallions, www.rishm.org.  He can be reached at charles@rishm.org.