Newport, Rhode Island was the center of the American triangle slave trade for over a century, sending more voyages to Africa than any other state. In that time, Newport ships brought over 100,000 enslaved men, women, and children on the horrendous Middle Passage journey from Africa to North America. Today, over 325 years after the first slave voyage to Newport, residents are still grappling with the long shadow of that history. The creation of the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project is just one step in the journey of lifting that shadow and responding to its consequences.
Beginnings
In January 2016, Ann Chinn of Jacksonville, Florida, Program Director of the National Middle Passage Ceremony and Port Marker Project convened a discussion at Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence to assess interest in creating a Middle Passage Port Marker for Rhode Island. Markers were already installed at several port cities on the East Coast.
“The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” with Jeff Weston
August 27, 2024 6:00 pm
Join Newport Middle Passage for an evening of engaging discussion with local tour guide Jeff Weston for this overview of Newport History, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”. This lecture is a part of the Newport Middle Passage Summer Series. Weston will present the complex history of Newport. Jeff is an expert storyteller and founder of Northstar Touring.
Visitors may also examine the Newport Art Museum’s Black History of Newport installation. Victoria Johnson, a lifelong Newporter, advocate, and educator, has documented celebratory mentions of Black Newporters throughout the 20th century. Select newspaper clippings and original scrapbooks are on display for visitors to interact with and learn about our city’s Black History.
Please join us for this illuminating discussion!
Jeff Weston is a Rhode Island “Prodigal Son” who grew up in Bristol, Rhode Island. He went to the University of Connecticut where he was an accounting major and also attained a master’s degree from Fairfield University. As a very successful marketing executive, he retired eight years ago and moved back to Newport to care for his elderly parents.
He volunteered to be a docent at Trinity Church, and it ignited a passion for both history and touring. He graduated from the International Tour Management Institute and after a few stints with local tour organizations, including the Newport Historical Society, founded his own upscale tour company “Rhogue Island Tours”, which specializes in personalized entertaining, irreverent but historically accurate tours. He has researched Rhode Island history thoroughly, pouring over 300 books from many of the local libraries, including the esteemed Redwood Library, to ensure all listeners are getting an accurate yet often provocative narrative. For more information contact Jeff Weston at jeffwestontours@gmail.com.
Jonathan Schroeder, Ph.D., Rhode Island School of Design
The Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project in collaboration with the Redwood Library and Atheneum, presents Jonathan Schroeder’s overview of John Swanson Jacobs’ remarkable 1855 autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, which was lost until Schroeder found it in 2016.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian of literature, medicine, and emotion, and a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016, in Australia, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s long-lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; republished by The University of Chicago Press in 2024 and profiled in the New York Times, NPR, and elsewhere, his edition features the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-spanning brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Schroeder is also the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn.
Harrison Room, Redwood Library and Atheneum, 50 Bellevue Ave, Newport | Free
Our first event is “Bristol, Newport and the Transatlantic Slave Trade“, presented by Dr. Catherine Zipf on Thursday, June 27, 2024, at 6 pm at the Newport Public Library in the Friends Room on the bottom floor.
Newport Middle Passage Project was awarded a $,5000 grant from the state of Rhode Island, administered through the R.I. Humanities THRIVE program, given to organizations that “support and strengthen Rhode Island’s many diverse, dynamic communities.”
Victoria Johnson, co-chair of the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project, accepted the award for the organization.
The awards were presented at the Rhode Island State House on May 23, 2024. Secretary of State Gregg Amore and Speaker of the House Joe Shekarchi made remarks.
RI Humanities Executive Director Elizabeth Francis noted, “Through the THRIVE program, we are thrilled to award these inaugural general operating support grants to small organizations that preserve and activate our many cultures, heritages, places, and stories in rural and urban communities across the state.”
“The Backstory of the Black Regiment: Soldiers’ Ties to Community and Kin”
Lecture by Peter Fay, Patriots Park Commemoration by NAACP
Patriots Park, Portsmouth, RI,
August 27, 2023, 3 pm
Philo Phillips of North Kingstown was 27 when his owner sold him into the state’s Black Regiment during the Revolutionary War. Now a soldier, he marched and fought for his life and freedom. However, like many soldiers, he was not alone. His wife accompanied him throughout the war as a “camp follower”, furnishing food, laundry, and nursing. She also earned income as a washerwoman for other soldiers. A year later, she learned her husband was captured by the British troops during a skirmish and was held captive in Newport. Six months later he escaped back to the regiment where his wife remained. At the end of the war, after five long years of service, Philo Phillips was honorably discharged.
After the war, he was impoverished, and his wife was blind. He sought and found help from the Black community, and years later the Providence Gazette commemorated the death of this “respectable man of color” at age 75.
Soldiers’ lives depended on their comrades in battle. But Mr. Fay will uncover the stories of women and others whose support was crucial to the Black Regiment’s success during the privations of war and its aftermath.
For centuries, Rhode Island sent its young men to sea. As agriculture and slavery slowly declined, hundreds left the rural towns, many of them formerly enslaved African American and Indigenous men. They sought out opportunities in shipping and whaling as cooks, first mates, oarsmen, and boatsteerers. They crossed the bay, the Atlantic, and the world in pursuit of a livelihood that had eluded them at home. What they found were South Sea islands, arctic icescapes, wondrous sea creatures, warring tribes, hardship, and occasionally, opportunities for stunning achievement.
Peter Fay is a public historian and board member of the Jamestown Historical Society. He researches, writes, and lectures about Rhode Island history. He also is currently helping develop a public memorial to recognize the role of Newport in the history of the slave trade.
In this third online event of the Newport Middle Passage Summer 2021 Series, the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project presents Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes in an online event for the general public in collaboration with the Redwood Library and Atheneum of Newport on Wed., July 21, 2021, at 6 pm.
In this presentation, Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes will discuss how the dynamics underlying the gendered/raced/sexual relationships created under colonialism manifest themselves today. She will also explore how the perspectives of different eras of Black feminism, human rights, and sexual health add to the conversation.
Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes is the Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories at Mystic Seaport Museum and is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. She is responsible for working on curatorial projects of race, Indigenous histories, ethnicity, and diversity in New England’s Maritime activities. She leads a multi-disciplinary team to examine Mystic Seaport Museum’s and other regional collections to develop contemporary re-imaginings of people’s actions in the past and present and translating that into content relevant to today’s social environment. Akeia received her BA in anthropology/archaeology at Salve Regina University and her MA and PhD in anthropology/archaeology at the University of Connecticut.
