Nantucket's African Meeting House Celebrates Its Bicentennial

"If these walls could talk," said longtime Nantucket teacher and historian Barbara White on Saturday as she recounted the long history of the African Meeting House on York Street.

White was speaking to a full house of island residents and visitors who had gathered over the weekend to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of the African Meeting House. The modest post-and-beam building, now a National Historic Landmark, is the only public building constructed and occupied by African Americans in the 19th century that survived to this day on Nantucket.

“This African Meeting House, like many Black churches, was more than a church,” said Dr. Noelle Trent, the president and CEO of the Museum of African American History, which now owns and operates the building. "It was more than a refuge from racism or white supremacy - to think of it as such is to limit the thinking of this community. Yes, it was a refuge. It was also a way station for men, a stop on their journey, a place for joy, for new weddings, births, baptisms, a place for sorrows. It was a school. It was a place for strategy. It was a place to breathe. It was somewhere that reminded them that they were more than the worst thing that happened to them, which was frequently embedded in the racial injustice of the time. They came here to be recharged, like an electric car today. This place was a place of power.”

Saturday's celebration was highlighted by songs, stories, and prayers, as well as a nod to the future of the African Meeting House. With a recent $489,798 grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services that will be distributed over the next three years, Trent said the Museum of African American History will build its organizational capacity on Nantucket, expand its partnership base, and pursue a long-term goal of "connecting with every student on the island."

In her remarks, White shared the rich history of the African Meeting House over the past two centuries - from its founding as a school for the African American community of the "New Guinea" neighborhood on Nantucket, to its evolution as a space for weddings, funerals, prayer, and meetings on abolition and temperance. It once hosted historical figures, including abolitionists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucretia Mott.

White explained how Florence Higginbotham purchased the house in 1933, saving it from possible demolition, and how Morgan Levine led the charge to restore the building in the 1970s and 1980s in collaboration with the island's churches after it had fallen into disrepair.

"Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr, talked to students here in the year 2000, adding to the list of illustrious people who spoke within these walls," White said. "We join the many people who have gathered here over the last 200 years. These walls heard laughter, weeping, frustration, jubilation, anger, songs, and wisdom. If you come here and sit quietly, as I used to love to do, I think you'll be able to hear them."

All photos below by Charity Grace Mofsen: