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Editor’s Introduction: On a wintry evening on February 1, 1843, a group of Boston’s African American citizens gathered in the vestry of this African Baptist Church nestled into the heart of Boston’s black community in the north slope of Beacon Hill. The measure these people were there to talk about was a quality to repeal the 1705 Massachusetts ban on interracial wedding. (1) Led largely by white abolitionists, the group cautiously endorsed a campaign to carry the ban. Their notably reluctant support for this campaign acknowledged the complexity that the issue of interracial wedding posed to African American communities. On the other hand, through the early century that is twentieth black colored Bostonians attended mass meetings of which they vigorously campaigned against the resurgence of anti-miscegenation laws and regulations led by the Boston branch associated with nationwide Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League (NERL). This change is indicative of both the development of taking into consideration the presssing dilemma of interracial marriage while the dilemma so it had often represented for black colored Bostonians and their leaders. [Read more...]