On Sunday, the First Parish, at the corner of Great Plain Avenue and Dedham Street, unveiled a display that honors Needham residents who were enslaved. The artwork shows a brown hand and a white hand together holding a flower. Around its edges are the names of the 15 known enslaved people of Needham. According to Rev. Catie Scudera, it’s the town’s first public memorial to slavery’s presence in Needham. Scudera has worked with Gloria Greis, executive director of the Needham History Center & Museum, since 2017 to unearth the names of Needham’s enslaved.
Scudera said the parish’s first permanent minister, Rev. Jonathan Townsend, “enslaved a man named Homer for 40 years — basically his entire pastorate.” In an age when church and state were intertwined, the town paid for Homer’s labor, but Townsend pocketed the wages.
“We recognize that Homer’s stolen freedom, his stolen labor, in part, has created the First Parish that exists today,” Scudera told the Observer. Her research with Greis reveals that many First Parish members held enslaved individuals until 1783, when Massachusetts made slavery illegal. Both pointed out that Clarke’s 700-page “History of Needham 1711-1911,” the only book that attempts to be a complete chronicle of the town’s first two centuries, only discusses two enslaved people, neither with an enslaver who is connected to the First Parish. Scudera said that Clarke knew about the others but chose to omit them.
The First Parish, officially the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Needham, gets the moniker ‘first’ because it is a direct descendant of the Puritan church whose establishment essentially created Needham in 1711. The Puritan church banished dissenters and saw no problem in the enslavement of African and indigenous people. That philosophy differs sharply from the current institution whose website says, “First Parish in Needham is a liberal religious community that is open to all. We gather on the basis of shared hopes rather than a creed which all must profess.”
Scudera said the First Parish and the town in general have a responsibility to address this history that goes beyond the installation of this artwork. “We recognize that a reparative process for a history like this includes a restitution of some sort,” she said. Ceremony attendees were invited to donate, and the collected money was presented to the Jack and Jill of America Newton chapter. Jack and Jill of America is a leadership organization for African American mothers and their children.
“When the Reverend Cate and I first started to present this research, people were offended,” Greis said. “They pushed back.”
She said that most of the evidence of slavery in Needham emerged from the birth records of the First Parish. “These were babies whose only future horizon was labor for somebody else’s benefit and use,” she said. “Babies who were born to be livestock and not children.”
Greis acknowledged that the form of slavery in the North may have been less brutal than in the South, and that Needham can rightfully be proud of its contribution to the Abolition movement and the Union Army, but “enslavement is never not brutality and it is never not violence.”
The guests of honor at the ceremony were Darlene Troge and Chief Peter Silva Arrow of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, both descendants of an enslaved Needhamite named Jupiter and his son, Ishmael. Stories passed down orally through seven generations told of Ishmael’s service to the Continental Army and his participation in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was while Troge assembled evidence in order to be admitted to the Daughters of the American Revolution that she came across her ancestor’s connection to Needham in First Parish records. She contacted Scudera.
Scudera said that the artwork installation went through several versions before completion. She said its placement in the Parish is symbolic of its importance, “It’s on the wall between two windows that overlook our memorial garden, a place where people at First Parish often scatter ashes of loved ones.”
The artist, Josephine Calzada, a member of the congregation’s youth group and a Needham High School student, addressed the congregation by video. She said that she has been working on this depiction for two years and she sought “to create a visually compelling memorial that acknowledges our history with enslavement, but also supports a commitment to counter racism and oppression.”
Scudera said she hopes this memorial is the beginning of a process of recognition and healing. She envisions that someday the installation can be part of a Needham memory trail, similar to the Black Heritage Trail in Boston, that recognizes the contributions of marginalized peoples in Needham.
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