This year, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of the African Meeting House on Nantucket.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to Dr. Noelle Trent, president and CEO of the Museum of African American History, about the significance of this building, and how it's changed over the years.
Gilda Geist Can you please start by just describing for us what the African Meeting House on Nantucket looks like?
Noelle Trent The African Meeting House on Nantucket is located just off of the Five Corners intersection. And it is a beautiful one-room, old-school church. When you walk into it, you can feel the sense of history.
GG Can you take us back 200 years to the beginning of this building's history?
NT 1825 is when the building is consecrated for the Black community on Nantucket. You have free individuals, you have formerly enslaved individuals, and they're living at a time when their status is kind of in limbo. If you're enslaved, you're considered property by the laws of the country. And if you're free, you're not quite a citizen, but you still do all the things that people do to make their communities better and live in those communities.
We see resistance to slavery as an institution at this time. But the abolition movement as we know and think about it doesn't really get its legs and really get going until about the 1830s. And so 1825 is still a little bit earlier.
And so then the question becomes, 'Why would you build a building?' People create spaces for gathering in places that they're comfortable. And so where the meeting house is today is a community known as New Guinea, which was a majority Black community near the windmills and away from the hustle and bustle of downtown. They needed a place to come together. And it wasn't just a place to reflect or deal with racism, but it was a place for them to celebrate things and to strategize and educate their children and to debate and to mourn and have sorrows and be frustrated and be angry. It was all of those things.
GG Can you talk a little bit about how the role of the African Meeting House on Nantucket changed over the years?
NT It was an African Baptist church, it was also used as a school, and it continued to be a gathering point for a period of time. Then it falls into disrepair, especially around the late 19th century or early 20th century. Florence Higginbotham purchases the meeting house, and while it's used for storage, she could have had it torn down at any given point. But she decided not to because she knew that this space was important. Later, about the 1980s, it gets sold to the museum.
There were a lot of different events that happened where it could have been torn down or destroyed, but somehow this place persevered.
GG So I understand that this house has been visited by Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott. Can you talk about the role of the African Meeting House, and how it was situated in the abolitionist movement back at that time?
NT Churches were cornerstones of the community. They were these community centers. And very much like the modern civil rights movement, churches, especially Black churches, were safe places for this radical engagement in conversation. As you're strategizing, as you're protesting, as you're putting together legal cases, you want to do so in a space that is safe for you. And so the meeting house was one of those spaces.
GG Is there anything else you wanted to add?
NT The celebration of the meeting house is marking a moment. It's incredibly important that we commemorate when these things happen because human memory is incredibly short. And when we don't take time to reflect and participate in rituals like that, that story can get lost.
However, that is not the end of our work. There will be more that we'll be doing because this story is important. The people who lived here mattered. These historic buildings matter and the context of the times in which they were occupied and so many amazing things happened is significant as well.
