The National Parks of Boston and the Boston Middle Passage Port Ceremony Committee will host an intergenerational, interfaith ceremony at Faneuil Hall recognizing Boston as a Middle Passage port site.

“Slavery is the paradox of Boston’s revolutionary history,” said National Parks of Boston General Superintendent Michael Creasey. “The first slave trading voyage left from Massachusetts in 1638. Later, just steps from the hall that became known as the ‘Cradle of Liberty’ during the American Revolution, merchants sold enslaved Africans from ships and buildings on Long Wharf. These joint histories of slavery and revolution shaped the early United States and drove Boston’s battles for freedom and equality in the nineteenth century,” he said.

The Boston Middle Passage Port Ceremony brings together historical and cultural organizations, schools, churches and community groups to recognize Boston as a port which received enslaved people and the vital role that Africans and their descendants played in the development of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the United States. The date of the ceremony symbolizes the global nature of the African diaspora and its members’ struggles for freedom – August 23 is recognized by The United Nations as an international day of remembrance for the transatlantic slave trade because on that day in 1804 Haiti achieved independence.