A SLAVE NO MORE, David Blight, and Julian Houston in the Boston Globe

An ex-slave in Cohasset
Town largely unaware of late resident's memoir

A family photo taken between 1913 and 1918, in Cohasset. From left: Annie Washington, John Washington, their son James (standing), and his wife, Catherine. (Courtesy of The Alice Jackson Stuart Family Trust)

By Megan Woolhouse
Globe Staff / August 25, 2008

COHASSET - John Washington may be one of the most illustrious residents of this swank seaside town, albeit one few people have heard of.

At the Cohasset Farmers Market last week, Charlie Field had his own guess as to Washington's claim to fame.

"Is he George's brother?" he asked as he pushed his granddaughter in a stroller.

No. John Washington lived in Cohasset as a retired sign painter, a life far removed from his younger years as a Virginia slave. Washington fled Virginia in the chaos of the Civil War, helped the Union Army, and later migrated to Washington, D.C., and ultimately Cohasset, where he died and was buried 90 years ago this year. But what makes Washington's emancipation story unique is that - unlike the millions who endured slavery - he wrote it down.

The manuscript, one of only 120 that have surfaced since the Civil War, was the subject of the 2007 book "A Slave No More" by Yale University professor David Blight. The original manuscript, extremely rare and penned on loose-leaf paper, sits in a locked vault at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston alongside the papers of Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Yet in Cohasset, once a rich haven for the Yankee elite, where a replica water spigot in the town center gets special historic recognition, Washington's story is a historical footnote, if that. The Cohasset Historical Society does not keep a copy of Blight's book, which examines narratives by Washington and another former slave.

"I don't think the town knows anything about John Washington," said Cohasset Historical Society curator David H. Wadsworth, 78. "There isn't much when it comes to black history in Cohasset."

For decades, the craggy, majestic shoreline of Cohasset drew Boston's wealthy leather barons, who built mansions overlooking the water. And the Bancroft family, former owners of the Wall Street Journal and Barron's Weekly, has deep roots in the community.

Historically, the South Shore town has been so exclusive that it shunned the likes of Joseph P. Kennedy, who unsuccessfully sought membership at Cohasset Golf Club before his son became president. Today, the community remains nearly exclusively white. In the 2000 census, 13 of the town's 7,200 residents were African-American. All of which makes Washington's life there that much more remarkable.

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Judge Julian Houston, author of NEW BOY, in Boston Phoenix

Judging Chris Matthews
Julian Houston on race in Boston

By NEELY STEINBERG
January 23, 2008, The Phoenix

Anyone meeting Julian Houston for the first time might feel intimidated. Résumé aside, at 6-3, the former associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court is a towering presence. His eyes bulge forth, confidently, boldly, like a bullfrog’s, and won’t do much to put you at ease. But when you meet him, his eyes and his stature soften to reveal a kind and gentle man. Now retired from the bench, Houston spends his time writing fiction at his home in Brookline, but it is his real-life back story that is the stuff of novels. While attending Boston University in 1962, Houston became an integral part of the local civil-rights movement. At the end of his freshman year, he then took a leave of absence to work for the civil-rights cause in Harlem, organizing rent strikes and tutoring programs.

In 2005, Houston published his first and only novel, the critically acclaimed New Boy, just out in paperback. The story, set in the late 1950s, follows a young African-American Virginian, Rob Garrett, as he crosses the racial divide to attend an all-white boarding school in Connecticut. It’s a case of art imitating life: Houston attended the Hotchkiss School, in Lakeville, under similar circumstances. (There’s a sequel in the works about how Rob decides to withdraw from Yale after his freshman year to work for civil rights in Alabama — sound familiar?) I had the good fortune of catching up with Houston a few days before his January 16 Beacon Hill book reading (sponsored by the National Park Service), to pick his brain about racism in America today.

Asked about Chris Matthews’s recent remarks anathematizing Boston as an exceedingly — though disguisedly — racist city (“It may not be ‘I think I’m better than you,’ but it might be ‘I don’t want to live next door to you.’ ”), Houston censured the leftie pundit.

“[His comments] were another attempt by a representative of the media to stir up a controversy with stale information. What does he base this opinion on? Events that took place 30 years ago? The fact of the matter is that Boston has undergone enormous changes since the time that such a charge would have stuck.” (Matthews, it should be noted, lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland — you do the geographical math.)

So, is Boston a racist city?

“No more so than any other city in the country, and that includes New England cities,” opined Houston. “It should be obvious, even to Chris Matthews, that things have changed. Any number of cities in the North, as well as the South, have black mayors, sizable black representation in city councils and state legislatures, as well as in the administration of school systems and other key positions in urban government. That is not to say that racism has been eliminated, but, for the most part, state-sponsored racism has.”

Houston also weighed in on the presidential election. “I think America is ready for anyone who is honest and compassionate. . . . Race isn’t an issue.” Though he declined to say for whom he’d be voting, he did voice his uncertainty over Barack Obama’s candidacy. “I felt he was vulnerable on the issue of experience, and I still feel that way.”

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