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On MLK Day, Remembering The 1800s Abolitionist Community In Florence, Mass.

January 21 marks the day Americans celebrate the birth of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. 

Every year on MLK day, no matter how cold it is, historian Steve Strimer leads a tour of Florence, Massachusetts taking people back to the mid-1800s when an abolitionist, kind-of utopian community had taken root here.

He heads down to the former site of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, an intentional community that started in 1842. Association members lived together, and operated schools and a silk mill.

“That’s the mill river,” Strimer said pointing through the woods, behind where the factory once stood. The river powered the silk mill.

Steve Strimer on the site of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry formed in 1842 by abolitionist families who believed in gender, racial and economic equality.
Credit Nancy Eve Cohen / NEPR
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NEPR
Steve Strimer on the site of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry formed in 1842 by abolitionist families who believed in gender, racial and economic equality.

The building was four stories high with a bell tower. Association members manufactured silk thread on the first floor, and lived on the second floor, where there wasn’t much privacy. Dozens of people lived in close quarters.

But every adult had an equal vote, whether they were male or female, black or white. Among the members was a former slave, Sojourner Truth.

“Sojourner Truth was the superintendent of the laundry department,” Strimer said. “It sounds demeaning somehow, but all work was respected at the community. And each of the departments elected their own leaders. So she was the leader of the laundry department.”

Truth, who said God gave her her name, came to Florence because of the association, which admitted African-Americans as full members. Another member was David Ruggles, a freeborn African-American and abolitionist.

The front door of The David Ruggles Center in Florence, Massachusetts. It is named after David Ruggles, an anti-slavery activist who lived in Florence in the mid-1800s.
Credit Nancy Eve Cohen / NEPR
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NEPR
The front door of The David Ruggles Center in Florence, Massachusetts. It is named after David Ruggles, an anti-slavery activist who lived in Florence in the mid-1800s.

“He was the one [who] organized a rally of black citizens in downtown Northampton at which Sojourner Truth gave her first anti-slavery speech,” Strimer said.

By 1850, ten percent or 60 out of 600 people in Florence were African-American. That was the same year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled citizens to help capture runaway slaves.

Sojourner Truth began travelling and giving more speeches, including her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Steve Strimer looks up at the statue of Sojourner Truth in Florence, Massachusetts.
Credit Nancy Eve Cohen / NEPR
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NEPR
Steve Strimer looks up at the statue of Sojourner Truth in Florence, Massachusetts.

Today a bronze statue of Sojourner Truth stands tall, just down the street from the house in Florence that she was finally able to buy for herself and her children. The statue is based on an 1851 photograph of her.

Strimer remembers the first time he saw the statue, he teared up.

“The moment that it was unveiled, the sun was shining in the west and her shawl was a gleaming bright gold,” recalled Strimer. “I mean people’s breaths were taken away.”

Monday morning, Strimer is giving a tour, starting at the statue, pointing out the places in Florence where abolitionists strived to build a place of equal rights and equal justice.

Correction: Due to a production error, the audio originally attached to this story included an incorrect date for when Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday was celebrated in 2019. It should have said January 21.

Nancy Eve Cohen is a former NEPM senior reporter whose investigative reporting has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Hard News, along with awards for features and spot news from the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA), American Women in Radio & Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She has reported on repatriation to Native nations, criminal justice for survivors of child sexual abuse, linguistic and digital barriers to employment, fatal police shootings and efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. She has done extensive reporting on the EPA's Superfund cleanup of the Housatonic River.

Previously, she served as an editor at NPR in Washington D.C., as well as the managing editor of the Northeast Environmental Hub, a collaboration of public radio stations in New York and New England.

Before working in radio, she produced environmental public television documentaries. As part of a camera crew, she also recorded sound for network television news with assignments in Russia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
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