Patrick said that the house must be saved. "This is a gem, that it be preserved, restored, and sustained," he said."We have this diverse story to tell," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the museum.
"They were not just a group of black abolitionists," Morgan-Welch said. ". . . They determined they'd change the nation. These are fabulous stories."
The words belonged to Frederick Douglass, who spoke them almost a century and a half ago as he rallied abolitionists in Boston after an antislavery meeting was broken up: "After all the arguments for liberty to which Boston has listened for more than a quarter of a century, has she yet to learn that the time to assert a right is a time when the right itself is called into question?"
Yesterday, it was the incoming governor, the first black to be elected to the office, who spoke. Reading excerpts of Douglass speeches, Deval L. Patrick helped to launch a 200th anniversary celebration of Boston's African Meeting House.
He read from a Douglass speech delivered at the Boston Music Hall.
The African Meeting House was the nation's oldest standing church built and used by blacks. It was a gathering place for black abolitionists, for free blacks who escaped from slavery, and figures of Boston's intellectual elite, who forged the ideas that would help end slavery.
And for years, it served as a beacon of black accomplishment. Patrick's appearance was a powerful moment for some of the hundreds who gathered at Tremont Temple yesterday.
"This celebration is not just a culmination of 200 years, but a real beginning," said Lori Britton, 36, of Dorchester.
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