“We Were Here Too” is a new media monument to colonial African Americans in Boston.
The project is a site-specific augmented reality experience in a colonial graveyard, and a web-based digital monument to a forgotten Black community.
We Were Here Too includes excerpts from historical texts; onsite video, expert interviews, audio and photography; studio voice recordings; and digital imaginary portraiture.
It is accessible at the cemetery site by smartphones, and worldwide to anyone with a web connection.
Gravestone of Mary Augustus
Gravestone of Margaret Collee
This project acknowledges the city’s North End colonial neighborhood known as “New Guinea.” Located on and below Copp's Hill, it was a bustling community of free and enslaved Black seafarers, stevedores, shopkeepers, tradespeople, day laborers, and street workers.
New Guinea is now almost completely forgotten. We Were Here Too aims to resurrect its memory, focusing on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, where an estimated 1,000 Black colonists lie in unmarked graves.
Monument to Prince Hall
Copp’s Hill’s only monument to a Boston African American is that of Prince Hall, a Revolutionary War veteran, prominent Black abolitionist, and founder of Prince Hall Masonry, the first Black lodge of Freemasonry in the world.
Some historians believe that Phillis Wheatley Peters, the 18th-century African American poet, may also be interred at Copp's Hill or in another Boston cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
Medical historians credit Onesimus, an enslaved/later freed man, for describing the smallpox “variolation” methodology to his enslaver, Reverend Cotton Mather, who in turn used this ancient form of inoculation (used for hundreds of years in Africa, Turkey, China and India, but not in the American colonies) to help save lives during Boston’s deadly 1721 pandemic.
Focusing on people without monuments highlights the contrast between those who have been memorialized and lionized and those who have been minimized or erased. By locating their remains and saying their names out loud hundreds of years later, we pay our respects in ways they may never have experienced during their lives.
I hope Bostonians and people from around the world will experience this new media monument and learn that African Americans — free and enslaved, loyalists and patriots — lived and worked here at the same time as Paul Revere, John Adams, Abigail Adams, and John Hancock. We Were Here Too - Roberto Mighty