buildings around the state with bronze plaques featuring QR codes , which visitors can access via their phones to learn how the sites are associated with slavery . The organization is also raising funds to erect Newport ’ s first statue of a person of color , nineteenth-century Black entrepreneur and abolitionist George T . Downing .
“ A lot of people think that Black history is a separate history — whether it ’ s Rhode Island or elsewhere . And it is not . It is a shared history . It comes out of the horrors and the pain of slavery , and in Rhode Island it merges into this extraordinary cultural experience that actually informs not only the nation , but the world ,” says Rickman .
“ Sadly , this is not a well-known history because it ’ s not taught in our schools , and that ’ s why Stages of Freedom came into existence — to celebrate and elevate people ’ s history and to make sure that it is shared across the racial divide .”
Slaves first arrived in Rhode Island in 1652 , and during the eighteenth century , the colony ’ s merchants sponsored about a thousand slave voyages , shipping West Africans here and to the West Indies . Newport was one of Colonial America ’ s largest slave trading ports , and home to thousands of enslaved individuals . In 1755 , Black people accounted for 18 percent of its population . They often worked in skilled trades — chocolate , barrel and rope-making , for example . Some of Newport ’ s most iconic structures — such as the Touro Synagogue and Redwood Library & Athenaeum — were built by enslaved and free Africans or funded by the slave trade .
Aquidneck Island resident John M . Rice can trace his family back six generations in Newport , from enslavement to prominence . His fourth great-grandfather , Abraham Casey , co-founded the city ’ s Free African Union Society in 1780 . His great-great grandfather , Issac Rice , was a successful gardener , caterer and nineteenth-century abolitionist leader who regularly hosted national movement figures like Frederick Douglass . Rice grew up next door to the family homestead at the corner of Williams and Thomas streets — once a stop on the Underground Railroad — surrounded by stories and photos of his eminent Newport ancestors .
The experience has given Rice “ that sense of being fixed in a place over such a
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