Worcester Business Journal

10 Worcester Business Journal | September 28, 2020 | wbjournal.com Slavery's legacy in the Central Mass. economy BY DEVINA BHALLA Special to the Worcester Business Journal Much like the rest of the county, the Greater Worcester region had direct and indirect ties to slavery, whose remnants are still being dealt with today T he modern Massachusetts economy has been growing for 400 years, since settlers first landed in Plymouth in 1620. And for 245 of those 400 years – more than 60% – the Massachusetts econo- my was tied to the legal institution of slavery, first as Massachusetts legalized and profited from slavery. en, aer Massachusetts abolished the practice, businesses still benefited right up through the Civil War from the use of free labor in the American South, par- ticularly surrounding the proliferation of slave-grown cotton and its use by mills in the Blackstone Valley. "What we don't realize is the extent to which those choices that manufacturers made and consumers made affected slav- ery," said Calvin Schermerhorn, a slavery historian at Arizona State University. "It wasn't just a Southern phenomenon. It was an American phenomenon." While the direct legacy of Central Massachusetts' ties to slavery lingers mostly in the names of now-closed prominent businesses with those ties – Crompton, Draper, Whitins- ville, Asa Waters – the enduring legacy can be seen in the renewed efforts this year surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, the fallout from the police killing of George Floyd, and compa- nies seeking to update their diversity & inclusion programs, as the generational consequences of slavery and the oppres- sion of freed slaves and their descen- dents aer the Civil War still impact the economic mobility of Black people in America. "In some ways, anyone who bought a cotton shirt for 200 years in the United States played some sort of part," said Kevin Klyberg, park ranger at the Black- stone River Valley National Historical Park, in Worcester. In the decades leading up to the Civil War when the American economy expanded around the textile industry, Central Massachusetts didn't necessarily benefit from the institution of slavery any more or less than other areas of the coun- try where slavery was abolished, but the region's ties illustrate how foundational slavery was to the entire nation's pros- perity and how the beneficiaries of the practice were far more than a handful of slaveowners. Even as Massachusetts was one of the first states to abolish slavery and Central Massachusetts played some key roles in the abolitionist movement, businesses in the region helped process the raw materials produced by slaves in the South and in turn sold finished goods to the South to be used by enslaved people and their owners. "One of the striking things about the industrial history of the Blackstone Valley was how infrequently abolitionists connected the region's pros- perity to slave-grown cotton and South- ern markets for manufactured plantation provisions," wrote Seth Rockman, an historian at Brown University in Provi- dence, in a history book chapter "Slavery and Abolition along the Blackstone." Even though slavery was abolished throughout America in 1865, the lin- gering effects of the practice has led to Black people struggling to gain equal economic and societal opportunity ever since, right up through the 21st century, wrote Ronald Waters, the director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, in an article for the "Journal of African Amer- ican History" published posthumously in 2012. "Whites enjoyed a monumental head start as slaveholders and the creators of a society built on the wealth the enslaved workers produced," Waters wrote. "us, whites were the arbiters of (Left) Unidentified women and children in a cotton field in the 1860s. Slave-grown cotton helped grow the textile industry in the Blackstone Valley. (Above) An advertisement by a Worcester manufacturer selling shoes to the South. PHOTO | COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE PHOTO | COURTESY OF WORCESTER HISTORICAL MUSEUM History's Legacy

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