Boston Athenaeum

Harriet Hayden and her husband Lewis Hayden were a Black Boston power couple in the community of abolitionists and equal right activists centered in Beacon Hill in the 1860s.

“I was an artist-reporter, recording what I saw,” said Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007), whose captivating paintings depict daily life in the Black community of Boston’s South End and Roxbury neighborhoods during the 1930s and ’40s.