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Superstar
By Tiya Miles
Ms. Miles is a professor of history at Harvard.
- March 9, 2019
Hayden’s story had made a strong impression on me. His immediate family was shattered by slavery. He had escaped from Lexington, Ky., not far from where I grew up in Ohio, and went on to build a remarkable life in Boston. Years after my first visit to the house, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad, I could still picture the green window shutters and elegant doorway. I associated Lewis Hayden with the place where I grew up, with family, perseverance and good will. So I was disconcerted by what I found when I arrived at the house that autumn day.
The ruddy bricks, green shutters and white curtains were just as I remembered them. But here was something new — a red, white and blue sticker on the windowpane trumpeting the National Rifle Association. This moment, which might not have caused a reaction in others, set me on a path of reflection, not just on the life of Hayden and those like him, but on the meanings of African-American gun ownership and my own deeply held beliefs about guns. What I learned surprised me.
My response to seeing the sticker was strong. I am an African-American historian and, on the matter of guns and most other political issues, decidedly liberal. To me, the pairing of Lewis Hayden and the N.R.A. felt like an affront. I knew for certain that Hayden fought for the right to be free from violent repression by white citizens wielding the weapons of guns, capital and political influence. I knew that he lost his family through a cruel, extractive system that reinforced — in fact, depended on — the ability of whites to inflict violence on the bodies of black people without legal repercussion.
A National Rifle Association sticker next to the front door of the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House.CreditKayana Szymczak for The New York Times
The N.R.A., on the other hand, has long been a boogeyman for me. I see it as an organization that stands in the way of laws to get automatic rifles out of the hands of people who might kill school children, hardened — or unresponsive — to the destruction that rampant gun violence wreaks. Who would plaster this flagrant symbol of white conservatism on the antique home of a black abolitionist who knew what it meant to be hunted? And why?
These questions nagged at me after my visit. I soon set out to get answers.
I contacted the National Parks of Boston, who passed along my contact information to the private owners of the Hayden House. I expected to hear nothing back; instead, I received an invitation. I accepted and agreed to return to the house in February.
Beforehand, I reviewed the basic historical facts of Hayden’s life. When Hayden was a boy, his owner, Adam Rankin (a Presbyterian minister), tore him from his mother and siblings and distributed them to different buyers. Rankin sold Hayden himself for a pair of carriage horses, a trade that honed the young man’s scathing analysis of slavery’s antihumanism.
In adulthood, Hayden’s first wife and child were also snatched away for the market. Hayden somehow made a new life, remarried, had a son, escaped with his new family to Boston, and operated an apparel shop with his spouse, Harriet Hayden.
$650 fine securing the release from jail of the white abolitionist who had aided his escape (a Methodist minister from the Midwest, Calvin Fairbank). Hayden chose the activist life, fighting for the dignity of others as part of what the historian Manisha Sinha called the “shock troops” of “fugitive slave rescues,” in her book “The Slave’s Cause.” The home that the Haydens made, the one I would soon be visiting, became a refuge for the hunted.
An old photograph, postcard and writing about Lewis Hayden, kept by the current owners of the historic house.CreditKayana Szymczak for The New York Times
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