Slavery

• African slavery was abolished in Rhode Island in 1652, but with little effect. "The law was evidently never enforced and the demand for cheap labor prevailed," says Brown University's John Carter Brown Library in a report titled, "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Rhode Island."
  
  According to the same report, Rhode Islanders made at least a thousand voyages from Africa to the Americas by the end of the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century they had carried about 100,000 African slaves to the Americas. Historian Jay Coughtry, in his book "The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade 1700-1807," painted an even darker picture, arguing that ships owned by Rhode Island merchants carried more than 60 percent of America's slaves.
  
  Many of the slaves carried by Rhode Island ships never made it to the state, but instead were sent to the South or the Caribbean in exchange for molasses or rum. Still, Rhode Islanders were also enthusiastic slave owners, and the ports of Newport and Bristol became the state's major slave markets. The state census of 1774 showed that about 14 percent of Rhode Island households owned slaves. At the same time, Rhode Islanders had more slaves per capita than any other New England state.
  
  Finally in 1784, the Rhode Island General Assembly freed the state's slaves when it passed the Negro Emancipation Act.
  
  

Revolutionary War Heroes

• On Aug. 29, 1778, the First Rhode Island regiment, the first all-black army unit in America, defeated British troops at the Battle of Rhode Island. Today, Black Patriots Park stands at the battle site in the town of Portsmouth, paying tribute to the regiment's 138 troops.
  
  Some of the regiment's members were slaves who enlisted in order to gain their freedom. But there were few other benefits for these patriots. According to the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, "Even after participating in other battles, the soldiers were disbanded in 1783, without pay, and abandoned to find their way home from Saratoga, New York."
  
  

Racial Tension

• Life was not easy for Rhode Island's blacks during the 19th century. According to the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, "Blacks were stripped of voting rights and segregated in schools in the 1820s (and) white rioters damaged property in Hard-Scrabble, the first separate black neighborhood (in Providence). ... In the 1830s, racial tensions once again escalated and resulted in a four-day riot between the white and black citizenry."
  
  But the city was also home to a vibrant abolitionist movement and became a stop on the Underground Railroad. Within the black community, organizations such as the Rhode Island Association of Freedmen formed to help strengthen community ties. State schools were also integrated during the Civil War period.
  
  

Key Figures

• Lucy Terry, the first African-American to publish a poem and argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, was an African slave brought to Rhode Island as a child in the early 1700s.
  
  Edward Bannister helped found the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877 and the Providence Art Club in 1880.
  
  Providence resident and opera singer Sisseretta Jones was the first black performer to appear at Carnegie Hall and sang at the White House for three different presidents at the end of the 19th century.
  
  And on July 3, 2001, Ruth J. Simmons was sworn in as president of Brown University in Providence, becoming the first black female president of an Ivy League university.
  
  

Today

• Today, blacks remain a small minority in Rhode Island, comprising 6.4 percent of the state's 1,050,788 residents, according to 2008 estimates -- roughly the same percentage as in 1774.
  
  In 2006, the state government formed the Blacks in Rhode Island Planning Commission, and in its first "State of Blacks in Rhode Island" report in 2008, the commission reported that blacks in the state lagged behind non-blacks in economic opportunities and in access to health care and education.