This year, Boston and the United States are marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, events that reshaped New England. Engaging with the paradoxes at the center of the founding of the United States remains an important task. 

Dr. Kabria Baumgartner, Reckonings Project Faculty Co-Lead and Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeastern, is working with the Essex National Heritage Commission (Essex Heritage) on “Untold Voices of Essex County’s Revolutionary Maritime History,” a digital exhibit set to launch in early 2027. Supported by a grant from Mass Humanities, the exhibit will focus on the untold stories of Black women and men, some of whom fought in the Revolution or kept the home fires burning.    

For the past five years, Baumgartner has worked with Essex Heritage on various projects to surface the histories of Black and Indigenous people in the area. She is excited about serving as a humanities advisor on this digital exhibit. 

“Sometimes it is intentional, how the stories of people of color are overlooked. Some of it is unintentional and is a result of a fragmented archive,” Baumgartner says. “How can we tell the stories of enslaved and free Black [people] when we have limited archival materials?”

It is a process that she describes as “tough,” “challenging,” and “time-consuming,” but worth it because that one document might be the key to helping tell a more complete, nuanced story of the Revolutionary period.

Baumgartner and collaborators Dr. Brad Austin, Professor of History at Salem State University, along with the Essex Heritage team, Annie Harris, Cheri Grishin, Beth Beringer, as well as Christina Pugliese, a graduate student at Boston College, together are assembling what currently is a fragmented archive. 

She and her team are in the beginning stages of pouring through documents at fifteen to twenty repositories across Essex County, including but not limited to historical societies, nonprofit organizations, and libraries. 

The new exhibit will include a timeline, biographical profiles, Revolutionary War era documents such as ship records, and educational resources for teachers and students. All the materials orient the visitor to the stories of unsung people and convey a narrative of resistance, resilience, and resurgence.

“The work we’re doing at the Reckonings Project and through partnerships like this one at Essex Heritage is deeply historical, but we also believe it has meaning and importance in the present,” Baumgartner concludes.

One of the collaboration’s goals is to find sources that can reveal the perspectives of Indigenous people who had their lands stolen from them, enslaved Africans, and women. 

“Sometimes repositories have no finding aid, which means you’re looking at boxes, folders, and documents – leafing through them one by one. You could end up spending a month going through these boxes and at the end of your search, you might find only one document related to your quest,” Baumgartner says. 

Baumgartner explains that certain areas of New England are thought of as predominantly white because of the histories told, published, and taught over the last four centuries. However, “there are actually really rich histories of people of color across New England. Sometimes those histories are difficult to hear and understand because they challenge dominant narratives, but they’re very important.” 

So far, she has had positive feedback from the Essex community:

“I think it will be enlightening for Essex County residents. I’ve really enjoyed meeting people, giving lectures, and leading workshops that focus on the history of people of color in this area.  Residents understand the difficulties and challenges in narrating these histories, but they are happy to have learned them,” she says. 

Dr. Baumgartner would like to note that her work would not have been possible without the support of her community partners and students. If you are a student and would like to become involved with Baumgartner’s work in historical archiving and analysis, she invites you to contact her at k.baumgartner@northeastern.edu for more information about paid opportunities.

If you ever came into contact with Napoleon “Nappy” Jones-Henderson, you always saw him with a hat, a kente cloth draped around his neck, a camera resting on top of the kente cloth, and on most days, sunglasses paired with a warm smile. He took pride in his relationship with his family, AfriCOBRA, and his relationship with artists in the Boston community and beyond. This was the man Boston came to know and love, but his journey began decades earlier in Chicago.

About Napoleon Jones-Henderson

Napoleon Jones-Henderson was born in 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in the community of Altgeld Gardens. In 1963, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where he immersed himself in an independent study program in French Art History and Figure Drawing. Upon returning to the United States, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving his B.F.A. in 1971. Jones-Henderson went on to earn credits in advanced graduate studies in Fine Arts at Northern Illinois University and earned his M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005.

In 1968, during the height of the Chicago Black Arts Movement, Jones-Henderson became a member of the Chicago-based artists’ collective called COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists). The collective changed its name in 1969 to AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). During the formative years of AfriCOBRA, Jones-Henderson created large pictorial woven tapestries that were included in the group’s important series of exhibitions. In the early 1970s, he was part of exhibitions mounted at the newly founded Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He remained an active member of AfriCOBRA until his passing, making him one of the longest continual active members. In 2011, the documentary AfriCOBRA: Art for the People celebrated the contributions of AfriCOBRA to the Black Arts Movement.

In 1974, Jones-Henderson moved to Boston to teach at Mass College of Art and Design and soon became part of a network of Black artists known as the Boston Collective, alongside artists Aukram Burton, Lotus Do, Paul Goodnight, Black A, Reginald Jackson, Vusumuzi Maduna, Susan Thompson, Johnetta Tinker, and their mentor Allan Rohan Crite.

Jones-Henderson’s impact and that of the collectives he helped found reached well beyond Chicago and Boston. Not only did museums from Boston to South Carolina acquire his work; he also served as Executive Director of the Research Institute of African and African Diaspora Arts, Inc. and BENNU ARTS, LLC., in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  He received numerous awards, for his artwork, in recognition of his community in-reach, and for curatorial efforts championing Black Art internationally.

Napoleon Jones-Henderson and the Reckonings Project

Jones-Henderson was one of the first artists (pictured above) to be part of the Black Artists of Boston cohort and project in 2022. In partnership with Dzidzor Azaglo, Professors Doreen Lee and Angel Nieves created a new oral history and ethnography course for graduate students in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) at Northeastern that would develop their skills in the craft of interviewing while also training them to integrate community members and values into their work. Jones-Henderson was interviewed by two History graduate students, Victoria Dey and Morgan Richard, who also helped him think about archiving his work. With the generosity that he always carried, he referred to Victoria and Morgan as “daughters.” Most recently, Jones -Henderson served in 2025 on the selection committee for the Hidden Histories Artists-in-Residence program. 

In speaking of his work with the students in 2022, Jones-Henderson reflected in detail on a print Yazoo Boogaloo named after the county and city in Mississippi from which his father hailed. The piece is part of a visual biography of his family that he intended to gift to his twelve siblings. Napoleon saw this series as part of a broader project of prints and sculpture that he called “Requiem for Our Ancestors.”

In talking about Yazoo Boogaloo, Jones-Henderson revealed part of his philosophy:

“It’s not about a portraiture, it’s about the spirit and the energy of those individuals and their lives within the context of my life.”

Jones-Henderson’s message to everyone who encountered him and his work is clear: we must look beyond the artistic image and into the relationship between our bodies, our self and community, and art itself. This wasn’t just theory, it was how Jones-Henderson worked and lived. “I don’t have a routine, except when I wake up and I get up,” he said in his ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art Boston) studio visit that you can watch on YouTube. “I imagine this as both an affirmation and an invitation for others. When you wake up, there is a second task—to get up and face the day.” “Do the work” is what Napoleon would always say, and that enduring message reverberated throughout the celebration of life held with hundreds at Roxbury Community College on January 9 of this year. 

Two months have passed since Jones-Henderson transitioned on December 6, 2025. Boston mourns the absence of a community champion and artist, even as it gains an ancestor and inherits a library of wisdom woven from art, jazz, and the memory of community. Jones-Henderson often quoted James Baldwin: “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.” But wasn’t Jones-Henderson himself such a force, the living embodiment of the very principle he taught? 

That force continues to pulse through everything he created. It reverberates in the woven tapestries of his AfriCOBRA years, in the portraits and structures that captured spirit and memory, in the way he held his camera as a sacred tool to record the community in its various forms. The force wasn’t just in Jones-Henderson’s work—the force was him. The feeling of his commitment to community, his spirituality within his words and sound, his belief in art as sacred documentation.

In remembrance of an image-maker who created work that transcends time and place, we must constantly be in conversation and in connection with one another. The spirit and energy that Jones-Henderson exuded beyond his work, lives on in our lives and in Boston and beyond. His work offers the reminder that we must get up and do the work!