Blacks in Jamestown, Rhode Island, in a Time of Racial Turbulence in America, 1850–1920

By Peter Fay and Valerie J. Southern

Revealing the untold history of a thriving Black community in rural Rhode Island, A Peaceful Patch of Earth challenges the conventional narrative of an all-white New England before the Great Migration. On Jamestown Island, this community took root in the nineteenth century and flourished despite national racial turbulence.

Set on a rustic island in Narragansett Bay—accessible only by boat and sheltered from the outside world—the story unfolds through vivid narrative and in-depth research. It brings to life pioneering figures such as James Howland, Rhode Island’s last survivor of slavery, and the Champlin family, who rose from bondage to establish the island’s first Black-owned farm and became its first Black voters. Within view of Newport, once the center of the American slave trade, Jamestown’s free Black residents cultivated a community that welcomed newly freed migrants from the South and forged the social, cultural, and economic fabric of a multiracial rural New England.

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