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diggWhat’s in a Name?
The “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” was founded on the principles of freedom. Now that name suggests slavery and it’s time to change it.
Illustration by James Steinberg
(page 1 of 2)
Slave monuments are common in the South; Rhode Island has but one. It’s an uncut chunk of quartz, leaning in the farthest corner of Prince’s Hill Cemetery. On its rough white face is a bronze plaque inscribed with the thanks of a grateful town: “In memory of the slaves and their descendants who faithfully served Barrington’s families.” The memorial was erected in 1906 by Thomas W. Bicknell, whose antecedents lie before it in straight rows of polished gray granite.
The Bicknells were among New England’s earliest European immigrants, first settling in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1635. Thomas Bicknell, of the Barrington branch, was an eighth generation American and a celebrated son. An educator, lecturer, publisher, historian and relentless organizer of societies and organizations, Thomas Williams Bicknell was the type of nineteenth-century man for whom the term indefatigable was coined. As a twenty-something Brown University junior, he was elected state representative. Bicknell went on to become Rhode Island’s commissioner of public education, to found the New England Journal of Education and to head the National Education Association. (These are slender slices of a career of civic hyperactivity.)
When Bicknell was born in 1834, slaves were still counted in the state census. His ninety-one years of life spanned the Civil War, and his family had once owned slaves. But Bicknell himself was a reformer. His first speech before the General Assembly urged the abolition of separate Negro schools. He launched Booker T. Washington’s speaking career by inviting him to address the NEA in 1884. And yet, Bicknell’s chronicles of Rhode Island slavery are fantastical, to say the least: “The Narragansett country was the slave paradise of the Northern colonies,” he wrote in his five-volume opus of Rhode Island history. “Every farm had its quota, and the family life of the slaves was recognized and protected. Labor indoors or out was not excessive, the relation of master to slave was kind and humane, and punishments for offenses were usually mild and corrective. The social and convivial life of the masters, mistresses and young people was communicated to the servant class and the natural happy-go-easy spirit of the slaves was made more joyous by the examples of their superiors.”
No historian today would cast slavery in a rosy glow. But how we remember slavery in Rhode Island is less settled. This session, for the third time, Joseph Almeida, a state representative from Providence and chairman of the minority legislative caucus, introduced a bill to drop “and Providence Plantations” from the state name. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, on everything from buildings to checks, was granted by royal charter in 1663. “Plantations” literally referred to the farms of the mainland. That mouthful makes Rhode Island the smallest state with the biggest name—people love the irony. There is another irony in a state founded on the principles of freedom saddled with a name that now connotes slavery. This irony, Almeida doesn’t love so much. And he bristles at critics who suggest that the House Finance Committee, which presides over the bill’s ultimate fate, has more important matters to consider.
“There is no right time for civil rights; every time is the right time for civil rights,” he says. “When can I bring it up? I’m not going to let this go. Eventually, somebody is going to listen.”
