Ten years after her enslavement and arrival in America, Phillis Wheatley chose to be baptized in what is now the Old South Meeting House on August 18, 1771. As a member of the church, she found a community and a deep spiritual connection, but she also likely felt some unease sharing fellowship with white congregants who owned slaves.
To mark the 250th anniversary of Wheatley’s baptism, we have teamed with Old South Church to ask four different local black women leaders to reflect on her work and how it has impacted Black people’s fight for liberation in America.
Featured in this video are:
- Dr. Deborah Washington, Director of Diversity for Nursing and Patient Care Services, MGH
- Cheryl Harris, Diversity and Inclusion Consultant and CEO, Cheryl Harris and Associates, Inc
- Jessica Young Chang, MDiv student class of 2022 and President of the HDS Student Association at Harvard Divinity School
- Reamogetje (Amo) Ngoepe, Pastoral Resident, Urban Pastoral Ministry Program, City Mission/Old South Church in Boston
Below, we you can also find extended cuts of each speaker’s thoughts, featuring their unique perspectives and personal insights into the legacy of Phillis Wheatley as a pioneering writer, a woman of faith, and a voice for the Black experience in America.
Extended Interviews
← About Imagining the Age of Phillis
Films from Imagining the Age of Phillis
Also at the Old State House
- Phillis Wheatley is Baptized at Old South Church
Jeffers imagines Wheatley Peters’ thoughts at the moment of her baptism, which might have included a mix of joy at a deepened connection with Christ and frustration at the church’s treatment of African Americans.Read more → - Lost Letters: Phillis Wheatley and Obour Tanner
In this pairing of poems, Jeffers imagines a first accidental meeting of Obour Tanner and Phillis Wheatley. The two women shared the traumatic experience of enslavement and the perilous Middle Passage, and the challenge of holding on to their identities as African women even as their masters demanded that they build new lives in New ...Read more → - How Phillis Wheatley Might Have Obtained the Approval of Eighteen Prominent White Men…
As Phillis Wheatley sought to publish her first book, there were many who doubted that an enslaved Black woman was capable of such an accomplishment. Jeffers here imagines the courage it likely took 20-year-old Wheatley to face down their judgment and manage the balancing act of intellect and subservience that was likely required to secure ...Read more → - The Replevin of Elizabeth Freeman (Also Known as Mum Bett)
Elizabeth Freeman helped to end slavery in Massachusetts through a lawsuit she filed in 1781. In this poem, Jeffers imagines her speaking to the profound injustice of being forced to seek her freedom in a system where only white men could argue her case and living in a world in which a Black person’s word ...Read more → - “Lost Letters”: Phillis Wheatley and John Peters
After she had achieved international fame, Phillis Wheatley met and married John Peters, a free Black man. In this deeply romantic pair of poems, Jeffers imagines their relationship.Read more → - Blues: Harpsichord, or Boston Massacre
We think of the Boston Massacre as the start of the American Revolution. In Jeffers’s hands, it becomes a moment to call out the hypocrisy of white colonists in comfortable circumstances who protested their “enslavement” by the British even as they held Blacks in bondage.Read more →