Legend has it, a slave was promised his freedom if the tide receded enough for him to walk out to a rocky ledge off a beach.
Endicott College history professor Elizabeth Matelski sits for a photo on Mingo Beach, in Beverly, Mass., Wednesday, June 15, 2022. The beach was named after enslaved African American Robin Mingo, who according to legend, was promised his freedom if the tide ever receded enough for him to walk out onto a rocky ledge offshore that becomes exposed at low tide. Students and faculty at Endicott College in Beverly are researching the local legend and proposing ways to memorialize Mingo.
“It shows how much power slave owners had over their slaves,” said Katerina Pintone, a 19-year-old rising sophomore at Endicott College, where Mingo Beach is located. “That one man could have this much control over another man’s life.” “Most people who walk by that particular stretch of beach have absolutely no idea about this history,” she said.
The historical society is doing its part to create a fuller picture of the city’s role in slavery, Battis added. The organization launched a virtual exhibit in 2019 featuring the stories of those enslaved in Beverly, a coastal city about 25 miles north of Boston that dates to the 1600s.,” but the society has identified at least 100 enslaved people and more than 200 local ships involved in the slave trade as part of its ongoing work.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took more than two years for Black slaves in Galveston, Texas to receive word of their freedom. That day, June 19, 1865, is now known asMatelski said she first heard of Mingo’s tale in the summer of 2020, during the height of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“It’s so deeply rooted in Beverly history and in the New England experience,” she said. “There’s just a lot of different threads happening there.”In the most popular telling, for example, Mingo achieves his feat and earns his emancipation, only to die later that year.