Ann Moritz on Boston Black History in the North End

This conversation between Treyton Littlejohn, SLHC International Program Coordinator, and Ann Moritz, was recorded on August 26, 2025, prior to her Zoom presentation for the Coalition on September 10th, 2025.

Ann Moritz is a resident of the North End in Boston and principal of Moritz Advisory Group, founded in 1989. She is a management consultant in social, racial, and economic diversity and inclusion, communications, and organizational management, and leads the North End Black History Trail Project.

This interview represents the view of the speaker and not necessarily that of the Slave Legacy History Coalition. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Treyton: Do you want to start by briefly summarizing your work? 

Ann: Sure. The whole project is designed to illuminate an African-descended population in the North End that, at times—from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century—was the largest African-descended population in Boston. The total figures vacillate between the North End and the West End, as the populations shifted between the two.

But they continued over decades to house the largest, African-descended population. And this project is designed to be a walking trail or a trail that you can follow online that takes you to the places of note where people lived. 

It's never been done before. It's not that the history's not there. I didn't have a difficult time once I applied myself to finding the kind of legitimate citations in numerous quantities to back up this history. There was very little primary research that I needed to do.

I just needed to organize it. People have done the work– somebody just needed to care, somebody just needed to pull it together. So that's what this is.

Treyton: Was there a moment you knew this project had to happen? That "aha" moment that kicked you off?

Ann: It had been a long-term part of my soul, although I couldn’t define it at the beginning. I’ve lived in the North End for close to two decades, and I always believed there was more culturally than met the eye. I was impressed with how the Italian-descended population was keeping its image over the last 150 years, but I knew there was more.

The tipping point came only a couple of years ago when I decided to attend a North End Historical Society event on the Jews in the North End. I walked into a room where you could hardly find a chair. The room was so crowded that there was standing room only all the way up to the podium and there were people in the doorways. This is the local library, and they kept asking people to move out of the doorways because it was a fire code violation.

There was a little fear on my part being someone who didn't identify with the cultures I was studying or identify with the current heritage of the North End. I was truly an outsider. Which was an important way to feel because that may be as close as I'll ever come to being able to live and breathe as an outsider in a dominant culture. 

I walked home with a friend saying, "I have a project to do. This neighborhood's ready for a project I want to do". That night, I called the woman in charge of the event, Jessica Dello Russo. She’s a historian and adjunct faculty at BU. I said, "Jessica, you have inspired me. I want to go further with this. Will you help?” She became a lifeline.

She knew a tremendous amount but had never pulled it all together herself. She would throw ideas at me, she would throw names at me, but she wouldn't always throw citations at me [both laugh].  So, I had to verify a lot of it myself — but most of it was quite verifiable.  So that was my tipping point.

I did two events like the one I just told you about, and I've done others in other locations. They were well attended, and people were curious, and I was just grateful.

Treyton: Wonderful. And you have the momentum. 

Ann: Sometimes you have to just stir the embers a little bit.

Treyton: Well, you seem to not have a problem doing that. [Ann laughs] 

In this journey, is there a place, a person, a specific location on the trail that you connect with personally or want to dive deeper into? 

Ann: I could probably have answered that question in a few different ways over the last year and a half.

Today, I’d say it’s Harriet Jacobs. She’s an author, and I discovered just this week that the latest edition of her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was published last month, which is mind-blowing.

If you're not familiar with the book, when it first came out, people thought it was fiction and didn't believe she wrote it. It's now often a textbook in classrooms that are enlightened enough to want to lift up this kind of history.

When I gave the local neighborhood talks, I had a 2021 edition that I would kind of use as a prop when I talked about her. There's a newer one now! It's still her story and it's still her book. They almost always have a new forward by someone who has discovered something else about her. 

Another reason that I would choose her as an individual is that even historians I've talked to about this trail didn't know that she lived in the North End. She lived in a lot of places so it's understandable. I just really enjoy giving her that credit and giving this neighborhood that credit. 

Treyton: Is there any anecdote or story that you want to talk about, that might not fit into the broader narrative of your talk?

Ann: There is a person that, if I played by my own rules, couldn’t include her even though she was in there in the beginning because the folks at the West End Museum said that she lived on Ann Street in the North End. Well, that was an error. She lived on Andover Street, which really is the West End.

It's Sarah Roberts. As a 5-year-old was forced to move beyond all of the public schools between her home and the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill. And her father enlisted a couple of attorneys, well-known attorneys at the time, to put together what became Boston's first desegregation case. And it went all the way to the State Supreme Court.

And I would dearly love to have that in, but I can't call that the North End. There's some really fuzzy boundaries between the West End and the North End. But she was definitely West End.

Treyton: And what was father's name?

Ann: Oh, I'd have to double check, but I can tell you the two attorneys he hired, Robert Morris and Charles Sumner, both noted abolitionists–one white, one Black. They fought this case and ultimately they lost. However, it became the seed for other cases that succeeded eventually. 

Treyton: What conceptions of Boston are you challenging and what does this trail challenge?

Ann: I think there are a lot of challenges. Some of them I don't see as challenges, I see them as work to be done. But one ongoing challenge is the popular conception of the North End as an Italian-descended neighborhood of Boston.

And that is so visual and so constant. And persistent for admirable reasons that unless prompted, people don't have any reason to think of what else was here before people from Italy immigrated here. There's Irish, there's Polish, there's Jewish, and there's the indigenous peoples, who were here. All of that's there and occupied even more time than the range of the predominantly Italian. And it's not predominant anymore– only about 35%. 

I'm the kind of optimist who doesn't use words like problem or challenge. For me, this is about helping people understand that, just as they have felt unrecognized and claimed a sense of value and worth, I'm helping to do the same with the other populations who are here too. 

Treyton: You're just trying to add more to the book. 

Ann: Exactly. And, you know, I think we get better when we do this with our environments and our neighborhoods and our friendships. The North End has something to gain from looking at all of these earlier populations. They define who we are too. The same way an evolving community is defined by its changing populations a hundred percent. 

Treyton: You, you mentioned it briefly, being not from the community that you're studying.

 Are there any tensions that you encountered doing this specific work? And how does that inform what you do and how you move forward with it? 

Ann: Well, there's the tension that you just described.

It’s an ongoing tension and that's not going to change. I represent a group of people, and I see myself as “normal”, and that tension is always going to be there. I am not normal, nor are a lot of other people, nor is the group I represent.

The tension for me is to be very sure that even if I've worked really hard, and even if I've assembled something that's really impressive or that people are really interested in, I can't just let that lie. Because it will sit. It has to be fed and it has to be nourished.

There need to be forms of ongoing reinforcement and revitalization—which is exactly what the Slave Legacy History Coalition is all about, and why it’s so rewarding to be in tandem with you.

I have to keep reinforcing how we gain, how we improve, how we enrich ourselves by looking at this larger community. A lot of people aren't going to take the time to do that unless someone tells them why it's a good idea. And it has to be interactive and iterative.

Otherwise, it's just a dormant object and it gathers dust, which is probably what it all was before we made it into a history trail. 

Treyton: As young people enter this space and ask these questions, how do you think about intergenerationality and how do you imagine this trail might embody that moving forward?

Ann: You've asked such a good question, and in all honesty, you've reminded me that's an area that I haven't addressed as well as I should. You also give me the chance to realize maybe for the first time that in all these places that I've cited, that were historic for their own reasons, two of them are now schools.

One of them is a K-6. The other one is North Bennett Street School. They sit on two of the sites that are a part of this trail. I’ve got a bird in the hand. I haven't gone back to some of these places that are now significant because they're part of the trail, in large part because I'm very sensitive to a lot of privately owned space. That I'm now lifting up as historic and we're not talking plaques, we're not talking permission, we're just talking stories. 

And I have stayed a little distant from actually doing something with the physical spaces themselves for that reason. But that doesn't mean these schools can't be a part of it. And North Bennett Street School had a president who actually volunteered their space for one of the community sessions where we were rolling this project out into the community.

You can explore a self-guided tour of the North End Black History Trail here.

And watch Ann's September 10, 2025 presentation for the Coalition here.