Akeia de Barros Gomes serves as director of the inaugural Center for Black History
Images courtesy of Newport Historical Society
This June, as communities around the country prepare to commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday, Newport will celebrate the opening of a museum that’s many years in the making and reflects the layers of history existing in and around the Cityby-the-Sea, where not everything has always been cause for celebration. That museum is the Center for Black History, and its opening is planned for June 19, which is Juneteenth.
Formally called the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History, the new museum and exhibition space will transform the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House — Newport’s oldest surviving home, built circa 1697 and located on lower Broadway — into a place of cultural immersion, where the city’s Black history is unearthed, examined, and honored in a way that spans uncomfortable truths and encompasses the vibrancy of past and current communities.
The Newport Historical Society, which has owned the property since 1927, hired Akeia de Barros Gomes as the center’s director in December 2024. She grew up on Aquidneck Island, has deep ties to the local Black community, and joined the Historical Society’s board of directors in 2018.
When Rebecca Bertrand, the society’s executive director, asked de Barros Gomes to help write the job description for the new director position, she looked it over and said, “I’d do this!” Overseeing Newport’s Center for Black History is a dream job, she says, one that not only builds on her career but enables her to tell the stories of her hometown, shaping how those stories are shared, contextualized, and brought to life in the years to come.
“[Now I’m] telling my own community’s stories,” de Barros Gomes says, “it’s very full circle.” She worked for three years at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, most recently as vice president of maritime studies. In Mystic, she curated “ENTWINED: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea,” an exhibit that centered maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences.
She also worked for several years at the New Bedford Whaling Museum as curator of social history. Since 2021, de Barros Gomes has taught at Brown University, where she is a visiting scholar and lecturer
in the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Historic discovery
An African spirit bundle known as a nkisi was discovered beneath the floorboards during construction work at the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House in The piece of blue and white fabric, important colors in African spirituality, held a cowrie shell, a fruit pit, a human tooth, two nails and other small items that appeared to have been intentionally collected and assembled.
The discovery is significant, de Barros Gomes explains, as the nkisi is evidence of a sustained cultural and spiritual connection between the enslaved bundlemaker in Newport and the enslaved person’s original homeland in West Africa. It remains the only nkisi unearthed in New England and served as the catalyst for a new interpretation of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House’s history.
The nkisi will be featured in the Center for Black History’s first-floor exhibition space and appears on the cover of “Echoes from the Attic: Stories of Slavery and Freedom-Making in Newport, RI,” which the Historical Society recently produced. In an essay contained in the anthology, de Barros Gomes writes: “t]hese figures continue to be used throughout the diaspora in prayer, for protection, to speak to ancestors, to make a vow, and for healing. Striking the nkisi with a nail breathes ashe — life force — into the prayer.”
The essay continues: “the bundle creator was freedom-making and insisting upon their own humanity in a system of slavery and degradation.” On a recent trip to West Africa, de Barros Gomes sought advice about the nkisi from a religious practitioner in Benin she has known for 15 years. She asked him if it is appropriate to display the spirit bundle and to share its intimate story.
The elder responded with an enthusiastic “Yes, please,” she reports. “‘This is something that should not be forgotten,’” de Barros Gomes says he told her.
Layers of history
As its name indicates, the WantonLyman-Hazard House has had several owners over the years. According to Newport Historical Society records, and detailed in its new book, “Echoes from the Attic,” it was built around 1697 by Stephen Mumford, a Seventh Day Baptist missionary sent from London in 1664. The house changed hands five times after Mumford died in 1707, eventually coming into the possession of John G. Wanton.
Wanton purchased the house at auction in 1765, after it was ransacked during the Stamp Act Riots of the same year. In 1782, Wanton’s daughter, Polly Wanton, married Daniel Lyman, who was deeded the house around 1785. In 1805, the Lymans’ second daughter, Harriet, married Benjamin Hazard, who took ownership of the house in 1807.
Harriet and Benjamin Hazard’s daughters, Emily and Mary, retained ownership of the property until their deaths in 1908 and 1911, respectively. The house was unoccupied for four years — the first time in its 214-year history — until Maud Lyman Stevens, a descendant of the family, campaigned to save the property.
During this two-hundred-year period, several owners and their families lived in the home along with the enslaved people who worked for them. They include Martin Howard and his wife Ann Conklin, followed by John G. Wanton and his wife, Mary “Bull” Nichols. Ann Conklin, also known as Ann Conkling, is
believed to have brought three enslaved people — Jenny, Casan, and Bristow — from her first marriage to the home when she married Howard in 1749.
According to historical records, in the same household two decades later, John Wanton enslaved a person who was counted among his taxable property in 1767. Additionally, the 1774 Rhode Island
census lists within the Wanton household: “one Indian male, name once known, aged under sixteen, and two Black males aged over sixteen, all presumably enslaved or indentured; one Black man was named
Cardardo but the name of the others is no longer known.”
“Echoes from the Attic”
Bertrand continues: “This shift is not merely a change in the visitor experience; it is a commitment to recovering and amplifying Black history, and confronting Newport’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, both narratives that have long been entwined with the very fabric of Newport yet largely absent from public interpretation.”
de Barros Gomes edited the book as well as contributed to the writing, adding her personal perspective to local Black history. She writes in the foreword: “When I was in graduate school and traveled, people would ask where I was from. When I said ‘Newport, Rhode Island,’ the response was often, ‘I didn’t know Black people lived in Newport.’ My frustration at that remark has led to the last twenty years of my research, community engagement, and understanding of the Black community’s deep, deep roots in our city.”
She goes on to note that, “[b]eyond the Gilded Age and stories of Black wealth and enterprise, there are also stories of slavery, of resistance, and of regeneration and persistence. There are everyday stories of family and community, love and beauty, and stories yet to be told. We are here. We have been here since the city’s birth. We have helped to make Newport what it is today.”
That, in a nutshell, is much of what the new Center for Black History will strive to do: tell stories, new and old, for audiences familiar and unfamiliar, local or visiting.
To bring the center to life, the Historical Society worked with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an international firm with the “world’s largest practice dedicated to the planning and design of museums and narrative museums,” according to its website. The National Museum of African American History
and Culture in Washington, D.C.; the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina; and the upcoming International Slavery Museum and Maritime Museum in Liverpool, United Kingdom, are among the firm’s work.
The local historical group also worked with SmokeSygnals, a MashpeeWampanoag owned agency that helped with the creative process and storytelling components, along with exhibit fabrication designed to enlighten and educate visitors without overwhelming them.
Some of the exhibitions will tell “a story of beauty and joy in the midst of trauma and violence,” says de Barros Gomes. “It’s a heavy subject, but the goal is to not leave heavy.”
A new chapter
The Center for Black History will have a new, accessible entrance on Stone Street, and the contents of one of its three firstfloor exhibition rooms will change periodically. “I will always rely on the contemporary community for their help with [that] exhibit space,” says de Barros Gomes.
Two of the rooms upstairs will be used to accommodate research fellows and small community gatherings, while the third will serve as de Barros Gomes’ office. It overlooks a small courtyard soon to be filled with sculptures by Black artists.
“This work does not end — there is no end point,” she explains. “We are always learning. This is an ongoing, forever process.”
Tattooed on her right forearm is a Bakongo Cosmogram, a sacred African symbol representing the passage of time, lifecycles, and the movement of the cosmos. Sometimes, life literally comes full circle, de Barros Gomes believes. For example, while she was a grad school student she often walked by the building housing her new office. If she cranes her neck and looks outside, she can see the apartment where she lived, she says.
She had no way of knowing then that the historic red house on the corner of Broadway and Stone Street would become home to the city’s Center for Black History, or that she would be the one to direct its future from an office in the same attic where someone once buried a hope and a dream. “It’s going to remind me every day of why I do this work,” says de Barros Gomes.
For more information about the Center for Black History, visit newportblackhistory.org.
