Royall House

Somerville, MA

Before he was President, Barack Obama was a law student in Greater Boston, living in this Somerville neighborhood of Winter Hill while he attended Harvard Law School around 1988 to 1991. Those were the years he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, a milestone that first drew national attention to him. This modest apartment on Broadway, later honored with a dedicated rose garden in 2021, marks one of the everyday places where a future national figure was still finding his path.

Cambridge, MA

Built in 1763 by the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Hollis Hall has sheltered Harvard students for more than two centuries and honors the Hollis family of London, whose generosity sustained the college for generations. In 1775-76 the building traded scholars for soldiers, serving as barracks for colonial troops during the siege of Boston.

Boston, MA

This National Historic Landmark plaque honors Old South Church in Boston, whose congregation traces a long lineage in the city's civic and religious life. The present sanctuary, completed in 1875, is a celebrated example of Northern Italian Gothic architecture. The church's history connects to figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, and to the ferment surrounding the Boston Tea Party.

Concord, MA

In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, slavery persisted even in Massachusetts towns like Concord, and the men and women who won their freedom often built new lives on the margins of the communities that had once held them. Brister and Fenda Freeman were among these formerly enslaved residents, making a home near this spot and raising a family in the years of the young republic. The surname they carried — Freeman — was itself a quiet declaration of the liberty they had claimed.