NORTHAMPTON — For many residents, Northampton’s small Black demographic stands in stark contrast with its distinct political identity. The city boasts a mere 2.7% Black population in a nation with an average Black population of 12%.

Yet Black Lives Matter posters and “Progress Pride Flags” litter the city, and talks of Northampton as a radically leftist utopia are a frequent point of conversation. The city’s image as a LGBTQIA+ haven is often collapsed with the assumption that it is therefore also an antiracist haven, local residents say.

“Everyone thinks this place is super utopic,” remarks Nevlynn Winona, a Black Northampton resident. “I remember this one queer-identifying white girl saying, years ago, ‘[Northampton] is like utopia.’ I told her, ‘Your utopia doesn’t include Black people.’”

Recently, Northampton’s City Council approved the formation of a commission to discuss the possibility of issuing reparations to Black residents of the city. This development generates some questions: What have Black experiences in “Paradise City” looked like? Relatedly, why is Northampton’s Black population significantly lower than state and national averages?

“I don’t know why Northampton isn’t more diverse,” says Nicole Harris, a biracial, Black-identifying resident who has lived in Northampton her entire life. “I think when people think of Northampton they think it’s diverse. But if you really look at it, it’s not.”

Robin Griffith, a Black resident, has lived in Northampton since 2015. She is an artist and stay-at-home mom to two children and moved to Northampton because her wife, Miriam, who is white, got a job at Westfield State University.

Before they moved here, the family often traveled to Northampton during summers to visit Miriam’s dad, who lived in Amherst. During those visits, Griffith saw Northampton as a “sweet little town,” especially appreciating its nature and, of course, “the lesbians.” After moving, though, she began to feel increasingly cognizant of, and impacted by, the city’s racial demographics.

Griffith recalled a trip this spring to the city’s Senior Center to put up flyers for an art exhibit. When she went in and scanned the room, what she saw served as a wake-up call.

“I looked in there and I was like, there’s no way I’m getting old here,” Griffith says. “It’s all white people with white hair. … I can’t do it, I have to see some brown — it doesn’t have to be a lot, but it’s gotta be more than [that] … I don’t wanna be the only Black person, I’ve been that before. … That’s not how I wanna finish whatever years I get to be an empty nester. It has to be more diverse than this.”

Not always so white

Dylan Gaffney, a local history specialist at Forbes Library, says Northampton hasn’t always been so white. In 1850, the village of Florence in the northwest section of Northampton had 10% Black residents. As a village founded by radical abolitionists in 1842, the area attracted Black fugitives from enslavement.

Though both downtown Northampton and Florence were known for their anti-slavery politics, Florence predominantly housed radical abolitionists, whereas Northampton was more conservative, Gaffney noted.

Then the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — which mandated that all fugitive slaves be captured and returned to their owners — incited mass emigration from the area. In Florence, complying with the Fugitive Slave Act was “a strict no-no,” said Emikan Sudan, a leader at the David Ruggles Center. However, the abolitionists of Northampton “were kind of OK with looking the other way,” allowing the South to “come up and … look for any fugitives,” Sudan said, making Northampton as whole less safe for Black people.

By 1860, only 22 African Americans remained in the area, a drastic shift from the 600 Black residents of 1850. Today, Northampton’s Black population remains small.

Not every Black person feels so impacted by the city’s low Black population. Harris was born and raised here, and says she’s pretty acclimated to the racial atmosphere.

She notes that she sometimes just “[has] her blinders on,” not noticing many race-related problems because of her positive outlook on the city. Growing up, however, “brown kids” in her schools were scarce. “It was a small handful of us,” she notes. “Less than 10.”

Harris’ mother is white and originally from Northampton and her father, who died in 2020 from COVID-19, is Black and originally from Amherst. He moved to Northampton when they got married, ultimately living there for about 40 years.

Harris describes her father, Frederick Harris, as having been a “legend” in Northampton and Amherst. As a mailman for UMass Amherst, “everyone knew him … he was always out in the community, he was super friendly, super extroverted,” Harris says. “If you didn’t know Fred it was like … you must be new here.”

In Northampton, meanwhile, attitudes seemed a bit different, Harris said. With the Black population in Northampton so small, Frederick “was like one of the token, cool Black adult males” in the eyes of the city’s residents, she says.

Winona likewise grew up in Northampton and was, for much of her life, accustomed to the city’s racial demographics. As an adolescent, Winona never gave much thought to race. But as an adult, she says has grown more aware and frustrated. She encapsulates how she feels with one word: “tired.”

“This is a very white place inside and out,” she says. “There are no spaces for us.”

Winona likes to frequently attend ecstatic dance parties — a monthly free-form dance event in the city — but she’s tired of them being overwhelmingly white, and she says she wants to create an ecstatic dance workshop for women of color. However, she has struggled to find places to advertise, seeing as there are so few spaces where people of color congregate.

Uncomfortable atmosphere

Winona and other Black residents share a sense that Northampton’s small number of Black people has produced an uncomfortable atmosphere.

“It’s elitist, even though they try to make it seem like it’s all about the oppressed,” Winona says. “It’s wokeism. To me, wokeism is like extreme white liberal thought. Wokeism is from white people and this place is extremely ‘woke.’ So I get very tired of it because it’s so pervasive and it’s suffocating … It’s this culture of always having to walk on eggshells. It’s passive aggressive in a smiley way.”

Beyond microaggressions, there is also direct racism, residents point out. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Griffith’s son, Elle, experienced two separate occasions where somebody driving past called him the N-word while he was walking home. When Elle told Griffith about these moments, she was stunned.

“I was like, really? Wow … Because people talk about how this place is PC [politically correct] … to a point it’s true, but then it’s not,” Griffith says. “There’s definitely a lot that feels like the right politics. But since Trump, I really feel like all this ugliness that was already there, people felt more … like they could just say whatever.”

‘Utopian community’

According to Gaffney, the imagination of Northampton as a radically leftist utopia is nothing new, dating back to the early settlement of radical abolitionists in Florence. They first named the village the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, which operated a silk mill that gave all members equal ownership. Free and formerly enslaved Black members had equal membership and voting rights with white members.

The Association, now often referred to as a “utopian community,” followed the politics of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. They promoted values that were quite progressive for their time, some of which included women’s rights and the immediate emancipation of Black people.

This reality attracted prominent Black leaders including Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles, who both lived in Florence for a number of years. A statue of Truth stands tall in one Florence square.

For Black residents, ideas of Northampton, or at least Florence, as a haven were cut short by the Fugitive Slave Act. But Northampton’s image as a leftist utopia persisted.

Emy Collins, a biracial, black-identifying mother and Ada Comstock Scholar at Smith College, says she frequently feels racially ostracized and targeted in the city. Collins is especially worried for her daughter, who will be going to Northampton’s middle school in the fall.

“I hear nightmare stories about the middle school in Northampton, especially for Black and brown kids. I have a friend who pulled their kid [out of the school], their middle schooler just started homeschooling. I’ve heard from a number of BIPOC parents that they’ve just taken their kids out,” she said.

Sara Weinberger, a former member of the Northampton Reparations Committee who moved here in 1977, says that, as a non-Black Jewish person, it “took a while” for her to realize that “yeah, [Northampton] is progressive, but … there’s no diversity here … People think that this is like … a hotbed of progressive thinking. But it’s really easy to be progressive when you’re not really dealing with differences.”

Conversely, Sudan says the city’s culture isn’t the primary reason why this town is so white. He cites the town’s high cost of living as the main reason for the sparse numbers of Black residents.

Weinberger, however, interrogates the assumption that expense is the direct source of the low Black demographic. For her, that idea assumes that all Black people are low income and can’t afford to live here, which she understands as false. She highlights the significance of other cultural factors in producing this demographic disparity.

“I do think that people come here, and they don’t see many people that look like them,” she says. “They may have experiences of being treated poorly.”

For Winona, leaving the city is an attractive prospect, especially for the sake of her social life.

“A lot of it centers around my social needs for more Black people, for diversity, for more of the kind of culture and artistic scene that I need that is diverse,” she says. “I need to be in strong connection with my own community, I need to see us every day, I need to see all different kinds of us.”

To Collins, leaving is likewise a no-brainer.

“It’s very clear who this city wants to be here and it’s not people of color,” she remarks. Accordingly, she hopes to leave as soon as she graduates from Smith.

In developing a reparations commission, Northampton’s City Council hopes to improve the quality of Black experiences in the town.

“An apology is empty by itself,” says Weinberger, who joined the NRC five years ago and left recently. “An apology that comes with a plan for repair can undo some of the damage, and can hopefully change things for the next generation.”

Editor’s note: This piece was written as an independent project by a Smith College student and edited by Naila Moreira, who teaches journalism at Smith College.]]>