Black-heritage sites are increasingly being promoted outside the Deep South—at long-established historic restorations, such as Historic Hudson Valley’s Philipsburg Manor in Tarrytown, New York. Until recently Philipsburg was devoted entirely to interpreting the English and Dutch heritage of the Hudson River Valley. Today, however, its program stresses that the manor’s farm and gristmill were operated by twenty-three African slaves and that New York in 1790 had nearly as many slaves as Georgia.

In Boston the Black Heritage Trail, a 1.6-mile walking tour, winds though the north slope of Beacon Hill, an area now designated the Boston African-American National Historic Site . The fifteen stops along the trail include the African Meeting House (1806), the oldest surviving black church in the country, where so many antislavery meetings were held before the Civil War that it was known as the Black Faneuil Hall. Also on the tour are the Abiel Smith School, a public school for blacks from 1835 to 1855, now the Museum of Afro-American History, and the George Middleton House, built in 1797 by Colonel Middleton, who commanded an all-black company, called the Bucks of America, during the Revolutionary War. The tour starts across from the State House on Beacon Street at the Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s magnificent basrelief depicting the all-black unit and its white commander marching off to the Civil War. The regiment was the subject of the film Glory .

Among the reconstructions at the Booker T. Washington National Monument, in Hardy, Virginia, is the kitchen cabin where the black leader and educator was born as a slave in 1856. In Washington, D.C., the National Park Service maintains the Black History National Recreation Trail, providing a list with maps of sites in six neighborhoods, including Cedar Hill, the home of Frederick Douglass from 1877 until his death in 1895; the campus of Howard University, founded in 1867 to educate freed slaves; and the nine-teenth-century Bethune Council House, today a museum and black women’s historical archives, named for the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who advised the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s on minority affairs.

One of the oldest black-history museums in a rapidly growing field is Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History, founded in 1961. Ohio, once a stronghold of abolitionism and important on the route of the Underground Railroad, today has many black-history sites open to the public. In Wilberforce, named for the English abolitionist William Wilberforce, the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center concentrates on black history and culture from the end of World War II to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And Wilberforce University is the first black-owned and -operated college in the country. Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, the first white college to accept blacks, has a statue dedicated to the Underground Railroad on its campus.

The home of the abolitionist minister John Rankin,