40 Influential Leaders - JerriAnn Boggis

JerriAnn Boggis
Executive Director of the Black Heritage Trail of NH

JerriAnn Boggis, executive director of the Black Heritage Trail of NH (BHTNH), is committed to educating people about the diversity that has always been here and the people whose lives and stories have been erased or overlooked for generations.

Among those is Harriet Wilson of Milford, the first African American woman to publish a novel. When Boggis asked the Milford High School principal why he didn’t know about it, he promised to get it in the school. The following week there was an article by a teacher who said the book was inappropriate for high school and best studied
in college.

“I took that as a way of burying the book,” says Boggis. “So, I formed the Harriet Wilson project and got a group of people together to advocate for the book being studied in Milford High School. It turned into a larger project where we built a monument in Milford to honor Harriet Wilson so that the history would be visible and it will be a permanent part of Milford and New Hampshire’s visible black history.”

Through that work Boggis met Valerie Cunningham, who made the Black history of Portsmouth visible through 22 markers placed around the city. Boggis started as a volunteer for what was then the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail and eventually became executive director of BHTNH.

Boggis learned that there were pockets of researchers across NH doing similar work. The Black Heritage Trail tells stories from an African American point of view, lifting the black voice in a contemporary way that doesn’t reinforce stereotypes, she says.

Currently Boggis and her team are developing specific tours for seventh- and eighth-graders in response to the divisive concept law to help teach civics and black history. Boggis says NH’s demographics are changing, but the state and its schools may not be prepared. “How we create our vitality as a state will depend on how we honor all our citizens. How do we welcome in our strangers, how do we honor the people who’ve always lived here and how do we tell their stories to create this vibrant community where diversity is honored and respected?”

Boggis says younger residents leave NH to go to more vibrant communities with more diversity. “When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to leave the state. But when I started the Harriet Wilson project it created a connection to a town. When you’re invested in that town, it becomes home,” she says.