Julian B. McCrea

Quick Facts

Significance:

Hairdresser, activist, Boston Vigilance Committee

Date of Death:

1871

Boston hairdresser and activist Julian B. McCrea served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Though details of his early life are unknown, Julian B. McCrea first appeared in the Boston City Directory in 1848. He worked as a hairdresser and lived on the corner of Cambridge and Temple streets in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, home to the city's free Black community.¹

In addition to his profession, McCrea became involved in abolitionist and civil rights activism in the city. For example, after being ejected from the Howard Theatre on account of his race, McCrea filed suit against the establishment for their discriminatory practices. As part of the larger struggle to integrate public spaces, McCrea refused to shave a Mr. Fleming, owner of one of the theaters that segregated seating by race, in the main area of his barbershop. Instead, he escorted Fleming to a back storeroom and told him:

You set apart a place in your theatre for men of my color. I do not measure men by their color, but anyone who will proscribe a man on account of his color, deserves to be proscribed. Walk in, sir. 

Fleming left McCrea’s shop in disgust.²

Julian McCrea also became involved in the local efforts to desegregate the Boston Public Schools. In particular, he and other integrationists focused their attention on the Abiel Smith School, the overcrowded and unfunded segregated Black school on Beacon Hill. Tensions grew within the Black community between the integrationists such as McCrea, and those who supported separate Black institutions. This hostility escalated into violence in 1851, when McCrea and others assaulted Thomas P. Smith, a proponent of the Smith School. Authorities charged and convicted McCrea and others in:

…seizing Thomas P. Smith, also colored, near his residence in Second street, South Boston, in the night time, plastering up his mouth with tar, and attempting to abduct him in a carriage. The parties had been at loggerheads upon the "Smith School question," and this was probably the cause of the attack.³

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, McCrea joined the third and final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers coming to Boston on the Underground Railroad. Though McCrea's specific contributions to the group remain unknown, one account remembered him as "an active operator on the underground railroad."⁴

McCrea died in Boston in 1871 after a short illness. One obituary stated:

The heart of many a flying fugitive in the days of slavery was gladdened through his efforts in their behalf. He was "a higher law abolitionist" of the old John Brown stamp. The "caste" schools had an untiring foe during the agitation for school rights, and in all questions regarding the interest of his race he has been an active worker.⁵

Footnotes:

1. Boston City Directory, 1848, 280; Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 232; "Destruction of Tremont Temple," New York Times, April 1, 1852, 1.
2. "Two Colored Person Ejected from the Howard Atheneum – Suits Commenced," Liberator, December 26, 1856, 3; "An Interesting Case," New England Farmer, December 27, 1856, 3; Jacqueline Jones, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2023), 141.
3. Jonas W. Clark et all, "Equal Schools For All Without Regard To Color Or Race," 1851, Equal schools for all without regard to color or race : Clark, Jonas W. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive; "The Colored Assault Cases," Boston Evening Transcript, June 14, 1851, 2; "Municipal Court," Boston Evening Transcript, June 13, 1851, 2.
4. Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4; Dean Grodzins, "Constitution or No Constitution, Law or No Law: The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861," in Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 73, n.57.; "Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston" (Ms B.17), Garrison Collection, Boston Public Library; "Eastern Massachusetts," Springfield Weekly Republican, April 15, 1871, 8.
5. "Julien McCrea," Boston Evening Transcript, April 8, 1871, 2.