Rhode Island Slave History Medallions (RISHM) is launching the inaugural season of “Newport Black History Walking Tours: Lost Stories of Resistance & Freedom,” beginning this Saturday, June 22. Tours will continue through November on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, at 10 a.m. near Bowen’s Wharf Pilot House, and will make 8 to 10 stops on Historic Hill, concluding at 11:15 a.m. on Washington Square, in front of the Colony House.

Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 with military or student ID, and $10 for children under 12, with the exception of infants, who are admitted free.

According to Charles Roberts, founder and executive director of RISHM, the mission of the tours is to “recognize and educate the public about the people and places in Newport that played a dominate role in the slave trade, and to share and commemorate the documented stories of real-life colonial free and enslaved Black and African Americans who made significant and lesser-known contributions to Newport and to the state.”

Roberts has worked closely for several years with local historians, and students from Roger Williams University, to research and develop the tour. Since 2019, RISHM has produced and installed granite and bronze monuments, embossed with a QR code that physically records and memorializes the colonial Black African history and participation of the state of Rhode Island, and that of the economically rich port city of Newport; both of which were complicit in the slave trade. Eight of these granite markers will be featured stops on the Newport tour.

Learn more at: www.rishm.org.