Despite Boston being one of the largest American cities, the black population there continued to lag. In 1890, there were 8,125 blacks; by 1920, there were 16,350. Although the black population had doubled in those 30 years, it comprised only 1.8 to 2.3 percent of Boston’s entire population.11

The few blacks who did live there rarely flourished individually or collectively. Most were victims of persistent job discrimination, residential segregation, and social prejudice. Often, blacks who migrated north for a better life had the double blow of having to compete in the job market with European immigrants as well as northern-born blacks.12 Menial jobs—bootblack, janitor, coachman, cook—were the default career options for most African Americans in Boston from the turn of the century until World War II, making the Powells’ trajectory all the more impressive.

But Boston was a complex city, and a suburb such as Milton could operate under a different value system in which blacks such as William and Ella Powell, and later their son, Lawrence, could live comfortably without any threats. Boston proper could not boast the same level of racial tolerance.

In the early 1800s there were violent race riots against the Irish in Boston. But when blacks from the South began to arrive, they found themselves on the receiving end of this intense prejudice, which was not unlike the racism they experienced in the South. In the North whites also resorted to tactics that reinforced their social, economic, and political superiority over the black population. In public places, whether for entertainment or dining, blacks were segregated to remote and inadequate corners or excluded altogether. If traveling by train, blacks were forced to sit in the “Negro” car. If traveling by boat, blacks were relegated to the deck irrespective of weather. Charles Lenox Remond, the nineteenth-century Massachusetts-born African American orator and abolitionist, said that he nearly froze to death on such a journey. Frederick Douglass once spoke about being turned away from an exhibit on the Boston Common, which had always been a public space. In the early twentieth century African Americans were also regularly vulnerable to acts of violence by white individuals. Packs of white youths hunted down blacks on the Boston Common to physically brutalize and hurl insults at them.13

Where Boston differed from the Deep South was the emerging and passionate anti-racist community that was ready to combat bigotry. An alliance between socially conscious blacks and white liberals formed in pockets of Boston communities, and together they advocated for black equality and civil rights at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1918, the Boston branch of the NAACP was the largest in the country, with a membership of 2,553 people. Although mostly black, the group also included whites, typically descendants of abolitionists, who grew up promoting an anti-slavery agenda.14 This activism began to spread throughout major northeastern cities, and by the time Lawrence Powell was an adult, he had taken full advantage of every opportunity that came his way as an African American male.