Go beyond the textbooks with the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society to uncover a legacy that spans from the heroic 1st Rhode Island Regiment—the Continental Army’s pioneering unit of African American and Indigenous soldiers who fought for liberty at Yorktown—to the sophisticated Black elite of the Gilded Age. By preserving the records of the 1780 Free African Union Society and the entrepreneurial triumphs of figures like George T. Downing, the Society documents a centuries-long journey of civic leadership and economic self-reliance.