In September 2024, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill creating 225 new liquor licenses in the city of Boston, including 195 “restricted licenses” reserved for areas of the city that have historically been underserved, in terms of both public resources and at the bar. The ZIP codes identified for these restricted licenses cover many of Boston’s communities of color, including majority Black areas such as Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan.[1] Disparities were stark prior to the passage of this law. Historically, licenses in Boston have been limited in number and exorbitantly pricey, sometimes being sold for as much as $600,000. According to one local report, half of the city’s 1,000 on-premise liquor licenses were awarded to downtown bars and restaurants as a result; neighborhoods with dense minority populations such as Hyde Park or Mission Hill each had fewer than ten.[2]

I came across this story while in Massachusetts in summer 2025, when the first licenses were successfully awarded to local businesses. On the news segment that flashed across the TV screen, entrepreneurs of color expressed their relief and excitement at the opportunity to share culinary traditions and compete with downtown restaurants.[3] As a historian of race, temperance, and alcohol in the nineteenth century, listening to the interviewees resonated. While my recent JER article unpacked the meanings of temperance for antebellum Black reformers, Boston’s liquor license bill speaks to the ways provisioning alcohol could be just as important to people pushed to the economic margins, both in the early republic and today. Whether for oyster cellars in antebellum Philadelphia or restaurants in present-day Boston, seemingly mundane policies such as licensing laws have either stiffened or muddled who can thrive in urban economies.

Black activists such as Frederick Douglass folded temperance into their abolitionist activism, at times controversially. At the World Temperance Convention in London in 1846, Douglass (pictured above, on the right) was the lone Black attendee, and white delegates booed him for linking the two causes in an unprompted speech. “Portraits from the World Temperance Convention, at Covent Garden Theatre,” The Illustrated London News, Aug. 15, 1846.

This is something I take stock of in my broader research on the nineteenth-century United States, following those beyond the bounds of the “Black elite” into the streets, taverns, and halls where they congregated to drink, dance, and socialize. Entrepreneurs could make decent livings selling alcohol in barrooms and eating houses. In these places—sometimes both physically and metaphorically underground—Black men and women made use of the freedoms they had on their own terms.

One prominent boozy space dotting northern cities were oyster cellars, where liquor flowed freely alongside delicacies like pickled oysters and turtle soup. Historians such as Gary Nash and Shane White have noted the prevalence of these locales in the early republic, showing how Black men dominated the oyster trade by opening and frequenting establishments throughout Philadelphia and New York. These could be sites of economic opportunity. For example, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s 1838 census of Philadelphia’s Black residents revealed that oyster cellar proprietor Fortune Fullerton owned about $1,450 worth of property, while another, Richard Hawel, reported $2,600.[4]

James Akin, Philadelphia Taste Displayed. Or Bon-Ton Below Stairs, ca. 1830, From the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Onlookers did not refrain from commenting on the ways they saw these spaces, making supercilious commentary about the ubiquity of drinking and the supposed promiscuity of the crowds. Compounding less-than-savory views was the fact that so many of these oyster cellars sold alcohol without a license. In a cartoon from the early 1830s, white engraver James Akin depicted Black restauranteur James Prosser’s oyster cellar on Market Street in Philadelphia as a site of drunken dalliances. Well-dressed white men with flushed faces tipple, smoke cigars, and slurp oysters, shucked for them by an apron-donning Black man (presumably Prosser) with his back to the viewer. At the far left, a Black server stands behind the counter with a glass in one hand and a full decanter in the other, and more decanters line the shelves behind him. Tacked to the bar is a sign that reads “City privilege sell without licence.” On the whole, Akin’s image reflects contemporary misgivings about the goings-on of oyster cellars and, significantly, publicizes his misgivings about an unlicensed Black-owned cellar, in particular.

Temperance reformers depicted taverns, bars, and other boozy spaces as places of disorder and immorality, as in the sketch above. J.W. Barber, The Drunkard’s Progress, or the Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin, 1826. From Library of Congress.

The matter of licensing oyster cellars was brought to the fore in 1832, when Pennsylvania legislators passed the “Oyster Bill” permitting Philadelphia authorities to capitalize on illicit sales by granting liquor licenses to cellar owners.[5] This process of regulation, however, introduces an important question: To what extent did this licensing law reward white restaurateurs and push Black business owners out of a trade they once disproportionately occupied? Philadelphia’s 1816 city directory lists 46 Black oystermen, just under half of the total. But, by cross referencing city directories and the 1838 PAS census, I estimate that Black Philadelphians comprised about one-fifth of the city’s 158 listed oyster sellers by 1840.[6]

Discretionary, legal, and financial hurdles to obtaining a license likely meant that some Black provisioners continued to sell alcohol illicitly, opening them to scrutiny from law enforcement. Philadelphian cellar keeper Edward Paca “was held to bail to answer for keeping a disorderly place of resort” after a “tooth and nail controversy” broke out among intoxicated (presumably white) “youths” and “damsels” in his shop.[7] Likewise, George Augustus and others were arrested for “obstructing the passage along the pavement” outside his oyster cellar, leading to an additional charge for Augustus: “keeping a disorderly house.”[8] In antebellum Philadelphia, then, enforcement of the Oyster Bill became a mechanism for gatekeeping Black economic opportunities—a pattern that continued in cities around the country throughout the nineteenth century and, as Boston shows, even outlasted Prohibition.

Indeed, Boston’s and Massachusetts’ joint reform makes visible the important role that access to alcohol has played in Black life. Since the era of the antebellum oyster cellar, provisioning booze has been one way for Black entrepreneurs to carve out space in an economy that often pushed them to the margins. The new legislation is a meaningful step toward reckoning with this by addressing the ways that opportunities have been distributed unevenly, whether through law, custom, or other means. My hope is that, like in Massachusetts, more cities take a similar look at the history of their laws and reflect on the impact of policies as seemingly boring and bureaucratic as liquor licensing. While Black temperance advocates preached temperance for equality, there is just as strong a case to be made for licensing for equity.

Endnotes

[1] Sam Doran and Sam Drysdale, “Beacon Hill Negotiators Agree on 225 New Alcohol Licenses for Boston,” WBUR, Sept. 3, 2024, https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/09/03/massachusetts-boston-liquor-license-increase.

[2] Amanda Beland, “Boston Has New Liquor Licenses. Why Aren’t More Restaurants Applying for Them?” WBUR, Sept. 18, 2025, https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/09/18/boston-liquor-licenses-neighborhood-disparity.

[3] Jennifer Peñate, “Several Boston Restaurants Receive Long-Awaited Liquor Licenses as Part of City Initiative,” WCVB, June 26, 2025, https://www.wcvb.com/article/liquor-licenses-boston-restaurants-received/65211820.

[4] “‘Committee to Visit the Colored People’ Census Facts Collected by Benjamin C. Bacon and Charles Gardner,” Vol. 4, 1838, 10–11, and Vol, 1, 1838, 26–27, Coll. 490, Vol. AmS .133, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers (PAS), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. This census is also available for free online as part of the fantastic digital history project, 1838 Black Metropolis. See “The 1838 Census,” 1838 Black Metropolis, accessed Dec. 8, 2025, https://www.1838blackmetropolis.com/1838-pas-census.

[5] For snippets of the Oyster Bill debates, see “Communication,” United States Gazette (Philadelphia), Apr. 8, 1831; “Electioneering Schemes,” Pennsylvania Weekly Telegraph (Harrisburg), Feb. 11, 1832; “The Oyster Bill,” Pennsylvania Weekly Telegraph (Harrisburg), Feb. 22, 1832; “Remarks of Mr. Hassinger, on the Resolution Relative to Licensing Oyster Cellars and Eating Houses in the City and County of Philadelphia,” The Patriot (Harrisburg), Mar. 6, 1832; “Gov. Wolf & the Philadelphia Oyster Cellars,” Gettysburg Compiler (PA), Apr. 17, 1832.

[6] I calculated 1816 figures using James Robinson, The Philadelphia Directory, for 1816, Containing the Names, Trades, and Residence of the Inhabitants of the City, Southwark, Northern Liberties, and Kensington (s.n., 1816). Figures for 1838 were calculated using data from “Committee to Visit the Colored People,” Vols. 1–4, 1838, PAS; A. M’Elroy, A. M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory, for 1839: Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business, and Dwelling-Houses, 2^nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1839).

[7] “Oyster Cellar Fracas,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia), February 28, 1842.

[8] “City Police–Monday, May 18, 1840,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia), May 20, 1840. Augustus is listed as an oysterman in the 1838 PAS census. See “Committee to Visit the Colored People,” Vol. 4, 1838, 30–31.