Thomas Doughton Holy Cross Professor, Worcester Black History Expert, Remembered

WORCESTER, MA — Thomas Doughton, a Holy Cross professor and the chief chronicler of Worcester Black history, died over the weekend unexpectedly, according to his family.

Doughton taught at Holy Cross for more than two decades, most recently at the college's Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies. He specialized in Black American history, Native American studies and local history.

Doughton recently helped actualize a longtime local history project: the Worcester Black History Trail. Doughton helped dedicate the first marker along the trail in the Elm Park neighborhood in June 2022.

"A project like this could be successful if it gets people to realize that people of color, people of African heritage — particularly enslaved people of the first quarter of the 18th century — have been here in Worcester and have been an important part of Worcester," Doughton said in a Holy Cross Magazine interview about the trail in 2022.

Doughton's death prompted an outpouring of condolences across Worcester from officials and people whose lives he touched.

"Professor Doughton’s unwavering demand for authenticity, respect, and fairness will never be forgotten," Worcester City Council Vice Chair Khrystian King said Monday on social media. "But rather, it was that very insistence which continues to permeate throughout the legacy that he left behind; and within the relationships that he navigated."

King highlighted Doughton's other local work apart from the trail, including the fight for a sexual orientation discrimination ordinance in Worcester in the 1970s, and the larger Laurel Clayton Project analyzing local Black history. The project is named after the downtown-area Black neighborhood bulldozed in the 1950s to make way for I-290. The neighborhood is now the site of the Plumley Village housing development.

Arrangements for Doughton had not been made public as of Monday morning.