STRATHAM - For Valerie Cunningham, the history of blacks on the Seacoast is much closer than the prominent Portsmouth residents who owned slaves in the 18th century.

While she could go to the soda shop with white friends after school, her parents, who became active in the civil rights movement, couldn’t go out to dinner at restaurants such as the Wentworth.

"In fact, you couldn’t even get a job at those places if you were black," Cunningham, whose ancestors arrived on the Seacoast in the late 1800s and early 1900s, told members of the Stratham Historical Society on Monday. She remembers learning about Colonial history when she attended schools in Portsmouth, but not the parallel history of a small but consistent black population that dates back to Colonial days.

She said she was learning about such history at the "black church" - the Pearl Street Church, known at the time as the People’s Baptist Church.

Her experience and her curiosity led her to research more about the history of blacks on the Seacoast. She is a founder of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, director of the African-American Resource Center in Portsmouth and co-author of "Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage."

"There’s always been a small black population in Portsmouth," Cunningham told members of the Stratham Historical Society on Monday. "I think people somehow get the impression we just appeared with the (Pease) air base or the Navy base or something like that. Well, no."

Those were peaks in the population, she said, but the black presence here dates back as far as 1645, when Massachusetts Bay Colony records report a man illegally imported Africans by raiding their towns and kidnapping them instead of purchasing them legally, and by doing that on the Sabbath.

A century later, prominent Seacoast names such as Odiorne, Wentworth and Warner were evident among the slaves - referred to as "servants" - who were given the surnames of their owners.

Freedom for slaves was gained, said Cunningham, by reaching an agreement with the owner, often because the owner could no longer afford to keep them.

"That’s actually how slavery ended in New Hampshire," she said. "Not by law. Not by legislation."

As a case in point, in 1779, 20 black men petitioned the Legislature for their freedom, using language similar to that used by the colonists in gaining independence from England.

The petition was tabled and not acted upon. Cunningham offered several examples of injustice against blacks while she was growing up, including segregated housing at Pease Air Force Base and the inability to find jobs locally, forcing blacks to head to the South for employment.

While blacks could attend the University of New Hampshire, for example, they could not use their education locally, said Cunningham.

"White parents did not want their children taught by a black teacher. White people were not going to use the services of a black doctor or lawyer," she said. "Black men couldn’t go downtown to get a haircut."

The civil rights struggle, she said, was "not just what was on TV, but what was right here that I was living with."