- [Narrator] While more of the history was slowly emerging, high school students made another discovery, an artifact of slavery in their school's front yard.

(eerie music) - My initial reaction was horror.

- My initial reaction was, "The school needs to keep this."

This is their history, and if they're trying to pawn this off on us, I won't allow that.

- [Narrator] The story of the bell began in 2016 around the time when Justin O'Neil-Riley joined Belmont Hill Private School as a scholarship student.

- I was very overwhelmed when I made my first couple of visits.

There were not many people of color on campus, it was just probably about 20 to 30 of us.

- [Narrator] Justin could not fail to miss an old bell on prominent display at the school.

- It was hung up on two stilts, very high, and when you walk by it, you'd always have to look up at it.

- [Narrator] When a course was set up to investigate the bell's providence, Justin joined the class.

The first thing we did was we started inspecting it.

There was a name on there, Jose Giroud, and then on it says Trinidad.

And that's all we had.

So we had to resort to the archives.

- [Narrator] The bell had been gifted in the 1920s by the manager of the Trinidad Sugar Company, which belonged to the co-founders of the school, a locally prominent family.

- Once we had the name, we kind of just started putting the puzzle pieces together.

- Page 97, there we go.

- [Narrator] Belmont Hill history teacher, Juliette Zener, who supervised the investigation was shocked to discover that this humble bell played a pivotal role in managing slavery.

- Bells that were mounted in this particular way were used to call enslaved labor to work.

That finding really was conclusive.

- [Narrator] Justin and his fellow students learned that the bell was used at a Cuban sugar plantation in the 1880s where laborers were still enslaved in all but name.

(soft tense music) - Under the old slave bell, about 1895.

We didn't want it to be biased, we wanted it to be truthful.

I wanted everybody to know like, "Listen, this is a slave bell.

You should feel just as uncomfortable as I do walking past this bell every day."

It being a predominantly white institution, there's never like a second though for most people when it comes to the history of slavery.

It's kinda just like, "Oh, it happened, get over it."

- [Narrator] For four years, the bell remained in place.

Then in 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer sent shock waves across America.

It propelled the recently inaugurated Black Lives Matter movement to the top of the national agenda.

(crowd shouting) - The incident with George Floyd kind of put it into perspective, like, "Why do we still have this on our campus?

If you guys respect us and love us, and you know, we believe that, we feel as if the bell should be removed."

- A board member that knew me well reached out and said, "Our school's discovered that a bell that's been on the campus was a slave bell and the board is voted that they would like to donate it to the Robbins House.

What do you think?

Would you like that bell?"

- I was very much against having the bell placed here.

To me, this home represents freedom from enslavement, it represents what you do when you say, "I'm not doing this anymore."

- [Narrator] Eventually, the bell was moved from the school grounds to Concord.

After much soul-searching, the Robbins House had accepted the gift under one condition, the bell's clapper arm was removed to render it silent.

- So as you can see, we decided to take away its voice and we said, "No, we want to reclaim the story and to reclaim the story, we will make sure that history's not forgotten."