The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume 2, continues to document the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This second of a planned three volumes continues the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes: an introduction to the period studied (from the end of the Civil War through WWII) by Deborah Gray White; a study of the first black students at Rutgers and New Brunswick Theological Seminary; an analysis of African-American life in the City of New Brunswick during the period; and profiles of the earliest black women to matriculate at Douglass College.
To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu
Introduction
Deborah Gray White
Chapter 1:
“All the World’s A Classroom: The First Black Students at Rutgers College
and New Brunswick Theological Seminary Encounter Racial Ideology,
Missionary Impulses and the Intellectual Life of the University”
Tracey Johnson, Eri Kitada, Meagan Wierda, and Joseph Williams
Chapter 2:
“In the Shadow of Old Queens: African American Life and Labors in New
Brunswick from the End of Slavery to the Industrial Era”
Caitlin Wiesner, Pamela Walker, Brenann Sutter, and Shari Cunningham
Chapter 3:
“The Rutgers Race Man: Early Black Students at Rutgers College”
Beatrice J. Adams, Shauni Armstead, Shari Cunningham, Tracey Johnson
Chapter 4:
“Profiles in Courage: Breaking the Color Line at Douglass College”
Miya Carey and Pamela Walker
Chapter 5:
“Race as Reality and Illusion: The Baxter Cousins, NJC and Rutgers
University”
Shaun Armstead and Jerrad P. Pacatte
Epilogue
Deborah Gray White
KENDRA BOYD is an assistant professor of history at York University.
MARISA J. FUENTES is an associate professor in women’s and gender studies and history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She was recently appointed presidential term chair in African American history. She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.
DEBORAH GRAY WHITE is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author or editor of numerous books including, Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South.
