The 250 th anniversary of the starting of Rutgers University is an ideal minute 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 files the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor unexpected– nor uncommon. Like a lot of early American colleges, Rutgers depended upon servants to develop its campuses and serve its trainees and faculty; it depended upon the sale of black people to money its really existence. Males like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810–1824), the Reverend Philip Milledoler, (president of Rutgers from 1824–1840), Henry Rutgers, (trustee after whom the college is named), and Theodore Frelinghuysen, (Rutgers’s seventh president), were amongst the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic. Scarlet and black are the colors Rutgers University uses to represent itself to the nation and world. They are the colors the professional athletes complete in, the graduates and administrators endure celebratory celebrations, and the colors that differentiate Rutgers from every other university in the United States. This book, nevertheless, uses these colors to signify something else: the blood that was spilled on the banks of the Raritan River by those dispossessed of their land and the bodies that labored unpaid and in chains so that Rutgers could be constructed and sustained. The factors to this volume deal this history as a functional one– not to tear down or deteriorate this very prominent, robust, and growing organization– but to strengthen it and help direct its course for the future. The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. Go to the task’s site at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu
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