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 Three, concludes this groundbreaking documentation of 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 final of three volumes concludes the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes essays about Black and Puerto Rican students' experiences; the development of the Black Unity League; the Conklin Hall takeover; the divestment movement against South African apartheid; anti-racism struggles during the 1990s; and the Don Imus controversy and the 2007 Scarlet Knights women's basketball team. 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
PART I
Prelude to Change
1 Twenty-Twenty Vision: New Jersey and Rutgers on the Eve of Change
ROBERTO C. OROZCO, CARIE RAEL, BROOKE A. THOMAS, DEBORAH GRAY WHITE
2 Rutgers and New Brunswick: A Consideration of Impact
IAN GAVIGAN AND PAMELA WALKER
3 “Tell It Like It Is”: The Rise of a Race-Conscious Professoriate at Rutgers in the 1960s
JOSEPH WILLIAMS
4 Black and Puerto Rican Student Experiences and Their Movements at Douglass College, 1945–1974
KAISHA ESTY, WHITNEY FIELDS, AND CARIE RAEL
PART II
Student Protest and Forceful Change
5 A Second Founding: The Black and Puerto Rican Student Revolution at Rutgers–Camden and Rutgers–Newark
BEATRICE J. ADAMS, JESSE BAYKER, ROBERTO C. OROZCO, AND BROOKE A. THOMAS
6 Equality in Higher Education: An Analysis of Negative Responses to the Conklin Hall Takeover
KENNETH MORRISSEY
7 The Black Unity League: A Necessary Movement That Could Never Survive
EDWARD WHITE
8 “We the People”: Student Activism at Rutgers and Livingston College, 1960–1985
TRACEY JOHNSON, CARIE RAEL, AND BROOKE A. THOMAS
PART III
Making Black Lives Matter beyond Rutgers, 1973–2007
9 “It’s Happening in Our Own Backyard”: Rutgers and the New Brunswick Defense Committee for Assata Shakur
JOSEPH KAPLAN
10 Fight Racism, End Apartheid: The Divestment Movement at Rutgers University and the Limits of Interracial Organizing, 1977–1985
TRACEY JOHNSON
11 “Hell No, Our Genes Aren’t Slow!”: Racism and Antiracism at Rutgers during the 1995 Controversy
MEAGAN WIERDA AND ROBERTO C. OROZCO
12 “Pure Grace”: The Scarlet Knights Basketball Team, Don Imus, and a Moment of Dignity
LYNDA DEXHEIMER
Epilogue: Scarlet and Black: The Price of the Ticket
DEBORAH GRAY WHITE
Acknowledgments
Notes
List of Contributors
About the Editors
MIYA CAREY is is an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University. Her forthcoming manuscript examines the role of social organizations in coming-of-age black girls in Washington, DC, in the twentieth century.
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.
