About the Scarlet and Black Digital Archive
The Scarlet and Black Digital Archive is a publicly accessible educational resource that features primary sources documenting African American history at Rutgers University and in our surrounding communities.
The digital archive sheds light on the legacy of slavery and dispossession and serves as a companion to the three Scarlet and Black books, which trace the history of race at Rutgers from slavery to Black Lives Matter. This digital archive was curated by Jesse Bayker, with contributions from the Scarlet and Black research team and students in the Department of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. We have digitized a wide range of historical documents to make them accessible to scholars and educators for research and teaching.
Related digital projects include the oral history portal Black Voices at Rutgers and the searchable database New Jersey Slavery Records.
Scarlet and Black digital collections illuminate the history of Rutgers and slavery through primary sources such as runaway ads, account books, and slave sale receipts that document how university leaders and campus namesakes enslaved Black people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These sources—and thousands of other records related to slavery—have been added to the New Jersey Slavery Records database, which uses archival materials and digital maps to explore the history of slavery beyond Rutgers.
Digital exhibits on the Scarlet and Black website also highlight the experiences of the first African American students at Rutgers University in the early twentieth century, including alumni of Rutgers College and alumnae of Douglass College (previously the New Jersey College for Women). A collection of cartoons from the student magazine Chanticleer shows the racist imagery that awaited African Americans on campus in the 1920s. Collections related to the third Scarlet and Black book highlight the black student protest movement in Camden and anti-apartheid activism in New Brunswick.
This website also explores local black history in digital exhibits about the New Brunswick NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign and the rise of the KKK in New Brunswick in the 1920s. Additionally, the Scarlet and Black research team partnered with the Mount Zion AME Church (the oldest African American institution in New Brunswick) to digitize records from the Alice Jennings Archibald History Library and make them available to the community as part of this digital archive.