Researching the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley

Introduction

Obtaining an education has been both a challenge and an aim of Black residents of Massachusetts throughout the state's history. While education was not illegal for enslaved people in Massachusetts (as it was in other colonies), and in some instances enslaved children learned to read alongside white children, Black children in slavery and in freedom were often denied access to sources of literacy and numeracy skills. In 1787, Black residents of Boston petitioned the state legislature advocating for greater access to public education. A decade later, Black parents organized the Abiel Smith School, which met in the home of Primus Hall before moving, in 1808, into the first floor room of the African Meeting House (today part of the NPS African American National Historic Site in Boston). Segregation was first declared to be illegal in Boston schools in 1855, though the path to desegregated schools was long. Still, Black families were tenacious in their effort to secure educations for themselves and their children, and "by 1900, when W.E.B. Du Bois, himself a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate, compiled statistics for his paper 'The Black North: A Social Study' (1901), blacks across greater Boston had the highest literacy rates in the country, and one of the highest proportions of black professionals." See Tufts University's African American Trail Project).

In Massachusetts as elsewhere, African American families also launched informal educational institutions, as Black-led organizations--from literary societies to social clubs to church-based efforts--also advanced these aims.

In the Massachusetts section of the Connecticut Valley, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several colleges and in time the University of Massachusetts appeared, and each have their own unique connections to African American history. In recent years, initiatives to better understand those histories have emerged on each campus. Researchers interested in these stories should reach out to the college archivists on these campuses for more information.

Amherst College

The ways African American history and the history of Amherst College, founded in 1821, intersect are complex and contradictory. The wealth that made Amherst College possible was, like everything else in the antebellum Valley, deeply entangled with the Atlantic Slave Economy. For instance, founding trustee Israel Trask was deeply committed to plantation agriculture in Mississippi, and brought enslaved men and women to Massachusetts to work both in his home and in his cotton mill.

Amherst College graduated its first African American student, Edward Jones, in 1826. An Anti-slavery society was founded in the 1830s. On Black students at Amherst College later in the century see Mike Kelly, "Black Men of Amherst, 1877-1883," Consecrated Eminence, February 7, 2020.

Resources at Amherst College include:

“Afro-American Society/Black Students' Union Collection”

Charles Drew House Family Albums

Amherst College Clubs and Societies Collection.

Mount Holyoke College

See the college's "Diversity and Inclusion" timeline here: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/diversity/timeline

Smith College

See the website for the project "Responding & Organizing Against Racism at Smith:" https://libraries.smith.edu/special-collections/about/college-archives/research-guides/responding-organizing

UMass Amherst

The UMass Special Collections and University Archives holds many sources relevant for researching the histories of Black students and staff at the university.

The Black Presence Initiative
A major effort to document African American history on campus, the Black Presence Initiative, is unfolding in 2020-2022 and will be shared via a robust website soon.
An overview of African-Americans at UMass
Compiled by archivists in the University Archives, this overview focuses mainly on the histories of Black students at the university, and links to a number of digitized sources related to this history.
George Ruffin Bridgeforth
This article presents a biography of George Ruffin Bridgeforth, the first Black student to enroll at what was then known as the Massachusetts Agricultural College.
Edwin D. Driver
This link presents a biography of Edwin Douglas Driver, who was hired by the Sociology Department in 1948, becoming the first person of non-European descent to join the faculty and one of the first two Black Americans hired onto the faculty of a state flagship university in the twentieth century.

Springfield Central Library

Springfield's Central Library maintains a limited collection of Springfield college and public high school yearbooks dating from the early 1900s to the late 1980s, some are digitized. Yearbooks are also available for reference use at the Museum of Springfield History Library & Archives.