Guides by Topic
Rutgers and Slavery
Many early trustees, officers, benefactors, and students at Queen's College (now Rutgers University) exploited enslaved labor and participated in the transatlantic and domestic slave trade. We have digitized many primary sources documenting their links to slavery and have integrated them into the New Jersey Slavery Records database. Our index of Rutgers affiliates and namesakes provides an entry point for these documents in the database.
Index: Rutgers affiliates and namesakes
Our book provides a deep dive into the history of Rutgers and slavery.
Book: Scarlet and Black, Volume 1: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, edited by Deborah Gray White and Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University Press, 2016).
Interstate Slave Trade and Kidnapping
We have digitized and indexed over a hundred sources related to the interstate slave trade, and we are working to add more records to highlight this topic. These sources include many legal documents authorizing the movement of enslaved New Jerseyans to the Deep South. Many of these documents were falsified by unscrupulous officials, and we have created a guide to help you understand how these documents were created and used in human trafficking.
Guide: Understanding Interstate Slave Trade & Kidnapping Documents
Index: Removal Records
We have also added newspaper articles about the kidnapping and trafficking of African Americans in New Jersey and the surrounding region.