Black History at Dartmouth
The idea of presenting a history of black students at Dartmouth came to our classmate Forrester (Woody) Lee as he observed:
I was one of 12 Black Americans and one African student who entered Dartmouth with the Class of 1968. We believed we were among the first Blacks to reach the Hanover Plain. Should we have known that Dartmouth historians had written in 1913, “Many young men of African lineage have entered the College. The College had shown an unfailing hospitality to the Negro, even when the doors of other institutions were closed against him.” Nearly 200 Black men had preceded us at the College, a discovered truth still not fully understood 50 years after our graduation.
Men of color have entered the College on the Hill for instruction since 1775. Who were these men, and why did they choose Dartmouth, so parochial in its isolation? Upon graduating in 1841, one Black student pronounced, “The great characteristic of American slavery is its hatred of the free colored man,” Yet Dartmouth opened its doors to a class of men uniformly denigrated in American society. In these men, we learn of Dartmouth Black alumni who found a rare glimpse of opportunity in a society that had closed most doors to their success. Their progress and isolated achievements contrast with the record of severe trials faced by Black Americans in collective struggle. The seminar will examine the lives and times of historical Black alumni of Dartmouth and consider their relevance to today’s discussions of racial reckoning.
With the help of classmate, John Pfeiffer, '68, Woody approached Jay Satterfield of the Rauner Library at Dartmouth, to define the project and bring it to fruition. A generous donation from a distant cousin of Remus Grant Robinson, Dartmouth class of 1897 and a second donation from a close friend of Woody's made the project possible. A current undergraduate student under the supervision of Jay Satterfield has prepared multiple informational displays that will be shown in Baker Library and in other locations on campus. The project will be dedicated at a reception in the lobby of Baker Library on the afternoon of May 14, 2022, shortly after the dedication of the Frederick Douglass bust in the Rauner Library. In addition, Woody and John will present A History Lesson for Dartmouth Alumni in the D'68 Spring 2022 seminar series on May 9, 2022.
Woody has long been interested in the history of black students at Dartmouth, having co-authored a book, A Noble and Independent Course: The Life of the Reverend Edward Mitchell, documenting the history of Edward Mitchell, the first African American to graduate from Dartmouth in 1828. In addition, Woody created a website, African Americans @ Dartmouth College 1775-1960, documenting the history of Black men who attended Dartmouth.
Click Below to See the Full Blacks at Dartmouth Website
As described by Jay Satterfield of Rauner Library, the Rev. Edward Mitchell papers digitization project is a fascinating spin-off now coming to fruition. In 2024 Dartmouth will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Michell’s admission in 1828 as Dartmouth’s first student of African descent. Dartmouth has many interesting manuscripts related to his time at Dartmouth. The McCord Museum in Montreal has held Mitchell’s personal papers since the early 20th century. The collection includes 32 of Mitchell’s Dartmouth class compositions and religious writings from his Baptist ministry in Lower Quebec. The papers were unknown to Dartmouth until the 21st century. Their discovery opened a window into the life of an unusual man of color who had traversed a path of transnational migration from birth in Martinique to the U.S. and Canada. He was considered the “the most profound theologian” of Lower Quebec.
The McCord-Dartmouth collaboration will bring together primary documents from Edward Mitchell’s life to create a robust online digital collection available to the research community. Transcriptions will be encoded utilizing markup tools of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to facilitate online research exploration of the collection. The Class of 1968 has provided funds to complete the transcriptions.