“Still I rise, and Still I Rise” • “Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can” • “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem”• “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” • “Freedom is never given; it is won” • “If there is no struggle, there is no progress”

“Racial superiority is a m

ere pigment of the im

agination” • “I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks” • “The tim

e is always right to do what is right” • “Anger, used, does not destroy. H

atred does.” • “Prejudice is the child of ignorance” •

“The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.

- Roger Williams

As Roger Williams University cele-brated its 55th birthday this month, another university, also epony-mously named for Baptist freedom-fighter Roger Williams, would have celebrated the 128th anniversary of its founding.

Established in 1883 by Northern white Baptist ministers and South-ern African-Americans, Roger Wil-liams University in Nashville, Tenn. was one of Tennessee’s first universi-ties for freed slaves.

The Tennessean RWU’s roots grew out of Bible classes taught in the home of Daniel W. Phillips, a white Baptist minister originally from Massachusetts. As Reverend Phillips’s classes grew in popularity, he enlisted the help of fellow white ministers. Eventually, the ministers and their students needed bigger classroom space, which a local Afri-can-American pastor granted them, letting the teachers and students study in his church’s basement.

Growing in popularity, the school gained funding from the Ameri-can Baptist Home Mission School of New York (ABHMS) and local African-American donors. The min-isters and their students relocated their class spaces throughout the outskirts of Nashville, eventually settling on a 30-acre property on farmland, purchased for $30,000.

Joining Reverend Philips and his

colleagues were several African-American board of trustee members including Nelson G. Merry, the freed slave pastor who granted Phil-lips access to the church’s basement, and Robert. V. Vandavall, another prominent African-American min-ister.

The young university quickly ex-panded, adding a Master’s degree program three years after the school’s inception. Yet, the school’s growth would soon come to an abrupt halt, as the campus community became embroiled in controversy.

After a large portion of students angrily called for the resignation of an allegedly racist university presi-dent, the ABHMS, which had been planning to sell the school, backed out of its deal, which would have brought the university $150,000.

Controversy soon turned to trag-edy. In late January 1905, a fire razed the campus’s Centennial Hall, a main campus building. Four months later, another fire leveled another key campus building. For both fires, authorities were unable to determine the origins of the fires, leading some RWU community members to suspect foul play.

Following the devastating fires, the ABHMS closed RWU, dismantling its assets, subdividing the land and selling it to various buyers.

But the Nashville community missed its flagship African-American university, and soon began earnestly

calling for the reconstruction and reestablishment of RWU. African-American Baptists rallied around the cause, forming the Tennessee Missionary and Education Associa-tion, raising $10,000 to purchase a new campus at Whites Creek Pike in Northern Nashville. In 1909, the university officially reopened, with its first ever African-American presi-dent.

However, the reestablished univer-sity did not have the same enroll-

ment as its first incarnation. With only 159 students and 12 faculty members, RWU was forced to merge with Howe Institute in Memphis, another African-American Baptist institution.

The last RWU students and teach-ers moved to Memphis on Dec. 29, 1929.

B e fo re B r i s t o l : A n RW U fo r f re e d s l a v e s

People of African descent have been in the country since the 1600s – even longer than most Yankees. Newport probably has the greatest native African-American popula-tion, the blacks having remained there for 200-300 years because of the variety of trades that they were taught. That is to say, if they had been good enough an artisan, they would be treated with respect. In the early days, the black slaves married the native Wampanoags—whose territory extended from Narragan-sett Bay to the tip of Cape Cod—and many of their descendants still remain on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Islands.

“The blacks in Newport have al-ways been there, but those presently living in town [Bristol] are new to the town,” said Joan Roth. “Those black families living here when my mother was a teenager (my grand-mother had a black woman to do housework for her, who sang all the time) had gone by the time I was a teenager.”

In the 1930s, the African-Ameri-can element had been declining to around 1% of the current popula-tion in Bristol, according to census data.

“It was part of the old prejudice that they were limited,” Roth said.

However, during the Revolution-

ary and Civil Wars, black regiments, mostly from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, fought for this coun-try: to this day, flags are rolled out to commemorate these regiments and there are memorials in places where they fought.

The deWolf Family must be also considered in the context of Black History Month, as they were the most prominent slave trading fam-ily in Bristol. As an extended fam-ily, the deWolfs brought more slaves into the country than anyone else. This is the legacy that seems to re-sound for some of its descendants.

However, people should not live in the past for what their ancestors had done: obviously, some of the deWolfs are still haunted, so deeply exploring the history of their family as to travel to Africa and the Carib-bean.

One member of the family was so disturbed by her family history that she felt the need to address it. She got grants to make a film and sent letters out to the 200 members of the deWolf Family all over the coun-try: 12 responded. They packed their bags and went to Africa [Gha-na, in particular] and followed the path of the slave traders. They were shown where the slaves were put in dungeons. They next went to Cuba to General George deWolf ’s planta-tion: the houses were gone, but they saw the area where the slaves had

lived. She wrote a book on it. An-other deWolf, who also felt tarred, even if he was a distant relative from the general whose family was not in-volved in slavery, also wrote his own book. The first book was later made into a documentary shown PBS.

The state of Rhode Island observes Black History month annually and Roth used to be involved in black history celebrations.

“I used to bring my community chorus and members of the RWU chorus to the State House in Provi-dence [on MLK Day] and sing for a part of the ceremony: we would pick music by black composers, who made more of an impact on the music of this country than any other race. Steven Foster and even foreign composers like Antonin Dvorak were influenced by the mu-sic of Afro-Americans: they imitated the style. Dr. C. Alexander Peloquin of Rhode Island wrote music influ-enced by Afro-Americans, mostly spirituals. He wrote “Four Freedom Songs” dedicated to MLK: I had been part of the Peloquin Charade and we were about to perform at Ebenezer Baptist Church in AL, but Rev. King was assassinated, so we performed them later—some mourning, some jazzy. The Chorale also sang in Munich settings of Bach chorales with an Afro-American influence: they were actually well-received.”

This past weekend, on Saturday, Feb. 19, Dr. Stanley Lemons, Pro-fessor Emeritus of History at Rhode Island College, delivered a lecture on a document that researched and authored, which details the history of African American members of Rhode Island’s oldest church, the First Baptist Church; afterwards, a Black History Month reception was held for Keith Stokes, an African-American descendant of a New-port craftsman and a historian, and to benefit The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society.

But this organization itself keeps Black History Month in continu-ous movement by “procuring, col-lecting, and preserving books, pam-phlets, letters, manuscripts, prints, photographs, paintings, and any other historical material relating to the history of the Blacks in Rhode Island; encouraging and promoting the study of such history by lec-tures and otherwise; and publishing and diffusing information as such to history.” Its exhibition hours are from 10:30 AM to 3:30 PM, Mon-day-Friday (by appointment), and it is located at 65 Weybosset Street at the Arcade, Suite 29 in Providence, Rhode Island 02903. It can be reached at (401) 751-3490, for anyone interested in making an appointment.

BEN WHITMORE | Editor-in-Chief

B l a c k H i s t o r y Mo n t h : R e f l e c t i n g o n B r i s t o l ’s p a s t

During last November’s heated politi-cal season, a pair of Rhode Island leg-islators successfully petitioned to create a statewide ballot referendum asking citizens whether they wanted to change the official name of the state.

Though it’s the smallest state in the nation, Rhode Island’s official name is the longest of any other state. The ocean state is legally titled “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Planta-tions,” a name dating back to the state’s founding charter, secured by Roger Williams.

Anxious to establish the territory as its own colony, Williams submitted a peti-tion to the regional head of the Com-mission for Foreign Plantations, seek-ing the “Incorporation of Providence Plantations in Narragansett Bay.”

In the modern day Rhode Island political landscape, the state’s official name has become a hot topic. Starting 20 years ago, various state legislators and lobbyists have petitioned to have “and Providence Plantations” cut from the state’s name, claiming that the in-clusion of the word “plantations” re-flects the state’s insensitivity towards its history of slavery.

Aquidneck Island – home to mod-ern day Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport – was renamed to “Rhode Island” during the early days of the state. And while slavery was illegal in the areas around the city of Providence, it was legal on Aquidneck Island. So ironically, “Rhode Island” had a flour-ishing slave industry while what Roger Williams referred to as the “Providence Plantations” banned slavery.

Yet, modern state legislators Rep. Jo-

seph S. Almeida, D-Providence, and Sen. Harold D. Metts, D-Providence claim that although the “plantations” in the official state name do not refer to slave owners’ estates, the term still conjures offensive imagery to modern African-American Rhode Islanders.

Keeping “and Providence Plantations” in the state name is “ really a grave in-justice and an insult to people in our community,” Metts said, as quoted in a Providence Journal article.

Yet seemingly indefatigable ef-fort from their represented officials, Rhode Islanders, as a whole, are decid-edly against changing the official state name: though the referendum has been presented to voters numerous times in the past twenty years, the majority of citizens have voted against changing their state’s name.

Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations: What’s in a name?

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NICHOLAS TOMEO | Copy Editor

BEN WHITMORE | Editor-in-Chief

Information was derived from an article written by Bobbie Lovett from

Tennesee State University.

An academic class from Roger Williams University, in Nashville, Tenn.’s class of 1889.Jeremy King

Bristol’s deWolf Family: Colonial Rhode Island’s top slave traders of the era

PAGE 9FEATURESFEB.24, 2011 | | FEB.24, 2011| PAGE 8 | FEATURES