Shining a Light on Enslaved People at Liberty Hall

By Tyler Clark | Published by April 28, 2021

Despite being one of the most diverse universities in the country, the land on which Kean stands was once worked on by enslaved people. As the extremely diverse student population walks to and from classes, they unknowingly retrace the steps of the enslaved.

Rather than shy away from the connection between enslaved people and the history of New Jersey, Kean has chosen to use it as a tool to educate the public.

Dr. C. Brid Nicholson, associate professor and assistant chair of history and director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program, is working on a project that will showcase the connection between the Liberty Hall estate on the Kean campus in Union, NJ, and enslaved people during the 18th century.

Dr. Nicholson is using documents from the Liberty Hall Collection. Most of the collection is from the 1780s-1830s and contains over 4,000 documents from the Livingston family, the Kean family, and other families related through marriage.

Dr. Nicholson has begun to analyze those documents in order to find the names of enslaved people and create a database that identifies them. The database currently contains information on about 150 enslaved people. Not all of them lived at Liberty Hall; many were in homes in the South owned by Liberty Hall’s occupants.

“My hope with this is that eventually we will have a database connected where we will literally be able to have biographies of as many of the enslaved as we can,” Dr. Nicholson said.

Dr. Nicholson is incorporating her work with the Liberty Hall Collection into her History class “Special Topics in History: Enslaved and Liberty Hall”. Students in the class are working with Liberty Hall in order to redesign their tours so that they will include names and biographies of the enslaved.

The class is also putting together an outline for an exhibit that explains the history of the enslaved at Liberty Hall. This will be the first-ever exhibit at Liberty Hall that will focus on the identities of the enslaved.

The documents in the Liberty Hall Collection are currently stored at the Special Collections Research Library and Archive at Kean University.

Erin Alghandoor, head archivist of the Special Collections Research Library and Archive, is currently uploading the Liberty Hall Collection to the Learning Commons website. Alghandoor has helped in digitizing about 100 of the 4,000 documents and will continue adding more.

Here is a link to the Liberty Hall Collection on the Learning Commons website.

Alghnadoor believes that the documents in the Liberty Hall Collection are important because they give a first-hand look at history.

“This gives us the most behind-the-scenes look that we can get into that time period,” Alghnadoor said, “You really get to know the characters and through that, you get to see history in a way that you don’t get to see when you’re looking at secondary sources.”

Once Kean reopens completely in the Fall of 2021, the Special Collections Research Library and Archive will be open to the public. Alghnadoor encourages the public to look through the documents themselves and help uncover the names and stories of the enslaved.

Here is a link to the Special Collections Research Library and Archive on Instagram.

Dr. Elizabeth Hyde, professor and department chair of history, has worked with Dr. Nicholson, the archivists at the Special Collections Research Library, and Liberty Hall in analyzing and organizing the documents.

Dr. Hyde believes that this will be an important opportunity for Kean students to grapple with the legacy of slavery in New Jersey.

“It marks an important opportunity for us to help Kean students understand that the institution of slavery was not something that was confined to the Confederate South,” Dr. Hyde said.

Dr. Jonathan Mercantini, Acting Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, in 2012 published the first statement revealing the connection between enslaved people and the Kean and Livingston families.

He received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2018, which allowed Kean to conduct a multiyear study of the world of William Livingston.

The website “William Livingston’s World” was created using funding from the grant. It contains digitized versions of the Liberty Hall Collection. The website also contains resources that can be used to teach students about the institution of slavery in the North.

Here is a link to the website.

Dr. Mercantini feels that the Liberty Hall Collection is significant because it is an integral part of New Jersey’s history.

“The Kean and Livingston families are among the most significant New Jersey political families that go back to the Revolutionary War generation and that are still relevant to today,” Dr. Mercantini said.

Dr. Nicholson gave a virtual talk about the work she is doing with the Liberty Hall Collection on March 23 that was uploaded to the Kean History Department Youtube channel.

Here is a link.

“It’s really important in history that we flip the narrative. In other words, we stop looking at history the way it’s always been taught and we flip it. And we look at who history is about, who history impacts,” Dr. Nicholson said.

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