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Dr. Washington was speaking at a uniquePatriots Week appearance at Gallery 125, addressing the challenge of researching regional African-American history and genealogy.
"And there were also blacks who received Masters Degrees right about the time of (President) Woodrow Wilson," he said.
- That the black community was developed by slaves coming from the South.
"That’s not true," said Jack Washington. "They were there as early as Colonial times in the 1600s. The Dutch brought them there" from New Amsterdam (now, of course, New York).
- That blacks in Princeton were all slaves.
"That’s not true, either," Washington said. "There was a large free black population living in Princeton who owned land and developed businesses."
It was stunning to learn that blacks attended Princeton University 195 years before women!
"We talked about John Quaumino and Bristol Yamma," he said. They were slaves whose freedom was bought by Pastor Samuel Hopkins and the members of the First Congregation Church of Newport, R.I.
They were taught at Princeton -- then known as the College of New Jersey -- for two years beginning in 1774, by none other than President John Witherspoon. TheRevolutionary War intruded in 1776.
Dr. Washington told story after story about the people of Trenton and Princeton, "the center of the world, with presidents and kings and scientists and writers, scholars and actors."
He told of Albert Einstein, unkempt, disheveled, often visiting the black community:
"The kids, they thought he was a rag-picker, and they would laugh and say, ‘Who is that crazy guy?’ but here was a man whose mind might be three galaxies away, he was such a genius, and someone would say, "Ohh, that’s Dr. Einstein," said Jack Washington.
"And here he was, he would play stickball with the kids."
And he told of a legendary black woman named Sylvia DuBois who was so old that she could remember her father returning from the Revolutionary Battle of Princeton.
Dr. Washington said she had physically whipped her master and run away to freedom. He said she lived through the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the passage of two major amendments affecting blacks. She froze to death in a shack in her 122nd year, in 1888.
Two dozen attendees were enthralled. Lawyer Diane Ciccone, 53, of Princeton Junction, is the descendant of a runaway slave and has traced her lineage back to 1760. She said she’d known nothing about blacks in Trenton.
"What I found interesting was that legislation in 1881 was passed in Trenton to integrate the schools, that everybody had the right to a public education," Ciccone said.
And she pointed to modern-day legislation, the 2002 Amistad Commission law ordering public schools to teach black history -- a law, she says, that is being ignored.
Bea Scala-Fischler of Trenton learned a lot. "I didn’t know," she said, "that Woodrow Wilson stood against admitting black people to the university in the 1920s -- I didn’t know that."
Amazing how nasty old skeletons come rattling out of the quiet textbooks of history, to give perspective. "Historical research can do that," she said.
Dr. Washington has written three books:
- In Search of a Community’s Past: the Black Community of Trenton, N.J., 1860-1900;
- The Quest for Equality, Trenton’s Black Community, 1890-1965, and
- A Long Jersey Home, a Bicentennial History of the Black Community of Princeton, N.J., 1776-1976.
They are available at Macawbers and the Princeton University Books stores, Princeton, and by ordering through www.bookcommitteeone.org and through the major chains.
