 Well, good afternoon to all who have joined us on today. We are delighted both to have this time with you and more importantly, to have this time with this great scholar and dear friend, our very own Dr. Gregory Nobles. Dr. Nobles comes to us, having, I got his undergrad from Princeton University, his PhD from the University of Michigan and is a professor emeritus of history at the, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served for approximately 33 years, both as a member of the faculty, as well as serving in several administrative posts at Georgia Tech. He is held two full-blight professorships, senior scholar in New Zealand back in 95, the John Adams Chair in American History in the Netherlands in 2002. He's held a number of residential fellowships, both at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society at the Huntington Library, the Princeton University Library and the Newberry Library. And in 2004, he was named a Distinguished Lectureship Program of the Organization of American Historians. After retiring from Georgia Tech, he held a Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in 2018 and 19, the Robert Richie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. And he has written extensively on the era between American Revolution and the Civil War, including John James Audubon, The Nature of the American Woodsmen, published in 2017. And he has now added to that illustrious record this wonderful book that we'll be discussing on today, The Education of Betsy Stockton, The Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. We are delighted to be in conversation with him today. I'm delighted to be a part of this time today. And I yield the floor now to Dr. Nobles. Well, thank you, Dr. Latimore. And thanks to the National Archives for sponsoring and organizing and making this event possible. It's really a delight, a good opportunity to reach out to a broader audience. And since Dr. Latimore was kind enough to introduce me, I shall do a brief introduction of him because it's something that I think is quite notable. David Latimore is the director, the inaugural director of the Betsy Stockton Center for Black Church Studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary, a position he's held for about a year by my count, or close to it. He came to Princeton from Tennessee, where he has served as senior pastor at 15th Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville. He taught at Belmont University. He acted as a minority student mentor and was associate director of the Academy of Preachers. He has a very strong educational and professional background. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago, his doctor of ministry from McCormick Theological Seminary, his master's in Divinity from Duke Divinity School, and his undergraduate degree is AB from Harvard University. After Harvard and before attending seminary, Dr. Latimore had a successful career in investment management and economic development. And I look forward to an equally successful career of his at the Betsy Stockton Center, where he's going to provide leadership for academic programming. He's going to promote research and a history of enslavement and its ongoing implications, which is a very important issue. He'll serve as a mentor to Princeton Seminary students and cultivate strategic relationships and partners between the seminary and the African-American community, getting across that divide between the academic institution and where real people live. And I think that's very, very important. So I'm delighted to have David Latimore as a partner in this conversation. And I want to thank you very much, David, for being part of it. And because we've had the privilege of fellowship outside of just this academic environment and this official environment, I'm going to refer to you as Greg and welcome references David as well. And I look forward to this fruitful conversation. I just want to dive right in to this very wonderful book that you have provided to all of us who have an interest in issues at the intersection of race and religion and history and education. And so let's dive right in as we can note from the very title, again, the education of Betsy Stockton and Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. And the work that you have crafted here charts the wondrous journey and borrowing from your language, Odyssey of Betsy Stockton's life. And there are plenty of places that we could begin in the conversation, but I'd like to just again, start at a larger or meta narrative, if you will, of this language of Odyssey and the ways in which that language is being deliberately used by you to craft this narrative. If you'd be gracious enough to really help us to understand what it is that you mean by Odyssey when you look at the life of Betsy Stockton and what are some of the ideas that are embedded in that that we ought to note as we encounter this wonderful work. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, the term Odyssey was chosen very carefully and very intentionally. And I think sometimes Odyssey has become a really a throwaway term, just a kind of long trip of voyage, a journey or something like that. But I wanted to think about Odyssey in the term as that Homer did in writing about Odysseus returning from the Trojan War. It was not just a sailing home. It was not just a journey back to his wife and family. It was a trip that was full of obstacles and threats and dangers. And I think of Odyssey in that term too, that way. Because when I think of Betsy Stockton, her journey through life, her geographic journey, but her personal journey is an Odyssey in the sense that it can't really be understood, can't really be appreciated unless we take account of the obstacle she faced as a black woman, single woman in the antebellum era, a woman born into slavery, frankly. And I will say too, that this book was a bit of an Odyssey for me because researching Betsy Stockton was quite a challenge in itself. There's not much archival record by her, not much written in her hand or in her voice. And so that required different means of going about doing research. How does one understand, know the life of somebody for whom we don't have a very extensive written record? And I can talk about that a bit more later, but I do want to say that the Odyssey is not just hers, it's also up in mine. And this might be a good point to bring in if we could the first slide. There we are. What I'd like to do would give you a very quick, and I do mean very quick overview of Betsy Stockton's Odyssey, her journey, her voice through life, and then we can go back and focus on different parts of that as they happen. Just very briefly in terms of biographical background, Betsy Stockton was born in 1798, although always we put a question mark because as a child born into slavery, nobody was keeping detailed records or giving her a birth certificate. But it says on her tombstone she was born in 1798 and I'll have to take that as close enough. She was born into slavery in the household of Robert Stockton, one of the most prominent men in Princeton, New Jersey. And Robert Stockton gave Betsy Stockton as a child to his daughter, Elizabeth Stockton Green. Elizabeth Stockton Green was married to another prominent man from Princeton, Ashple Green, and if we could have the next slide then. Well, I'll come back to that next slide if you wouldn't, yeah. Ashple Green was a very successful student, valedictorian of his class in 1783 at the College of New Jersey or what I would call Princeton as it's called now. He married Elizabeth Stockton Green in 1785. They moved to Philadelphia, where he became pastor of one of the most prominent churches in that town. Next slide please. The Second Presbyterian Church. It was one of the major religious institutions in Philadelphia. It was an integrated church. It served black people as well as white, although the black people sat in a gallery in a balcony and had separate communion from the whites. So there was an issue of religious inclusion but also segregation there, which I think is very important and it's very true throughout most religious institutions in the North and certainly as well as the South. In 1812, while Betsy Stockton was still living in Ashple Green's household, he got a job. The position is president of the College of New Jersey College or Princeton College, I'll call it. If you show the next slide. In 1812, he moved to Princeton, took Betsy with him. She was about 14 years old at the time, still in his household. It's not clear whether she was enslaved, still enslaved or had been emancipated. I think that Green emancipated her sometime between 1807 and 1810, but she was still not a free person. She was an indentured servant in Green's household and stayed that way until she was just about 20 years old, I believe. And I do wanna point out, it's important to know that Green was the eighth president of Princeton and the eighth president of Princeton to be a slaveholder. And the presidents and their enslaved people lived in that house on the right of the slide. That's the president's house at Princeton. It's now the alumni house, but it has rather a long legacy in terms of Princeton's connection to slavery. Betsy stayed in Princeton, again, as a not enslaved, but not altogether free person. And Princeton was a talent, next slide, please, where slavery was very much alive. This is an ad for a young woman about Betsy's age in 1816 to be sold. The person selling her was a member of the Princeton faculty and I think the connection between slavery and the Princeton faculty, including Asheville Green, the Princeton president, is one that needs to be noted. Stockton herself, was not enslaved, as I mentioned, but in 1813, soon after arriving in Princeton, Asheville Green sold her time, three years of her time, to another pastor down in Southern New Jersey, Woodbury, New Jersey. She was going to live in the household of the Reverend Nathaniel Todd, work there, help take care of his family, but also in the process to take advantage of his books, his library. He was a teacher, just as Asheville Green was a professor, and she was able to, in her spare time, of which there was not a lot, to continue her own self-education. But then in 1816, she comes back. She comes back to Princeton, next slide, please. And she joins the Princeton Presbyterian Church and it's hard to read the writing of the document here, but it says Betsy Stockton, a colored woman living in the family of the Reverend Dr. Green, has applied for admission and so forth, has been accepted into the church. This begins, I think, a very, very important period in her life, as a teenager, late teenager, probably 18 or so years old this time. She's back in Princeton, she joins the church, and I think what's significant here, too, is simply her name. That's the first time I've seen the use of the word Stockton. Up until then, Ashba Green referred to her variously as Betsy, Bet, Betty, but never with the last name. And there's no real documentary evidence of this, except for this church record, but I think that she actually took the name Stockton. It was an act of self-naming, which was a very important step, I think, for people who were emancipated from slavery. Next slide, please. She also very proudly put her name in a book. Not a great book by Thomas Branigan, The Flowers of Literature, but a very generous, rare book dealer in Princeton, New Jersey, Joseph Falcone, showed me this book with her name inscribed on the fly leaves. And it really struck me. It was quite an emotional moment to see this, because here it was an act of possession, writing her name in a book, an act of possession on the part of a young woman who had been at one point considered a possession herself. And I think that signature, or that autograph in the book is really a compelling piece of evidence. It's both documentary and for me, actually somewhat emotional. I will say that the book she had is a compendium of information about all sorts of things, but what's really striking about this book is that it has a preface and it's aimed at parents and children and teachers. And to the parents, it says, of course, you need to raise your children right. To the children, it says, you better behave or you're gonna wind up in hell. But to the teachers, it talks about what an important role they play in the lives of not just the children, but in lives of society. And I think this book came to Betsy Stockton. I'm gonna say she got it around 1816, 1817 while she was still living in Princeton. And it became, I think, an important part of her developing a sense of calling because by the late 18 teens, she's decided that what she wants to do is to teach, to teach black children. And that's what she eventually does throughout her life. But she doesn't do it in Princeton, at least not yet. Next slide, please. She meets a young man and he's much younger than he is here in this picture. This picture is 1863 when he's quite a bit older. Charles Samuel Stewart, about the same age as Betsy Stockton. He was born in 1795. She around 1798. He's a former student of Asheville Greens, both at the college and then at the Princeton Theological Seminary. And he's setting out to go on a mission to Hawaii, Sandwich Islands. He gets married right before he goes to Harriet Bradford Tiffany. They set out and they take Betsy with them. Betsy Stockton has decided that she's gonna go along on this mission to the Sandwich Islands to Hawaii. And I think there are many ways to look at that. One, it's simply a way to get out of the United States, to get out of a land and a region that still accommodates slavery. It's a sense of religious mission. And I think it might even be a form of what we might call self-colonization. Sending herself, taking herself to a foreign land at the time and beginning a new life for herself. An act of independence to a degree. If you show the next slide. Next slide, yeah. The Stewart's and Betsy Stockton go to New Haven, where in November of 1822, they get on board a whale ship called the Thames, which is the way they pronounce it in Connecticut. They're with a group of Protestant missionaries. They call themselves a missionary family. And they're heading out on this whale ship down the Atlantic around Cape Horn, all the way to the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands or what we now call Hawaii. It's a long and arduous five-month voyage. They assume they'll never come back that they will die in Hawaii. They have no return ticket for this trip. And it's a real sense of commitment. It's also a very long voyage in which Betsy Stockton very happily, for me and for all of us, keeps a journal. And it's a remarkable journal for travels. But it's also a journal of the difficulties she faces. She writes of her physical challenges, her spiritual challenges, sometimes her relationship with other members of the missionary family, her relationship with members of the crew, these whalemen. And but what she writes of a special in the midst of all of her physical difficulties and spiritual doubts and questions is of her growing relationship, her growing friendship with the stewards with Charles and Harriet Stewart. In fact, she becomes so close that she is the midwife when Mrs. Stewart delivers a child on board ship in April of 1823. Charles named Charles Seaforth Stewart and he becomes a lifelong friend of Betsy Stockton. The stewards in general do become, all of them become lifelong friends at first. Next slide, please. There we are, Hawaii. You can barely see, I think, just above what people call the big island is the island of Maui. And on that in the community of Lahaina, Betsy Stockton and the stewards set up their missionary station and she begins to teach. Next slide, please. This is Charles Stewart's drawing of Lahaina. You can see it's not a very well-developed area. It certainly is now, but at the time, they were living in rather limited huts. But what's striking here is that this is the time when Betsy Stockton really begins to find her sense of calling. She does what she's set out to do. She does it in a rather tumultuous environment. I'll just point out very briefly and I'll come back to this, perhaps, that Hawaii is going through rather remarkable cultural and economic changes at this time. The great king Kamehameha I had recently died. The missionaries recently arrived to start preaching Christianity, but also had arrived were merchants and mariners, people involved in the sandalwood trade and whaling. And this mixture of native Hawaiian people, missionaries and mariners and merchants made for rather conflicted society. And Betsy Stockton was living within that. That, again, was part of one of the steps on her odyssey, one of the obstacles in her odyssey. But despite all that, despite what was going on among the missionaries, the other missionaries and the merchants and the native people, she begins to teach. And she begins to teach not just to the elites, but she's the first one to teach to ordinary people, the children of farmers on the island. And that really, I think, becomes her calling. She spends the rest of her life teaching and teaching literacy above all, to ordinary people of color, not to the wealthy by any means. Next slide, if you will. Her journal was published by of all people, Ashple Green, who has left Princeton in rather sad circumstances, gone to Philadelphia and started a new newspaper called The Christian Advocate. And he runs Betsy Stockton's journal in series from 1824 through 1825. And it's a remarkable presentation of the writing of this young woman. And she is a remarkably well-educated and a self-educated woman. And I have to pause here and say that she got her months of education in Ashple Green's house using Ashple Green's library without much assistance from Ashple Green himself. There's a suggestion, some of his sons helped her, but she became not just literate, she became a real intellectual. And when you read her journal, she's able to quote from the Bible, to quote from Milton, to quote from other sources. And you get a sense that this is a very well-read woman, remarkably well-read woman, who had never gone to school a day in her life. All the education she had, she got for herself. And Green recognizes that, and he talks about that and says, this is a journal, it's very well-written. Even though she's a person of African descent, he tells his readers, you should take it seriously. And I think they do, and I certainly do. Next slide, please. The problem, even though Betsy Stockton, the stewards, had planned to stay in Philadelphia for the rest of their lives, they couldn't or they didn't. Harriet Stewart becomes ill, they go back to the United States and Betsy Stockton comes with the stewards. She's developed that strong friendship with them. She goes back to the Cooperstown, where they were from, or where Harriet was from for a couple of years. But in 1828, she gets a remarkable job offer. She gets a letter from some women in Philadelphia who were starting an infant school, or black children, and they want her to be the principal, the lone teacher. She's gonna have an opportunity to go down and be a professional, have some measure of independence, and earn what, for a black woman at the time, was a pretty good living, $200 a year, and then she got a raise to 250. And the red dot here is her school. There were three other infant schools. And I'll say that infant schools were designed for children between the ages of two and five, what we would now call kindergarten or pre-K. And the goal in the infant school movement was, yes, to provide education, but also to provide some means of social uplift, social controlling. There was a concern that the children of the poor were falling into bad habits on the street. They would wind up being criminals. They would wind up being a burden to society. And so the idea was to create these infant schools that would give them education, moral uplift, and frankly, a place to be other than on the street. Betsy Stockton's school was one of the four in Philadelphia, but it was the one that was separate and very unequal from the others. If you go to the next slide, please. There's rather an elaborate fundraising effort for infant schools, organized by Matthew Carey, one of the most prominent printers and polemicists in Philadelphia. But in the case of the black school or the colored school, as they called it, the fundraising was separate and it was kept separate from the monies raised for the white schools. And it wasn't as much raised by any means. And you can see here in this slide, not just the names of the major donors, several of whom, Mrs. Cassie, Mrs. Cassie, Mrs. Douglas, Mr. Fortin, are prominent African-American members in Philadelphia, but also a large number of people of color contribute a dollar annually from the fund. And I think that raises for me questions of what it is white people and black people saw in these schools. White people saw, yes, education, yes, moral reform, yes, some measure of social control, and even perhaps preparation for colonization to Africa. But I don't think that was the only motive of the black community. Black people knew black parents, certainly did, that Philadelphia could be a dangerous town for black children. They could be kidnapped, they could be taken down to the South on ships and enslaved. And I think that the infant school that Betsy Stark and Rand provided, not just an educational institution, but a safe haven, a social haven for children, and also an opportunity for black parents to connect on a daily basis as they drop their kids off, which parents always do when they leave their kids at school. She was a remarkably successful teacher. The visiting committee of white women came in frequently. They said she's doing an illustrious job, the school is flourishing, things are great. And they did so until briefly in the summer of 1830, Betsy Stark went away. She went to Canada. She had been recruited to start another infant school in Ontario for indigenous children. He got that up and going, came back to Philadelphia, resumed her position at the infant school in Philadelphia, but then fate intervened once again. Her dear friend Harriet Stewart up in Cooperstown died, and Betsy Stockton went to Cooperstown to take care of the Stewart children. And then after a couple of years, she moved with them down to Princeton, New Jersey, and came back to Princeton, the place of her birth, the place where she had spent her time as a teenager, the place she had left in order to go to Hawaii, but now she was back. Next slide, please. Can you do the next slide? And there is a picture of Princeton about the time Betsy Stockton came to town roughly. I always talk about Princeton as a tale of two streets. The street you see there with the carriage going is Nassau Street right in front of Nassau Hall, the main building on the college campus. But you can also see coming out of Nassau Hall and going right into the foreground of the picture, a walkway, and that becomes another street, another spoon street, and it's a witherspoon street that leads into Princeton's black community. And I will say that Princeton's black community was sizable, upwards of 600 people, sometimes 18 to 20% of the town's population, a non-trivial community, and a very difficult community, I think, for black people. And I think we might, I'll just pause it there with Betsy arriving in Princeton in the 1830s with the campus on one side, with Witherspoon Street on the other. And, David, I think I'll return the conversation to you. The journey that you've laid out so far has so many interesting threads, and you conclude with this picture of Princeton, which it begs the question that you've touched upon through your comments, but I really appreciate kind of your additional thoughts. We see the ways in which educational institutions, the church, the larger issue of race and the way it plays itself out in Betsy Stockton's life, how they're all commingled and all exerting influence, both in shaping elements of Betsy Stockton's journey, but as well, having repercussions to the broader community in the state of blacks and whites. And I wonder if you'd just comment a bit on how you have both encountered these institutional influences and what conclusions might you have come to as you begin to examine the interwovenness of these places and, again, the influence that they've exerted, the educational systems, the church systems, the broader issues of race in this community and the Princeton community. I'd love to hear your reflections on those aspects of this narrative. Of course. I think it's important to point out that Princeton, even though it's in the North, even though it's in New Jersey, has been called a very Southern town and Princeton College was the Northern School for Southern Boys. At various times in the antebellum era, about half the Princeton student body at the college came from slave-owning states or the slave states in the deep South. And I think that, I say sometimes, Princeton had a Southern accent, both the college and the larger community. That had an influence on Princeton. It had been, frankly, a recruitment approach that they had adopted in the 18th century. Princeton knew it couldn't really compete with Harvard and Yale for students in the North. And so they focused their efforts on getting a lot of many students from the South, which they did. But those students from the South came with their attitudes about race and slavery. And that became very much embedded in the life of the college and also in the life of the community. Can you go to the next slide, please? Yeah, it also affected an institution you know very well, Dr. Latimore, and that is the Princeton Theological Seminary, which had been started, or at least partly influenced by Asheville Green back in the 18 teens. And the Theological Seminary likewise had a very, I'll say a Southern flavor to it. Some of the leading faculty members there were from Virginia, or they had very strong Southern connections. Princeton Theological Seminary became a center of colonization activity. The notion that black people, free blacks and enslaved blacks could be sent to Africa. Or as people said at the time, sent back to Africa, even though many of them had never been in Africa in the first place. And I think colonization became a real dividing line, a real kind of cultural litmus test between black people and white people. Many white people saw colonization as a means of dealing with the worst aspects of slavery, but that meant getting the enslaved people not just out of slavery, but out of the country. And after a brief fascination with colonization, most black people said, this is not for us. We don't want to be sent away, we live here too. And so I think the divide between whites and blacks over colonization is a very important part of antebellum history. It's a very important part of Princeton's history, both the college, the Theological Seminary and the community at large. So these two educational institutions play a very important role. But also we'll see the emergence of two religious institutions. If we can go to the next slide, please. These are the two Presbyterian churches in Princeton as of 1840. On the left is the main Presbyterian church, the one in which Asheville Green had worshiped, the one in which Betsy Stockton had worshiped and did worship when she came back in the 1830s. But in 1835, that church burned down, burned to the ground. And while it was being rebuilt, the white members of the congregation decided that it would be much to their preference if the black members would go elsewhere. And there are about 90, more than 100, actually black members of the church, both enslaved and free people. And over the course of several years, from 1835 until 1840, the black people from the Princeton Presbyterian church were urged very much to go and worship on their own, in some place else. And finally in 1840, even though I think they resisted being sent away, they established their own church, the Willisburg Street Presbyterian church, which still stands today as a very important part of the Princeton's community, not just the black community, but community in general. And that became Betsy Stockton's church. She became a very, very active figure in that church as a member of the congregation, but also as a Sunday school teacher. And she was a very central figure in the Sunday school. Her friend, Anthony Simmons, the wealthiest African American in Princeton, by far, helped establish a Sunday school, but Betsy Stockton became one of the lead teachers and a consistent teacher over time. And that was again, an aspect of her commitment to education. She provided education in the Sunday school. Yes, literacy, Bible study, but I think also the notion that these things could be important tools, not just for Sunday, but for every day of the week. Literacy was a critical tool. And a lot of white people had tried to deny literacy to black people. And so even though I think we might take Sunday school and education in general, rather for granted these days as being kind of innocuous institutions, they're not. They're not. Her role in teaching in the Sunday school and also in teaching in a public school, she was the sole teacher in Princeton's black public school for over 30 years, a remarkable job. So six days a week, money through Friday and Sunday, she was teaching children. And I think that commitment to teaching both in religious terms and in even more secular terms was a critical part of her life, was a critical part of the community of Princeton, certainly the black community. I think that's a critical part of her legacy, Franklin. It reflects one of the real richness of both the history of blacks in this country and the history of black churches in this country and this particular story, the way it begins within the context of the influence of educational institutions, the context of Reverend Green serving ultimately as the president of Princeton Seminary. So always in the backdrop and the ways in which it provided opportunities for Betsy Stockton, even though frustrated in her attempts to nonetheless persevere and self-educate and the ways in which it shaped the rest of her journey, you see this recurring theme in Philadelphia and then her return to Princeton. And again, I think it speaks to not only within the context of this narrative and this story that is unfolding, the importance of education, but it really talks to an important element of these institutions, the black church, the black community and the ways in which literacy and education provided such a hope and aspiration of what could be that they pursue, we see many examples of the pursuit of education in spite of the tremendous obstacles that were put in front of blacks at this time. So I think if you really, there are several things that you've tapped into and certainly the issue of education is extremely important. And one of the ones for which influence, I think Betsy Stockton serving as the namesake for our institution that as the seminary was beginning to consider the events of this historical story and the ways in which it's hands, the seminary's hands were not innocent of the stain of slavery. The seminary really had a commitment to take some action that would reflect this acknowledgement and in this language, both as confession and repentance for that involvement. It wanted to have a moment that celebrated this long history of commitment to education on the parts of blacks. And it wanted to establish a center that would be instrumental to the continuation of many of the themes and conversations that emerge out of men and women of color who are committed to exploring the richness and depth of at the seminary's perspective of religious education and the ways in which it can make a meaningful impact on human life. It wanted to celebrate the ways in which that conversation had already and consistently been a part of the black church, the black community. And as the seminary began to look around, it recognized that the Betsy Stockton story exemplified so many of the trends and techniques and the approaches and the commitments around blacks and education that it wanted the center to reflect. That Betsy Stockton really serves as an aspirational image for us and not an abstraction, but in the reality of her lived experience, there are so many wonderful things to celebrate about this connection between race, religion and education. And it shapes the ways in which even the center looks out and understands its role in even in this contemporary moment. So she winds up being such a wonderful representative and her life filled with examples of, again, the centrality of these issues and is reflected in the ways in which the center, the Betsy Stockton Center now views its mission and its hope for its existence. So, again, what I was appreciative of the work that you've provided for us is the ways in which it begins to capture just glimmers of these intersections and these issues that are certainly important to the center as well. I noted that you mentioned the movement to Witherspoon, which I think you correctly mentioned continues to be under the leadership of Paso Ocala in June Bay, continues to be an instrumental institution here. And what was noteworthy in your book, you began your comments here reflecting on Betsy Stockton being acknowledged as a member of the Presbyterian Church and the ways in which her full name is there and there's not the notation of slave or indentured. And then later in a later chapter, you also mentioned that her name appears, I guess at the top of the list, of African-Americans who are dismissed from the Presbyterian Church, the First Presbyterian. And so how interesting that at two important points, she is well-represented, both for the best or at least for the pursuit of religious relationship, involvement, et cetera, and also in the dismissal. And again, how representative is that moment of dismissal to the way we are to understand both the celebratory parts of African-Americans establishing independent religious institutions and the ways in which the other side of that coin was often was a rejection, it reflected rejection by predominantly white congregants and institutions to rid themselves of the presence of blacks. I wonder, is that something that we can see in as a bit of a trend? Is it somewhat, is it an action that was really should be noteworthy of us and not isolated just to this moment? Well, I think we look at the history of black churches in the North, independent black churches. We think of the more celebrated ones like Richard Allen's church in Philadelphia, Absalon Jones, a little bit later John Loughlin's church. And we see those as almost defiant acts of religious independence. And I think that's a very important part of that story. What I think is exceptional about the Witherspoon story is that it wasn't a breakaway congregation. It wasn't that the black people, black congregants chose to move, leave. They were pushed out. They were pushed out. I call it a pushaway congregation. But once that had become clear that there was no going back to the first Presbyterian, they established that church and it became a thriving, a very important church in the 1840s and early 50s that had two, I think very significant black pastors, Alimas, Pace and Rogers, and probably most notably, in my mind, Charles Gardner, who had been a very important abolitionist and iconizationist in Philadelphia. He came to Witherspoon in 1849, I believe it was, gets embroiled in a dispute with a member of the Princeton Theological Seminary who's overseeing the Sunday School. And it becomes enough of a dispute that finally Gardner leaves. But I think the presence of Rogers Gardner and then later, of course, Paul Robeson's father, William Drew Robeson, really puts Witherspoon on the, I think, not just the theological, but also the political map back in the 19th century. And you mentioned a moment ago why the Theological Seminary now has chosen to, I guess, incorporate, celebrate Betsy Stockton. I think we've all been at an important point when American colleges and universities, certainly on the East Coast, have begun to examine their own connections to slavery. And those connections are very complicated, they're very deep, and they're inescapable. They're absolutely inescapable. And Princeton is not just the only one. I think that other universities, particularly Brown University, had begun looking into this. And I think that what's striking even now is the way in which Princeton University as an institution and the Princeton Theological Seminary as an institution have gone about their respective investigations. And I will say this, that the study of Princeton University's involvement in slavery stems largely from the work of very dogged and important work of my colleague, Professor Marnie Sandweiss in the History Department, who started the Princeton and Slavery Project about 10 years ago. And she and students and professors, one of whom is me, have written about Princeton's connection to slavery at universities. But this has done so without direct institutional support from the upper administration. And I think what's important about the Theological Seminary, and you know this better than I, I'm sure, is that it was an institutional effort, a very conscious, self-conscious institutional effort, to look the past, to think about the present and think about the future. And I think that your involvement, your role in leadership in the Betsy Stockton Center for Black Church Studies is a very strong indication of that commitment to recognizing the past, but also to moving forward in the future. Absolutely, one of the things that drew me to the institution, to the seminary, was both the fact that some effort had been made to examine the history of the institution. And I think it takes a real commitment, and I encourage, quite frankly, to address not just the auditory elements of one's history, but really to look at even those places where herd and harm has been done to communities and to acknowledge it and to work your way through it. So I was drawn to the reality of that analysis, the involvement of the institution. And certainly it does not mean that there is not a need for continuing evaluation. There are far more stories beyond Betsy Stockton's that can be unearthed, even from the archives of the seminary, but the likelihood of that occurring increases given the work that's already been done. So I have a confidence of the institution's willingness to really examine these important issues. Listen, I do want to, I want to come back to this conversation there, but I can hear my colleagues and particularly my women colleagues whispering in my ear saying, as you look at this story that unfolds in the book and with the life of Betsy Stockton, are there particular points where you see the influence of not only her race and her birth into slavery, but also her gender playing a role in the way the story unfolds? Of course, of course. I mean, certainly as a young woman born in the slavery but emancipated, she still had very limited choices in life. If she had stayed in Princeton, New Jersey, from her teens on, the likelihood is that no matter how much she had educated herself, no matter how much she had studied and read, she was gonna wind up being a domestic of some sort. The main occupation for women in Princeton, black women in Princeton was washer and ironer and that's very clear from the census records. And I think that by getting out, getting away, going in this missionary family where she was not considered all to get there in equal, I have to point out, she gained the kind of independence, the kind of confidence that maybe middle class white women might gain by going to female academies. She never had that opportunity. When she comes back and she's teaching in Philadelphia, as I said, she started out making 200 a year and then 250. But one of the teachers in the mail said that, one of the mail teachers in another school was making $500. You know, there's always economic inequality between men and women. And I think that as a woman, as a figure, an important figure in a community like Princeton, she becomes, I use the term sometimes a matriarch of the community. People talked about her presence, her power. And she was very supportive of other women. I think that's important to say too. In her will, when she's making out her will in 1862, she leaves her clothing to another woman, another member of the Sunday School faculty, but also a woman who is a washer iron for her profession, if you will. Betsy Stockton leaves her her clothes, her clothing. Now, you know, I don't know exactly if the clothing fit, but I don't think it was a question about clothing. I think it was a way of saying to her, this is my clothing, this is me, this can be an inspiration and a validation of you. Now, Betsy Stockton never married, never had children of her own. And that's, I think, one of the great puzzles about her. There are many reasons why that might have been the case. It could have been a desire for independence, just not wanting to have to deal with the husband and all the complications that always come with that. It might have been her sense of mission that she thought there was something more important for her in life and her calling than marriage. It could have been a question of sexuality. And those questions are hard to unpack. It could have been, frankly, all three. We just don't know from the remaining record. But I think to see Betsy Stockton as this powerful figure in this community, this black community, and frankly, well-respected in the white community. I talk of her as a pillar of the black community but a bridge to the white. And I think she had in a town that had so much respect for education, or at least educational institutions. Betsy Stockton was the kind of educated person, again, self-educated person, that people couldn't simply ignore. She was not just another woman in the town, not just another black woman, not just another domestic woman. She was the only person in the black community who carried the very important title of teacher. And she had a role that went beyond instruction day to day. It was a role of nurturing children, both boys and girls, no doubt working with their parents, particularly their mothers. And I think to find a female figure of that stature, of that significance, and that doggedness, that's what I really think is remarkable about Betsy Stockton. She lives in Princeton for over 30 years. And she teaches almost until the day she dies in 1865. And it's that sense that I think is very important. She's not a famous figure like Harriet Tubman. She's not a famous figure like the journey crew, certainly not like Frederick Douglass. But she's one of those people, and I think they need to be recognized and celebrated. One of those people who work day to day at the grassroots level, making a community intact, keeping a community intact. And especially in a black community in a town like Princeton, which was very conservative on questions of race and very hostile environment for many black people, to maintain those institutions is not just a form of providing education or spiritual uplift. It's also a question of providing, again, a kind of haven, but also a means of resistance. And this is why I think teaching, even though it's something we take for granted, we take it for granted so much that you and I do it. But it was a radical act in the early 20th century, a radical act for black people. And certainly a radical act for a teacher, a woman to be in charge of a school and not reporting directly to a male principal, a male superior. And so I think that I have to try to understand, try to appreciate the significance of Betsy Stockton's gender because again, in terms of an odyssey, that's one of the main obstacles she faced throughout her life. And it never went away. Wherever she turned, she was always black, she was always female. There's no getting around that. I think she had to find some way to navigate that throughout her life, whether she was in Princeton or in Hawaii or Philadelphia, back in Princeton again. That's the world she lived in. That was an important, yes, again, an important part of her own odyssey. One of the things, again, about the way this story unfolds in your work is, it again reminds us of, not only the centrality of education, but also the centrality of the church as elements of her journey, and particularly the black church. And you and I were having a conversation around, again, the influences of Betsy Stockton on even the Betsy Stockton Center at the Seminary. And it is the reality that the black church has historically been such a central point to fanning the flames and fueling the desires of African-Americans to pursue education as a way of liberation and a way of advancement. And even in this moment, our perception is that the church continues to play a central role. And part of what the center is designed to do, and I think in an effort to live up to the legacy of Betsy Stockton, is to contribute to the thinking and strategies and asking the questions of how do we best continue this historic role of the black church to pushing issues of liberation to men and women across the United States and recognizing, again, the history of individuals like Betsy Stockton and their commitment to these issues of education. How can we best reflect that? So she serves, again, as kind of a North Star force to provide us with a set of aspirational objectives. And we are not only grateful to her story, but grateful to the retellings of her story, such as the work that you've done to kind of expand the ways in which we see these uncovered gyms and reflections of the very best of blacks in very arduous circumstances. Listen, we've only got a few more minutes here, but I do want to offer you just the space to provide any closing reflections on this work that you've done and your encounter with the life of Betsy Stockton as a historian and your perceptions of its continuing relevance even to the conversations that we're having in our country at this time. So any final reflections that you have, I welcome. Well, I'd like to pick up on a point you made a moment ago, just about the many stories. And then there are many stories that they just haven't been told yet, or at least haven't been told in a way that we can get access to. You know, I, first of all, I would like to see more work on Betsy Stockton. I've heard there's an opera in the works. I know that there's poetry written about her, children's books. I don't consider my book to be the last word on Betsy Stockton, it's the current word. But I'd like to see it as a foundation of future work. And again, not just about Betsy Stockton herself. I think there are hundreds, indeed thousands of people like her. Those people who work at the grassroots, those people who make communities work, whether in the 19th century or in the 21st century. And once you get past the, what I call the political pantheon of the sojourner truce and the Harriet Tubman's and the Frederick Douglass's, they're all those people, all those people at a lower level and very courageous and dogged and determined people. And I think that their stories are out there. I had to struggle to write Betsy Stockton's story, to find the evidence, to find the documentation. And I can tell you it's hard. I could spend another hour talking about that, but mercifully I won't. But I do think that for other scholars, other writers, and I think, frankly, this is a particular issue that you can promote at the Betsy Stockton Center. And that is how do we find, how do we tell, how do we make meaning out of all the stories of people that we've not known before? I don't think we need another book about, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson, although I'm sure there'll be a bunch more. But I think of people who are like Betsy Stockton, who are engaged in a form of resistance to the status quo, engaged in a form of resistance to the pervasiveness of not just slavery, but racism in America. And how do they go about that? How do they do that? And how do they do that sometimes quietly, sometimes anonymously? But I think that our job as writers, scholars, is to bring them out of that anonymity, and to give some visibility to these people, who I think once you begin to realize how many there are, can be an inspiration, not just about the past, but about the present and the future. People can see themselves, I think, in these stories, and I hope they do. And that to me is that having now finished this book, that to me is, I think, its legacy. I hope people read it not just as a scholarly text, but I hope they read it and can see, and even can perhaps in their own ways imagine, tell their own Betsy Stockton story from the evidence available. It's not the last word, I think it's one of the first words. Amen. Well, there is a richness in this story and the realization that there are many other stories that might also encourage our hearts. Thank you, Dr. Nobles, for this time. I've been delighted both to have read the book, but also to be engaged in this and made the many conversations that we have. And the center certainly looks forward to also making a contribution to the thought and liberation of people of oppression. Borrowing from the images that emerge from our history. So thank you again for your time and the work that you provided on today. Thank you, Dr. Lionmore. And again, thanks to the National Archives for having this opportunity to speak. Appreciate it very, very much.