Part III: Somerville, NJ: Timeline to School Integration
Somerville has a rich and deep educational history. In 1911, Frederick H. Moore became the first African American Somerville High School graduate. Somerville schools’ full integration was delayed until 1918. These decisions to integrate marked a dramatic change in the educational experiences of African American children. In the 250 years between Dutch arrival and school integration, African American children were excluded from or educated differently within the school system. Generations of enslaved, free black, and African American children experienced educational neglect. The impact of this neglect can better be understood by exploring Somerville’s educational history.
Religious and Educational Institutions: Somerville’s rich and deep educational history is tied to The Dutch Reformed Church of Somerville (1699). The teachings of the church’s first minister laid the foundation for Queen’s College, later called Rutgers College. The church’s Sabbath and Sunday schools provided bible reading instruction. As early as 1750, free black people and the enslaved were, “brought under Christian influences,” through their religious guidance. The first formal children’s Sunday school, established in 1811, excluded African American children until 1815.
Somerville’s first school house opened in 1790 at the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1801 the school merged with the Somerville Academy. The Somerville Academy (1800–1855), educated white male students with the means to afford the tuition. Many academy graduates went on to attend Rutgers College. The Young Ladies’ Seminary (1832–1836), The Somerset Young Ladies Institute (1848 -1880), and two other private residence schools educated white female students.
African American Education: By 1740, sixty years after Somerville’s settlement, two-thirds of work on New Jersey plantations was done by the enslaved population. Somerset County’s free black and enslaved population increased to 2,038 persons in 1800. Between 1804 and 1840 more than four hundred enslaved births were recorded in Somerset County. Somerville’s early educational institutions excluded or under-educated these generations of free black and enslaved children.
In 1815, The Female Charity Society of Somerville opened a Sabbath school to teach enslaved and free black children to read the bible. Fifty children were in regular attendance with twenty-seven students able to read the bible in the first year. The county superintendent’s progress report noted the, “... desire to learn, which the blacks have evidenced”. The report also attributed the declining attendance between the winter and summer sessions to, “the prejudice existing in the minds of slave-holders against teaching the blacks to read”. The next year, a separate day school was established and opened to poor white students of Somerville and the surrounding communities. By 1824, these segregated Sabbath schools employed ten teachers and included 100 children. The Female Charity Society’s founding volunteers served students until 1832.
Educational Neglect: Somerville’s religious and private schools were not fully open to the population of free black and enslaved children. Without access to public education, learning was limited and dependent upon the goodwill of others. As a result, generations of students experienced educational neglect. The Somerville Colored Pubic School would eventually be established, but only through the resourcefulness of Somerville’s African American community.
Further Reading:
The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review by Lyman H. Atwater, Henry Boynton Smith, and by James M. Sherwood
History of Hunterdon and Somerset County, New Jersey by James P. Snell
The Christian Herald Volume 2 by John Caldwell
The Christian Herald Volume 3 by John Caldwell
How Somerville schools were integrated. Havens, J. (1989, December 7) Somerset Messenger-Gazette, p. 13.
