The Education of Betsey Stockton

Join us as historian Gregory Nobles discusses his latest publication, The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a testament to the courage and commitment of a Black woman whose persistence grew into grassroots resistance to racism in the antebellum North. When she was a child, Betsey Stockton was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used her education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then in Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, in Princeton, New Jersey—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities.