**This entry is a summarized account from the essays “Old Money” and “And I a Poor Slave Yet” from Scarlet and Black, a collection of essays edited by Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, published by Rutgers University Press, 2016. This entry would not have been possible without the important work of dedicated researchers at Rutgers University.**

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Since New Brunswick's founding, Black people have been living side-by-side other residents, though they do not appear in detail in historical record.  Some were free residents, some were slaves, some were runaways from Southern states; beyond that, we do not know much about their lives.  However, this community was integral to the establishment and growth of New Brunswick as a city, and Rutgers University as a collegiate institution.

We do not have any records about the lives of slaves in New Brunswick from their perspectives, and only know about many of them because of the financial and property documents, like wills, left behind by their white owners. Slaves were considered property.  Sometimes, a will would list how many slaves the deceased person owned, and where those slaves would go (to be freed or to an heir), alongside other property like furniture or houses. Often, this document would not list any other information about the slaves, and if a name or other characteristic was mentioned, it was highly unusual.

Also in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a community of free Black people who lived in an area of New Brunswick called Halfpenny Town, a poor neighborhood in the north of the city, which was segregated from wealthier residences. Black and poor white people, often fishermen or boatmen, lived in this neighborhood in cabins.  

The Underground Railroad also ran through New Brunswick. The city was dangerous for fugitive slaves, given that many “slave hunters” often patrolled the Raritan River in order to stop runaways from making it farther north.  Sometimes the law enforcement officials in New Brunswick would capture free Black people. Assuming them to be slaves, they would hold them without a trial in the local gaol or, as happened for many, sell them back into slavery. Law enforcement could disregard a person’s “free papers” with few consequences.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, even though New Brunswick had a large Black community (and many free Black people worked alongside white people and slaves), life for a Black person in New Brunswick was still constricted and dangerous.  New Jersey participated in the Northern slave trade, and was the last of the Northern colonial states to abolish slavery. Many colonies in the North abolished slavery in the 1780s; New Jersey only instated “gradual abolition” in 1804, avoiding the full removal of slavery until after the Civil War. The Parker family in New Brunswick, who donated part of the land that Rutgers University is built on, was recorded as owning slaves as late as the 1820s.