
This September, the Libraries invited the Dartmouth community to celebrate and honor the extraordinary life and work of Reverend Edward Mitchell, class of 1828.
Whether Mitchell could anticipate how his presence would spark a 200-year legacy of over 4,000+ Black students at Dartmouth, we can only guess. His handwritten diaries, notes, sermons, and personal accounts offer few clues to the direct experience he may have had as Dartmouth’s first (and first among all the later-named Ivy League schools) graduate of African descent. What the archival materials do reveal is his impassioned love and commitment to God and the story of how he came to be a Dartmouth student. While Mitchell was initially accepted by faculty in 1824, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees rejected his application based on race. Upon learning that he was denied admission, the students petitioned against the decision. In their letter, they vowed to “cheerfully receive him as a companion and fellow student.” The Board relented, and Mitchell took his rightful place in the student body.
The Libraries’ celebrations mark 200 years since his matriculation, and caps a three-year-long digitization project between Dartmouth Libraries and the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Quebec. This international collaboration began in 2021 when Mitchell’s biographer Forrester “Woody” Lee ‘68 curated a Libraries exhibit on the history of Dartmouth’s Black graduates, and included material from the Mitchell archives at the McCord Stewart Museum. Teams from the two organizations worked together to develop a digital collection that collates high-resolution digital scans of Mitchell’s personal papers from the McCord Stewart with materials from the Libraries that contextualize what Dartmouth was like in 1824. All documents in the Edward Mitchell Collection are fully transcribed and searchable, as well as freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.