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photo of the panel session celebrating Edward Mitchell
An Outsized Impact

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.

Forrester "Woody" Lee '68 gives presentation on Edward Mitchell

One of the celebration’s key events was a special panel session with guest speakers: Woody Lee ‘68; Cheryl Bascomb ‘82, Vice President for Alumni Relations; Mathieu Lapointe, Curator of Archives at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Quebec; and Samara Cary, Digital Project Specialist for Digital by Dartmouth Libraries. Audience members listened to an overview of Mitchell’s adventurous and tumultuous life leading up to his time at Dartmouth. Panelists also expanded on Mitchell’s significance to Dartmouth, to New England, and to Canada. 

Cheryl Bascomb highlighted that his graduation from Dartmouth opened the door for future students to have “an outsized impact at Dartmouth and the world.” She acknowledged that Dartmouth’s community of Black students and alums is so strong because Dartmouth was the first Ivy League to graduate Black men, and were at least 42 years ahead of institutions that would later make up the "Ivy League." She pointed out that ten Black alumni have received Dartmouth’s highest award, with three more to be named in Fall 2024.

Mathieu Lapointe extended this idea of Mitchell’s “outsized impact” by sharing how Mitchell was probably the first college-educated Black man to live in Canada. Mitchell played a role in changing the lives of his fellow citizens in a predominantly white society where opportunities for people of color were limited. Lapointe continued by explaining how until very recently, Quebec and Canada more broadly had conceived themselves as “white settler societies” to distinguish themselves from their US neighbors, particularly when contending with the legacy of slavery and racism. 

That myth, Lapointe stated, overrides the social and cultural erasure of Indigenous people and French minorities after the British conquest of New France in 1760. “Only in recent decades have Canadians begun to understand that diversity was always a feature, though, shunned, of their societies. Quebeckers have taken longer to accept this history, as they saw themselves as the minority and marginalized as “White Negroes.” In doing so, they obscured the fact that Black people had suffered much harder prejudice than them; and, that slavery had indeed existed in New France up to the beginning of the 19th century, though the lived experience of those enslaved persons is often hard to trace in the historical record. This is why Edward Mitchell’s papers are so precious to Quebec.” 

Mitchell’s papers are the only intellectual, religious, social, and cultural documentation of a Black man’s life in Quebec from 1833 until his death in 1872.

When asked why the panelists thought there wasn’t much in Mitchell’s papers that discussed race, Woody Lee admitted that at first he found it difficult to grasp that Mitchell didn’t write about being Black. Lee followed up with a reminder, though, about how “there was no African American identity in the way it is today,” so there was no framework to write from that perspective. Lee also reminded us that Mitchell was “obsessed with God and being a servant of God,” so saw himself as above the racial issues of the time. Bascomb shared a similar sentiment, saying that as a Dartmouth alum, “being Black at Dartmouth isn’t something often saved in the archives” and that even in her personal body of work, she didn’t express that experience, “but, of course, I lived it and expressed it in other ways.”

Samara Cary presents information on transcribing Edward Mitchell's transcripts

Most recently, the Libraries acquired an additional 70-page manuscript to add to its Mitchell collection. Jay Satterfield, Head of Rauner Library Special Collections & Archives, and co-organizer of the day-long Mitchell celebration with Laura Braunstein, Head of Digital Scholarly Engagement, commented on the momentousness of this acquisition,

Rarely do we have substantive information about people from the 19th century. This manuscript provides so much” and it helps “to create the shape of the person from what’s written within.

Transcribing 19th-century handwritten documents is an arduous yet fulfilling task. Just ask Samara Cary, Digital Project Specialist for Digital by Dartmouth Libraries. She and numerous volunteers have been reading and transcribing Mitchell’s manuscripts. Samara finds that transcribing offers a way to connect to the author on a deeper, more personal level, more so than just reading alone. She adds that, “it also allows us to champion and amplify the hidden, overlooked, or historically marginalized stories from Dartmouth’s past.” For her, making Mitchell’s once invisible history visible and “to bring Mitchell’s words to the digital environment and make them accessible and available to anyone is incredibly rewarding.”

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Today, you’ll find Mitchell’s personal papers at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Quebec, at Rauner Special Collections Library, and as digitized transcriptions in our Edward Mitchell Digital Collection. That Collection is made available thanks to an international collaboration between the McCord Stewart Museum and Dartmouth Libraries. The digitized transcriptions include his writings and related Dartmouth documents that mention him, such as the petition and student accounts.

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