On July 13, 1969, physician and chronicler of Black life Dr. Carl Russell Gross opened the Evening Bulletin, clipped the photograph seen here, and placed it into a file marked “Military.” In the photo, we get a glimpse of Major General Roger Reckling Blunt (1930- ), a fourth generation Rhode Island serviceman as he inspects new West Point cadets. He looks confident and we know from other documents collected by Dr. Gross that, early in his career, Blunt gained a reputation for being innovative and demonstrating “a skillful ability to analyze…obstacles and develop thorough solutions.”  Major General Roger Reckling Blunt was born in 1930. Reflecting on his youth, Blunt’s mother told a local newspaper that he was “unsure what he wanted, but he did want a good education.” He pursued his education for many years after graduating from East Providence Senior High School in 1948, which stood at this address. He went on to attend Brown University for two years and acquired a General Liberal Arts degree. In 1956, Blunt graduated from West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree, ranked 72nd out of 479 graduates, and was the only Black graduate in his class. Six years later, Blunt received a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering as well as a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1962, Blunt attended the Nuclear Power Plant Engineer School in Virginia to become a Certified Nuclear Plant Engineer, later taking an Engineer Officer Career Course at The Engineer School of Virginia.  Blunt’s commitment to education complemented his participation in the armed forces. Within the Blunt family, he represented the fourth generation of military service. His great-grandfather, Captain Robert W. Blunt, commanded the First Separate Brigade of the Rhode Island Militia (BRIM), a segregated unit that trained at the corner of Knight and Cranston Streets in Providence. Blunt’s grandfather, Captain Harry W. Blunt, commanded the same unit and served in the Spanish-American War. Blunt’s father, Captain Harry W. Blunt Jr. was presented a gold sword by the members of his company. Major General Blunt later used his father’s sword to cut his wedding cake when he married DeRosette Hendricks at West Point in 1956.  When Blunt first decided he wanted a career in the military, he told his mother, “Mom, if I go, I’m going as far as I can.” Blunt made many advancements throughout a career that began in 1958 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. While lieutenant, Blunt worked for the German American Assistance Program as part of the 37th Engineers, the largest organized combat group in the U.S Army. He worked as Assistant Operations Officer in charge of the German American Construction Assistance Program, where he organized and operated a technical school for Atomic Demolition Munition specialists. From 1956 to 1965, Blunt worked for the U.S. Corps of Engineers as Project Manager, Technical Operations Officer, and Project Officer. In 1965, Blunt was promoted to Major, at which point he supervised a group of officers and a battalion of 700 men. Blunt transferred to the U.S. Army Reserves in 1969 and was appointed Major General in 1983. He received the Distinguished Service Medal in 1986.  In the image preserved by Dr. Gross, Blunt is 36 years old and assigned to teach at the Department of Tactics at West Point. He was the first Black officer to be given a teaching assignment at the military academy.  By the end of his active military career, Blunt would go even farther with the start of his own construction company and later as CEO and Chairman of Tyroc Construction and Chairman of the Board and President of Blunt Enterprises, Inc.

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When the US Naval Academy in Annapolis was created by an Act of Congress in 1845, its admissions policies were codified into law. Members of Congress have the privilege of personally nominating the majority of candidates in each class. This is the story of one such candidate, Captain Reeves Ramsey Taylor (1929- ), nominated at 18 years old and the only Black student to graduate with his class in 1953.  Captain Taylor was born in 1929 and lived most of his early life at 60 Carrington Avenue in Providence. As a young man, he took an interest in the environment. Taylor once wrote a letter to the editors of the Providence Journal about the smoke coming from factories and its effect on people and the city. He was a member of the Sea Scouts and spent two summers as a seaman on fishing vessels. This enticed Taylor to the idea of a career on the sea. He set his sights on Annapolis, the US Naval Academy in Maryland.  While a student at Hope High School, Taylor involved himself in a variety of clubs. He was a member of the band, orchestra, track team, and Omnibus club, which concerned itself with race relations. As part of the band and orchestra, Taylor played the saxophone and clarinet. While Taylor was very musically inclined, he was also into photography and had his own dark room at home. He did some work for Hope High School’s “Blue and White” yearbook as well as for the Hope Log newspaper. Taylor graduated from high school in 1947 on the honor roll and in his last year won the Anthony Medal for English composition.   After high school, Taylor attended Brown University, where he joined the Naval Reserves Officers Training Corps (NROTC), one of eight programs like it in the country initiated under the direction of Brown University alumnus, Senator Theodore Francis Green. The Navy was one of Rhode Island's largest employers at the time. In 1947, after Taylor earned the highest mark on the US Service Academies joint civil service exam, Senator Green nominated him for the US Naval Academy—Taylor was said to have a 13 point lead in his score. The year before Taylor had scored second.  After graduating from the Academy in 1953 and over a distinguished military career, Taylor flew 65 Vietnam missions from the carrier USS Constellation. He led a Minority Recruiting Program for the Navy. In 1968, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. Four years later, Taylor went on to receive the Air Medal-Strike/Flight as well as the Meritorious Service Medal. Taylor received the same Meritorious medal two years later. Taylor retired from the Navy as a Captain in February of 1975.

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There are a few things that Rhode Island lacks: adequate parking at the beach, pothole-free streets, and enough Del’s to go around. One thing it does not lack however is prominent figures with the last name “Brown.” To be fair, it was a Brown that co-founded Providence; it was the Brown family that helped bring the school (Rhode Island College) that would become the university to its current location; and it was a Brown that brought the father of the American Industrial Revolution, Samuel Slater, to Rhode Island. But it is often unclear who in this large and influential family was Brown University’s namesake. That would be businessman and philanthropist, Nicholas Brown, Jr. Nicholas Brown, Jr. was born in Providence on April 7, 1769, to Nicholas Brown and Rhoda (Jenckes) Brown. After graduating in 1786 from the school that would eventually bear his name, Brown entered the family mercantile business and worked under his father. Following his father’s death in 1791, the younger Brown partnered with fellow Providence businessman Thomas P. Ives, and together they formed the firm of Brown & Ives – a mercantile partnership that would become one of the longest-lived and most respected trading entities in New England of its time. The idea of a religiously-tolerant institution was conceptualized in 1762 by a Baptist Reverend, James Manning, and two years later Rhode Island College became a reality. Originally located in Warren, the school moved to Providence in 1770 with financial help from the “Brown Brothers”: Joseph, Nicholas (Sr.), John, and Moses. After his uncle, John Brown, resigned his position as treasurer of Rhode Island College in 1796, Brown, Jr. was selected to fill the vacant seat. After Brown, Jr. was elected to the seat, he donated a law library of “considerable extent and value” and paid for several works of great English literature to be added. Years later, in 1804, Brown, Jr. donated $5,000 to the school to be put towards a Rhetoric and Oratory program. Because of his generous donation, school officials renamed the institution “Brown University.” Brown University is a part of the eight-member Ivy League and one of the oldest colleges in the country.  

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What should an architect’s new house look like in a historic neighborhood? This is the question that Margaret B. Kelly and J. Peter Geddes had to address when designing 29 Manning Street in the 1930s. The small, two-story brick house was modern in many ways, but it was also cleverly designed to fit in with its much older architectural neighbors. Many of the historic homes in Providence are noted for their elaborately carved architectural details, but Geddes & Kelly did not include moldings around the windows and doors in order to create a simplified, more modern facade. The windows on the Manning Street front are arranged in a traditional, symmetrical way, but the windows themselves are casement windows (they swing out), unlike the windows of most of the neighborhood’s earlier homes. The interior had innovative features that made use of the limited space, like a custom-designed kitchen table that could unfold to add workspace and built-in benches with storage. Service areas like the kitchen were in the front of the house, and the main living areas were in the rear, where a wall of large windows and a door connected the living room to a patio and walled back yard.

The house is significant not only as an early example of domestic modernism in Providence, but also for being designed by Margaret B. Kelly (1907–1995), one of the few women architects working in Rhode Island in the first half of the twentieth century. Kelly’s family moved to Providence when she was a teenager and she attended the Wheeler School and Vassar College before receiving her degree in architecture from MIT in 1933. This Manning Street house by Geddes & Kelly was built in 1939 and was featured in the March 1941 issue of Architectural Forum, an important architectural publication. Margaret Kelly married Peter Geddes in 1942 and lived in the house from then until her death in 1995. Margaret Geddes was very active in the community and her Manning Street home served as a meeting place for the League of Women Voters of Providence and the Rhode Island Vassar Alumnae Association.

Margaret Geddes gave the house to Brown University and it served as the headquarters of the Urban Studies Program for over 20 years. The university chose to demolish this structure to make way for a new Engineering Research Center designed by the award-winning architecture firm KieranTimberlake and completed in October 2017. Before the house was demolished, Dietrich Neumann, director of the Urban Studies Program, and Stefano Bloch, a postdoctoral fellow, organized a public art “Paint Out” of the facade with local artist Gregory Pennisten (see video). Another house designed by Geddes & Kelly, also built in 1939, survives nearby at 47 Manning Street. Though much larger, this private residence shares many features with the demolished building like a minimally-adorned brick facade, low hip roof, casement windows, and an attached garage.

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If the walls of University Hall could talk, they might tell you about the time they met George Washington (although don’t believe them if they tell you he slept here). The first building constructed on Brown’s campus, University Hall, has played host to wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War as well as our nation’s first president, during his visit to Rhode Island in 1790. The Providence Gazette reported that despite Washington’s habit of not going out in the evening, he made his way from his lodging at the Golden Ball Inn to University Hall to accept the invitation of Brown University undergraduates. In a patriotic display, students outfitted each of the Hall’s windows with candles aglow.

Renowned for “The Brown Curriculum,” an innovative approach to undergraduate education instituted in 1970, Brown University’s philosophy states that students, who are free to design their own curriculum, are “the architects of their own course of study.” Founded in 1764 by Baptists as the College of Rhode Island, the school moved to Providence in 1770. The institution changed its name to “Brown University” in 1804 after a generous donation by Nicholas Brown, prominent Providence businessman and alumnus of the school.

With over 250 years of history under its belt, Brown University understandably boasts many styles of architecture. One of the most noticeable structures on campus is the Carrie Tower (1904). Paul Bajnotti commissioned the tower to honor the memory of his wife, Caroline Mathilde Brown, grandaughter of Nicholas Brown, Brown University’s namesake.

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As the population of the East Side grew in the 18th century, residences sprang up quickly along Benefit Street. Intended for “the common benefit of all,” Benefit Street encouraged the construction of homes higher on the ridge of modern-day College Hill while still remaining within existing property limits. This was possible because of the very narrow, but long, plots that Roger Williams designated for the new community of Providence in 1636. These plots began at the edge of the Great Salt River and Cove, and extended up the hill. Colonists typically used the higher land to plant fruit orchards and graze livestock. Unlike many other New England towns, the Providence settlement faced the waterway, rather than surrounding a meeting house. The emphasis on religious liberty explains this choice: since colonial authorities in Rhode Island could not force men and women to worship, the Church did not serve as the center of the community, literally or figuratively.

This unique orientation of the settlement did not mean, however, that Providence townspeople did not worship. Most did so, and they first used private homes before a meeting house was constructed to better serve the religious needs of the community. Roger Williams founded the first Baptist congregation in the U.S. in 1638. In 1775, while Providence enjoyed economic success, the Baptists made a new and bold move in erecting this magnificent building, the First Baptist Church. The largest surviving wooden structure from Colonial America, it combines the simple hall of a traditional New England meeting house with the most fashionable English architectural features, such as the steeple, modeled after a version of the one at St. Martin in the Fields (1724), on Trafalgar Square in London, by architect James Gibbs. Brown University, founded as a Baptist college, has held its annual commencement in the church every year since 1776.

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Fed up! Perhaps they didn't hear you the first time. Every so often, you have to redeliver the message. That’s exactly what happened in 1975, when a Third World Coalition led by Black students occupied University Hall for 38 hours. Black, Latino, and Asian American students’ snaked through University Hall, equipped with their voices and drums reverberating, a robustly creative ruckus of music, dance, and rhythmically sounded demands.

Equal access, visibility, and services; are these reasonable demands? Brown University’s planned budget cuts would decrease financial aid, student services, ultimately reducing the population of minority students, staff, and faculty. In an attempt to persuade the University to rethink their decision, students formed an alliance demanding to view the budget, and to be part of the conversation.

For two months students of color attempted to have a seat at the administration’s table to address their concerns, but access was denied. They assembled and deliberated, but the administration didn't budge. They organized campus rallies, but the students’ demands were unmet. They put forth a list of demands, most notably an increase in scholarship funding from the administrations’ amount of $3.3 million to $3.5 million. They also demanded that the Black student body proportionately reflect the national percentage of Blacks in the United States—which echoed a demand from 1968. Despite the students’ orderly negotiations and clearly outlined requests, plans remained in place to proceed with the budget cuts.

Nearly 3,000 students went on strike on April 14, 1975, ditching pencils for picket signs to stage a protest. With very little revision, the Advisory and Executive Committee passed a new budget. Had every option been exhausted? University Hall housed the office of the president of Brown and other administrative offices, and was a place for the students to be heard. The students believed that confrontation demonstrated their seriousness and commitment. On April 24, 1975, students occupied University Hall for nearly two days, insisting the university fulfill the promises they made to Black students during a 1968 walkout.

The 1968 walkout, staged by twenty-three Black women of Pembroke College in solidarity with Black male students from Brown University, demanded several changes in the admissions process. The Dean of Admissions refused the first and most important demand: an increase of the black student population to eleven percent enrollment for the class of 1973. On December 5, 1968, the Brown Daily Herald reported, “A substantial majority of black undergraduates at Brown and Pembroke will dissociate themselves from the University at noon today…” The debate around Black presence and representation in education—and by extension in America—was not new. In 1961, Malcolm X spoke at Brown on racial oppression, Black Muslims, and, in his eyes, the need for dis-integration of Blacks in America to move toward liberation.

The irony of Brown University’s complicated relationship with Black America is the role of Black Americans from the institution’s birth. University Hall, the oldest, and until 1832, the only building on Brown University’s campus, was financed with revenue from the slave trade and built in part by Black slave hands. In recent years, Brown has commissioned a slave memorial in an effort to recognize the Brown family’s role in the slave trade.

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Imagine the Fox Point waterfront in the 1940s. Cargo ships lined up to get into crowded docks. Longshoremen bustled along the busy quays. Crowds waited to welcome packet ships bringing new immigrants and news from Cape Verde.

Many of the longshoremen who worked the docks had themselves come into this port on the packet boats.  Until the 1950s, most of the packet boats were repurposed schooners and aging whalers. Crewed by skilled seamen, these vessels made regular trips between American ports and the islands of Cape Verde off the African coast, transporting people, letters, food, and freight.

Cape Verdean immigration to Providence, and greater New England, began the early nineteenth century, when men from the islands were recruited by whaling companies looking for good seamen and inexpensive labor. By the early twentieth century, Portugal’s oppressive colonial rule of the islands, combined with drought and starvation, forced families to consider leaving Cape Verde. Many immigrants moved to Providence and New Bedford, joining family members and friends already in the United States.

The waterfront neighborhood of Fox Point, bounded to the north by Power Street, became the heart of Cape Verdean Rhode Island until the late twentieth century. Today, some Cape Verdeans still live in the area, but most were forced to relocate as urban renewal projects dramatically changed the neighborhood. Beginning in the 1950s, Brown University also bought and developed land in the neighborhood; the ensuing gentrification made it prohibitively expensive for working class families to live there.

At the same time that longtime Fox Point residents were being forced to move elsewhere, the Fox Point docks were also changing. After World War II, “containerization,” the increasing use of shipping containers, drastically decreased the numbers of jobs available on the docks. Many longshoremen actively resisted the changes. In 1971, a historic strike on the west coast shut down the ports for 130 days. The Cape Verdean longshoremen who worked in Fox Point were members of Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the first labor union in the United States founded by Cape Verdeans. Local 1329 played an important role in the national labor union and in the lives of the Cape Verdean longshoremen and their families. Ultimately, resistance to automation was not successful and by the end of the twentieth century almost ninety percent of longshoremen jobs had been lost to automation.

These docks are filled with the memories of work, change and resistance, and the journeys of people and things from Cape Verde to Providence. Though the Cape Verdean community is no longer concentrated in Fox Point, more Cape Verdeans still live in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than anywhere else except Cape Verde. Many of them still gather each year in India Point Park to celebrate the islands’ independence from Portugal on July 5th, a day filled with festivities, educational events, and food.

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On January 3, 1791, Ann Arnold walked into the newly founded Slater Mill and onto the pages of history as one of the first nine employees hired by the mill. She was probably about ten years old.

As the industrial revolution swept across the western world, many factories, including Slater Mill, capitalized on child labor. Pliable young children could be easily taught the skills needed to operate the mill’s spinning frames, could be paid less than adults, and were less likely to incite trouble than adult workers. Some factories hired children as young as four years old. At Slater Mill, Ann Arnold joined a workforce made up of boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve who worked six days a week – twelve hours a day in the winter, sixteen hours a day in the summer. They spent more than twice the amount of time that today’s kids spend in school working at the mill each day.

Ann Arnold and her fellow workers picked cotton clean and worked the mill’s carding and spinning machines. The roar of the Blackstone River and hum of the water-powered machinery filled the air. Fine cotton lint coated the floor, clung to the workers' clothes, and clogged their throats. If the mill supervisor thought the children were not working hard enough, the children were fined, further reducing the small paycheck that they took home each week. The children were expected to spend Sundays, their one day of rest, at a mill-sponsored Sunday school where Brown University students provided basic schooling.

For her hard work, Ann Arnold brought home a regular salary: a luxury compared to farm life. The rest of her family toiled all day on the family farm, working just as hard as Ann did in the factory, but without the assurance of a regular paycheck.

As Slater Mill expanded, more workers were needed to run the carding and spinning equipment. Mill operators adopted the “Rhode Island System” of labor where entire families were hired to work together in the factories. Nonetheless, children remained a key source of labor. In 1830, fifty-five percent of all millworkers in Rhode Island were still children.

Long after Slater Mill closed its doors in 1895, child labor continued to be a contested issue. In the early 1900s, organizations such as the Consumer's League of Rhode Island fought to limit child labor. Early legislation restricted the number of hours that children could work and set age requirements for factory work – unscrupulous mill owners seldom enforced these rules. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to employ any child under the age of twelve in the United States. However, children like Ann still work in factories throughout the world today, enduring harsh conditions to support them­selves and their family.

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