Trenton, N.J., high school students recently created a project that honors the role African Americans played in the founding of the United States. As members of Foundation Academies’ Black Student Union (BSU), they developed “Men W/O Shoes,” a multimedia exhibit that recognizes 14 African American Revolutionary War soldiers who fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton.
The “Men W/O Shoes” project started when Mark Herr, a Princeton Battlefield Society board member, asked if Foundation Academies students wanted to research 14 African American Revolutionary War soldiers who had been identified as having participated in the Trenton-Princeton campaign.
When they got the names of the soldiers, BSU advisors Casey Scott and Earl Wallace had to plan how to make the project appealing to students.
“Earl and I, we are a tag team, and we were just thinking about, like, how do we make this a phenomenal project?” said Scott. “So, he was the main person doing the research; he literally sat in these classes, teaching these students the basics of research from Google Scholar, not using ChatGPT, not using Wikipedia. We went to the archives; we got library cards. Scott explained they got in contact with John Mills, another researcher, who connected them to a living descendant of a soldier. “It was really this research project, which has multiple parts to it, that allowed us to step into a different hat than we had: teaching youth how to be researchers and teaching them skills, not just in the classroom, but the skills that they’re going to use in life,” said Scott.
Wallace, a doctoral student, and Scott, a school social worker, spent a year working with 30 BSU students in grades 9 through 12, and teaching them the fundamentals of academic research. They had the students pore through pension testimonies, military records, genealogical databases, and even visit the New Jersey State Archives to view microfilm reels and historical documents.
The soldiers the students researched included Charles and James Ailstock, brothers from New Jersey’s free Black community who fought in several major battles, including Harlem Heights and Brandywine; Robert “Prince” Green, who was born into slavery but enlisted in regiments that promised freedom in exchange for his service; Oliver Cromwell, whose service earned him a Badge of Merit signed by George Washington, and who went on to become a landowner and community leader after the war; and Cato Smith, who had been kidnapped from Africa and enslaved before enlisting, but died while serving in the military.
Historians estimate that Black soldiers made up between 5% and 20% of the Continental Army. Many had to march barefoot through brutal Northeast winters. They fought in place of their enslavers who promised them freedom in exchange for their military service. So, for many of these men, the Revolutionary War fight was personal.
Scott said that the students realized these soldiers were essentially placing their hopes for Black freedom on the establishment of the new nation. “During that time the only reason why they were fighting was they were fighting for freedom,” Scott told the AmNews. “That’s it. Black men weren’t seen as anything during this time. And even after they fought, some people were put back into slavery. Some were free men, but they ended up fighting for pensions; their families ended up fighting for pensions for years for the work they did.
“What a lot of people have to understand is that these 14 men are the reason we have a Declaration of Independence, the reason we can celebrate the [United States’] 250th anniversary is because they fought. They fought with nothing. And to see what has come of this exhibition to bring a face and a name to the forefront of history, not just during the 100-year anniversary of Black History [Month], but during the 250th, it makes it land very differently when you say that there is no American history without Black history.”
BSU students used technology to turn their research about 18th-century veterans into a platform 21st-century audiences could relate to. They created AI-generated monologues to imagine the soldiers’ voices and used the program Midjourney to develop portraits of the soldiers. They collaborated with Philadelphia visual artist Shaheed Rucker to display these portraits on stylized JET magazine covers.
The “Men W/O Shoes” exhibition opened in February at the Morven Museum & Garden and featured a documentary about the students’ work in creating it. The research findings made by Foundation Academies’ Black Student Union will now be permanently preserved and included in the Princeton Battlefield Society’s digital encyclopedia. For the students of Foundation Academies, Scott said, the project’s impact goes far beyond the gallery walls. “They are historians now. They are authors of Black history, not just consumers of it. This isn’t about interpretation, it’s about truth. Putting names to faces. And making sure Black history is where it has always belonged — at the center of American history.”