The Primus Project is “an ongoing research endeavor dedicated to a fuller understanding of Trinity College’s history as it relates to slavery, white supremacy, and questions of racial justice.” It intends to use this public history research to uncover hidden histories and “forge a more just and inclusive present,” particularly for members of the College community. An administrative document from the President's Office in 2020 indicated that the project is tasked with writing “a comprehensive history that includes an honest telling of any institutional ties to slavery,” which will serve to “honor the contributions of people of color in the celebration of the college’s bicentennial in 2023” and to “make recommendations to the board of trustees on building names.”

From the earliest version of the Primus website known to be archived, “the Primus Project aims to steer the college toward Reconstruction—the fulfillment of Trinity’s unrealized potential to educate people equitably, fuel their self-determination, and expand their power to change the world.”¹⁾

The Primus Project Logo, designed in 2021.

The Primus Project began in the fall semester of 2020, in response to the death of George Floyd earlier that year and at the urging of President Joanne Berger-Sweeney “to address systemic racism” at the College. Original members of the Primus Project were four Trinity faculty members: Davarian Baldwin, Cheryl Greenberg, Christopher Hager, and Scott Gac. The participants briefly expanded to nine individuals, including a member of the President's Office, a member of the Communications Office, a Trinity trustee, and Dr. Alexander Manevitz (a former visiting faculty member at Trinity). President Berger-Sweeney's "An Update on a Message of Hope and a Call to Act" of November 2, 2020, was the first known public announcement of the Primus Project.

During the spring semester of 2021, the Primus Project drew upon research undertaken by undergraduate students in the American Studies course 406 “Slavery and Trinity” taught by Dr. Scott Gac (Trinity College), as well as research uncovered during previous iterations of the course. Contact with the Tulane University Library was pursued. Outreach efforts were made to confer with the Hartford Heritage Project, Universities Studying Slavery, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University.

In summer 2021, according to its annual report, the Primus Project “sponsored 10 weeks of intensive summer research” by a graduate student, a recently graduated student, and an undergraduate, who conducted research at the Trinity College Archives at the Watkinson Library, the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History (formerly Connecticut Historical Society), the Connecticut State Library, and within digital collections.

By fall 2021, the six Committee Members of the Primus Project listed on its website were Davarian Baldwin (Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies), Jederick Estrella '22, Scott Gac (Associate Professor of History and American Studies), Cheryl Greenberg (Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History), Christopher Hager (Professor of English), and Alexander Manevitz '09 (Department of History, Hamden Hall Country Day School). In early December 2021, the Primus Project designed and distributed several posters in various places around campus.

The spring semester of 2022 saw some collaboration with the Trinity Social Justice Initiative, according to The Trinity Reporter. In September 2022, the Primus Project released an annual report covering “its second year” of the project. The report expressed a hope “to engage our community in a thoughtful reckoning with the American past.”

In May 2023, the first issue of the “Primus Project Newsletter” was issued as “Volume 1.” The three page PDF was distributed via email to “friends and supporters” of the Primus Project. According to the newsletter, the Primus Project “register[ed] a strong opposition to the proposed demolition” of the home of Ham Primus in Guilford, Connecticut and claimed to have assisted the Witness Stones Project (founded by Dennis Culliton) in making a case for the historical importance of the house.

Summer 2023 saw the employment of two new Trinity students in the work of research through the Public Humanities Collaborative. In addition, the Primus Project website added a bit of new content, especially in regard to the story of Rebecca Primus (see below, under “Rebecca Primus”).

Over the summer of 2023, the organizational structure of the Primus Project changed and new layers of governance were added. While the four faculty members of Trinity (Baldwin, Greenberg, Hager, and Gac) remained along with Dr. Manevitz (now of Baruch College, City University of New York), they were joined by an Advisory Board composed of Dansowaa Adu '24, Momo Djebli '25, Bishop John Selders (Assistant Dean of Students and Coordinator of Community Standards), and Will Thomas '86 (Class of ’86 and Professor of History and John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities — University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

By the middle of the fall semester of 2023, the organization was rearranged into a three-tiered structure. As of November 2023, the Directors were Scott Gac and Christopher Hager; the Founders and Faculty Board were Baldwin, Gac, Greenberg, Hager, and Manevitz; and the Advisory Board Members were Adu, Djebli, Selders, and Thomas.

In November 2023, the Primus Project publicly unveiled a series of three “Founding of Washington College Bicentennial Reports.” (Trinity College had originally been known as Washington College.) Though not directly tied to the Trinity College Bicentennial celebrations, the reports were released just days before the November 14, 2023 Bicentennial Symposium Day. At that one-day event, two community forums took place which addressed how the history of the College's founding and development relate to slavery, white supremacy, and questions of racial justice in both the past and present.

The information-sharing sessions were moderated by project Directors and professors Scott Gac and Christopher Hager. Participation numbered around 40 people in each of the two sessions, which were open mainly to members of the Trinity community, though some members of the general public may have attended. The Project's reports were described as “living documents” which are subject to critique and scrutiny, and represent “its research to date.” In the discussions, the directors and other members of the Primus Project's governing board stated that they had conducted research at the Epsicopal Archives in Middletown and consulted Trinity founder Bishop Brownell's personal correspondence, among other sources. The report(s) do not name individuals who contributed to their authorship—even in all together listing—and instead state “prepared by the Primus Project.”

While the discussions were being held, the Primus Project placed several “sandwich boards” briefly along the Long Walk and one at the main entrance to the Raether Library, appearing no earlier than 12:15pm. The large signs featured printed posters with information about specific individuals connected to slavery and the College.

According to those Primus Project members who spoke at the Bicentennial Symposium Day panels, the release of these reports to the public is “Phase One” of the ongoing project, which may include a podcast series.

A contact email was added to the Primus Project website in late November 2023.

The Primus Project has relied upon funding from The Henry Luce Foundation (including a $25,000 grant), The Office of the President, The Office of the Dean of Faculty, and the Public Humanities Collaborative, in order to conduct its research and prepare its reports.

The Primus Project has not collaborated with the Watkinson Library and College Archives in any of the writing, editing, or public presentation of the research of the project.

Previous efforts to study slavery and Trinity College included a Spring 2019 course, “The History and Memory of Slavery at Trinity” (AMST 406), taught by then-Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies Alexander Manevitz ’09. Students in that course conducted research, wrote papers, and developed a website to explore the complex ways slavery is entangled in Trinity’s history and encoded in its campus. A second iteration of AMST 406 was taught in Spring 2021 by Professor of History and American Studies, Scott Gac.

In early 2019, members of the American Studies Program at Trinity College, authorized by then-Dean of the Faculty Timothy Cresswell, initiated the College’s membership in Universities Studying Slavery (USS). This national consortium fosters collaboration among dozens of colleges and universities publicly committed to “confronting our own past entanglement in human bondage” and to “addressing contemporary issues: race and higher education, inequality, and the complicated legacies of slavery on campuses, in communities, and in our world.”

The Primus Project publicly unveiled a series of three “Founding of Washington College Bicentennial Reports” in November 2023. Available for download from the Primus Project website, the 90-page “three-part report” centers on how Trinity College directly or indirectly benefited from slavery and the slave trade through employment, support, or ties to individuals, social networks, and institutions which relied upon the ownership, investment, or economic development of areas of the globe in which slavery was a part of the economy. The report's subtitles are “The Slave Economy” (22 pages), “Religion” (33 pages), and “Politics” (35 pages). Topics of interest include the role of the Episcopal church, the Colonization Movement, records of slave ownership, and white supremacy in Connecticut. For more information, explore the “Trinity and Slavery” entry.

On two occasions in spring 2021, the editors of The Trinity Tripod commented on the work of the Primus Project. In March, the editors stated in an editorial that “the Primus Project is but one element of researching and recognizing Trinity’s history, including the parts that are not to be celebrated. For all the public is aware of, however, it seems to be just that — a start. There is much to our varied institutional history and at a time like our Bicentennial, all of it should be celebrated and recognized.” A few weeks later, the editors commented, “We are also in wont of a review of our College’s history, a broad and critical inquiry which cannot be achieved through the Primus Project alone. To truly make strides and understand the facets of Trinity’s history, particular troubling moments cannot be studied in isolation. They must be viewed as part of our larger narrative, as one touchstone among many that helps us understand the limitations and realities of a particular moment in time. We cannot merely hold up the darker sides of our history at the expense of all we have to celebrate.”

Rebecca Primus, the project's namesake, was born in Hartford in 1836. Though no link between Rebecca and the College has been documented, she lived at 20 Wadsworth Street within half a mile of the Washington College campus. Her great-grandfather was stolen from Africa, enslaved, and ultimately gained emancipation through his military service in the Revolutionary War. As a Woman of Color in the 1830s, attending Washington College was not a possibility. Instead, Primus dedicated her life to supporting and educating People of Color in Hartford and Maryland.

Primus' family members were part of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, whose pastor was former slave and abolitionist, James W. C. Pennington. Pennington taught at a school in the basement of the church called the First African School, which the Primus children attended. As she grew older, Primus absorbed books, novels, and newspapers. Her parents took her to museums and musical performances, and in 1860, she opened a private girls' school in the family home.

At the close of the Civil War in 1865, Primus was sent by the Hartford Freedmen’s Aid Society to Royal Oak, Maryland, the birthplace of Frederick Douglass. It was there that she taught classes to recently-freed men, women, and children, and helped them gain the literacy and learning skills that were denied them during years of enslavement. In 1867, a small wooden school was built with some funds provided by Hartford “friends and sympathizers.” In a letter written that year, Primus said that her students were “all just beginning life, as it were…they are industrious, and hopeful of the future, their interest in the school is unabated and many of them deny themselves in order to sustain it.” In a letter home, Primus expressed that she had begun with 10 day and 26 night students, which quickly grew to 75 of all ages. Besides teaching in the school, Primus opened a Sunday School and took charge of all the administrative duties required to report to the three agencies supervising her work: the Freedman's Bureau and the Freedman's Aid Societies of Baltimore and Hartford. After four years, her impact was so profound that the community christened her schoolhouse The Primus Institute.

Primus returned to Hartford in 1869. She married, and also was appointed as an assistant to the superintendent of Sunday School at the Talcott Street Church, the first woman to hold the position. She lived the rest of her years in Hartford at the family home on Wadsworth Street, and on Adelaide Street near Barry Square. Primus died in Hartford in 1932 and was buried with her parents at Zion Hill Cemetery, just across the street from Trinity College's current campus. Her gravestone does not bear her name.

The Primus Institute functioned as a school until 1929; the wooden building stood until it was demolished in about 2000.

Founding of Washington College Bicentennial Reports

Text taken from The Primus Project.

Rebecca Primus.

Talbot Historical Society: Rebecca Primus.

[Eric Stoykovich, Trinity College Archivist], Attendance at “Slavery and Trinity’s Founding” (Dangremond Family Commons, Hallden Hall North, Trinity College), November 14, 2023, 1:30-2:30pm.

[Amanda Matava, Trinity College Digital Archivist], Attendance at “Slavery and Trinity’s Founding” (Dangremond Family Commons, Hallden Hall North, Trinity College), November 14, 2023, 1:30-2:45pm.

The Primus Project - Contact Us, website captured on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), November 27, 2023

The Primus Project - Board Members, website captured on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), November 22, 2023

The Primus Project - Committee Members, website captured by Trinity College Archive-It on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), September 19, 2023

The Primus Project - Committee Members, website captured on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), June 9, 2023

Primus Project Newsletter, Volume 1, May 2023, Trinity College Archives.

The Trinity Reporter, Spring 2022, p. 25.

“The Primus Project AY 2021-22,” Trinity College Archives, n.d.

The Primus Project posters, December 2021, Trinity College Archives.

The Primus Project - Committee Members, website captured on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), October 26, 2021

"Tripod Editorial:Thoughts on the Process of Renaming Campus Buildings," The Trinity Tripod, 2021-04-06, p. 4.

"Tripod Editorial: Reflections on Trinity's History," The Trinity Tripod, 2021-03-23, p. 2.

The Primus Project - Main Page, website captured on The Wayback Machine (The Internet Archive), March 2, 2021

Trinity and Slavery (2021).

An Update on A Message of Hope and a Call to Act (November 2, 2020), Joanne Berger-Sweeney President and Trinity College Professor of Neuroscience

Email Correspondence, Cheryl Greenberg to College Archivist Eric Stoykovich, October 23, 2020, Trinity College Archives.

Trinity and Slavery Project (2019).

Beeching, Barbara J., "The Primus Papers: An Introduction to Hartford's Nineteenth Century Black Community" (1995). Hartford Studies Collection: Papers by Students and Faculty. 8.