NEW BRUNSWICK -- In an effort to confront its historical ties to slavery and address concerns raised by students, Rutgers University has compiled research that sheds new light on its beginnings, including an untold story of a slave who helped build the school's iconic Old Queens administration building.

Published in a book titled "Scarlet and Black," the detailed report released Friday coincides with the university's 250th anniversary this year and shows how intertwined slavery is with the early history of Rutgers, a common theme among America's colonial colleges.

The book combines previously documented history with some new details to paint a vivid picture of the university's relationship with slavery, a history largely unacknowledged by Rutgers until this year, university officials said.

"It's something that I think most people at Rutgers had no clue about," said New Brunswick campus chancellor Richard Edwards, who ordered the review last year after African American students raised concerns about the racial climate on campus.

Though slavery was common and socially accepted when Rutgers was founded in 1766, the new book marks the first time Rutgers has chronicled its past in such depth, university officials said.

It comes as colleges nationwide are grappling with concerns about their historical ties to slavery and racism.

Among the highlights in the book:

Rutgers' first president owned slaves. Its first tutor owned slaves. And its namesake Henry Rutgers owned slaves, including the "negro wench" he supported in his will.

A slave named Will, leased for construction work by the New Brunswick doctor who owned him, helped lay the foundation for the Old Queens administration building in the early 1800s.

Famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth was originally owned by the family of Rutgers' first president.

Some early university trustees owned slaves and were among the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic region. Others were proponents of the colonization movement, which supported sending former slaves to Africa rather than allowing them to live alongside whites.

Rutgers' early faculty and curriculum reinforced the racism that justified slavery and the separation of races.

"Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty," the book states. "It depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence," noting that donors who gave money or land to the university owned slaves.

The book also examines the displacement of Native Americans who once occupied land later transferred to Rutgers.

The committee of university professors and students that spent eight months combing through archived documents and compiling the report issued more than a dozen recommendations.

Among them, the group calls for the university to place historical markers on campus recognizing the contributions of enslaved individuals and to consider naming new buildings after prominent African Americans or Native Americans.

It proposes naming the space in front of Old Queens "Will's Way" and requiring all Rutgers students to take a course in diversity.

"The committee has explored aspects of our history that are difficult and complex and I applaud them for it," Rutgers President Robert Barchi said. "Their findings provide a fuller understanding of the institution's early days."

Rutgers will consider all of the suggestions, Edwards said. It will also continue its research and document the experiences of African Americans and Native Americans at the university through the 20th century.

"We must acknowledge that our history also includes some facts that we have ignored for too long," Edwards said after commissioning the report last year. "To truly praise Rutgers, we must honestly know it."

Unlocking the past

Edwards initiated the review at Rutgers after African American students told him about the 2013 book "Ebony and Ivy" during a meeting in 2015, he said.

Written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology history professor Craig Steven Wilder, the book examines how the birth of America's early colleges was associated with slavery. Several passages in the book mention trustees and leaders at Queen's College who owned slaves or supported the colonization movement.

"As we approached the 250th anniversary, it struck me that this is something we really needed to take a look at," Edwards said. "I thought it was really important for us to start examining it, documenting what the situation here at Rutgers was."

Edwards commissioned a group of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates who sifted through records in Rutgers Libraries Special Collections and University Archives and the Sage Library at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. They also traveled to the state archives in Trenton and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Students dove into the wills, speeches, journals and property records of Rutgers founders and early trustees. They read documents slave owners filed to grant freedom to the slaves and analyzed newspapers ads for the sale of slaves.

Beatrice Adams, a graduate student who participated in the research, said she was proud of the university for doing the project.

"This report speaks volumes, that this doesn't have to be something administrators and professors are doing begrudgingly," said Adams, a graduate student in African-American history.

The report helped bring the university's relationship with slavery out of the abstract and into reality, Edwards said.

"The history was all there," Edwards said. "But no one had really delved into it."

Perhaps the most interesting finding was the slave known only by his first name, Will, who helped lay the foundation for Old Queens, according to the book.

Little is known about Will's life, other than records of his labor. But accounting records kept by his owner and maintained in the university archives place him at the construction site of Old Queens in the fall of 1808, where he performed masonry work.

"I want our African-American students to be proud of Will and to understand that their ancestry helped build the university,'' said Deborah Gray White, the history professor who chaired the research committee. "I want New Jerseyans and Americans to understand that African-Americans were integral to this nation even though we came here in chains."

The book says that other slaves likely contributed to the construction of Old Queens but were not documented by name.

There's no known record of what happened to Will after 1823, and it's likely he was sold to another owner or ran away, the report concluded.

A shared story

The fact that the early leaders of Rutgers -- founded as Queen's College in 1766 -- were slave owners has been previously documented and was not unusual for the times, historians unaffiliated with the university said.

Slavery was widely accepted at the time in the 13 original colonies and prevalent in New Jersey since the arrival of Dutch colonists in the 1600s. Slaves in New Jersey commonly tended small farms, performed household chores or were rented for manual labor.

New Jersey was the last of the northern states to pass the gradual abolition of slavery in 1804, and some African Americans remained enslaved in the state into the 1850s, historians said.

"The institution (of slavery) was simply not frowned upon at that time," said Craig Hollander, a history professor at The College of New Jersey. "If you were a prominent citizen in New York or New Jersey and you had enough money to support the founding of an institution like Rutgers, my guess is that you also had enough disposable income to own other human beings."

Many of America's other colonial colleges were also founded by men who owned slaves and supported by wealthy families who profited from slavery. Several of the nation's oldest colleges, including Harvard, Yale and Brown universities, have also investigated their ties to slavery.

Though slavery was prominent in the north at the time Rutgers was founded, it's also commonly mischaracterized as benevolent or humane, said Jim Gigantino, a historian whose book "The Ragged Road to Abolition" examines slavery in New Jersey.

"There's kind of a myth that slavery in the north was benign, that it was somehow better or easier to be a slave in the north, that they were treated better," Gigantino said.

Northerners were often just as racist as the slave owners who lived in south, Gigantino said -- a sentiment reflected in the the comments of Rutgers' seventh president, Theodore Frelinghuysen.

Frelinghuysen, president from 1850 to 1862, described African Americans as "a depressed and separate race" who were "licentious, ignorant and irritated," according to the new book.

'History is messy'

Rutgers' exploration of its history comes as universities across the country have been pressured to reconcile how they honor the past within the social and political expectations of the 21st century.

Some students at the University of Missouri last year petitioned for a statue of President Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, to be removed, saying it represented "the dehumanization of black individuals."

The University of Louisville announced earlier this year it will remove a statue honoring Confederate soldiers. And Princeton University has promised "an expanded and more vigorous commitment to diversity" after criticism of its continued honoring of former university president Woodrow Wilson, who admired the Ku Klux Klan.

Georgetown University took the biggest step toward reconciling its past, announcing earlier this year that it would offer a formal apology for the sale of 272 slaves in the 1830s and offer preferential admissions status to descendants of all slaves who contributed to the university.

It also pledged to rename two buildings named after former college presidents involved in slave sales.

Rutgers, too, has buildings named after founding fathers who owned slaves on its campus, including a residence hall named after Jacob Hardenbergh, the university's first president.

Before moving to rename buildings, the university should consider the consequences, White said.

"We would like to open a dialogue and begin a discussion of what is lost and what is won in the renaming of a building," White said. "Do we really want to erase this history be erasing the name?"

Those types of decisions, historians said, can become complicated.

"History is messy," Hollander said. "And it's going to be for every institution to decide whether or not they want to hold past generations to certain standards."

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.