Nicka Smith at Amherst, October 4, 2021 – A Racial History of Amherst College

Nicka Smith’s talk on October 4 was recorded and is available on the college’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/RBe9uHxSTJo

The Amherst Student published an article about the talk: “Nicka Smith Delivers Talk on Israel Trask and the Trask 250”

Anna Smith ’22 published an op-ed piece on Trask to propose that the college acquire his mansion in Springfield, MA which is currently for sale: “Buying the Trask House: A Chance to Confront Our Past”

“Held in the Balance: The Trask 250”
A public lecture by Nicka Smith
Monday, October 4, 2021
5:30 PM in Lipton Lecture Hall, Science Center
https://www.amherst.edu/news/events/calendar/node/809793

“Held in the Balance: The Trask 250” will feature the Trask family, which ran a cotton empire in Mississippi and Louisiana valued at upwards of $4 million, all while largely retaining residency in Massachusetts and New York. Israel E. Trask was a donor to the Amherst College Charity Fund and served as a College trustee from 1821 until his death in 1835. He established cotton plantations in Mississippi with his brother before returning permanently to Massachusetts in 1822, where he ran a cotton textile mill in his hometown of Brimfield. Trask was active in Massachusetts government and charities throughout his life while spending several months each year on the family plantations. Discover how DNA shared by more than 350 people who descend from the formerly enslaved unearthed this discovery and how a multitude of documents detailing their lives have created a family history project documenting more than 6,000 people.

For people who want to do a little reading on their own in advance of Nicka Smith’s lecture, we recommend the following resources:

Students, Faculty, and Staff currently on campus can view a small exhibit of the Founding Documents of Amherst College on the A-Level of Frost Library. The documents on display include the original Charity Fund ledger open to a page with Israel Trask’s donations and other fundraising documents from ca. 1818-1825. The display also includes an explanation of who Rev. David Parsons was and his role in the founding of the college: Rev. David Parsons held three people in slavery while he was pastor of the First Church of Amherst. His son, also Rev. David Parsons, was the founding President of Amherst Academy and was a donor to the founding of Amherst College. These materials will remain on public display through the end of 2021.

Most of the documents on display are also available online via Amherst College Digital Collections in two sub-collections:

The Trask 250 Multimedia Series
https://www.whoisnickasmith.com/trask-250-series/
Nicka Smith is a professional genealogist who hosts a long-running web series called “BlackProGen Live” that focuses on African-American genealogy; there are more than 125 episodes freely available online. The Trask 250 series focuses on her work tracing the descendants of people enslaved on the Trask plantations; there are only six posts in the Trask series.

Nicka Smith’s genealogical work was part of this recent news story about digitization of vital records for Black genealogy.

Israel Trask Blog Posts by Anna Smith ‘22
Amherst senior Anna Smith is writing her senior thesis on Israel Trask and his relationship to Amherst College. She spent part of the summer of 2021 conducting research with materials held at Amherst and traveling to Mississippi. She wrote a series of blog posts that are now available on the Racial History of Amherst website:

The Israel Trask Papers
The Archives & Special Collections holds a small collection of Trask’s manuscripts, largely correspondence with his family members. These documents feature several mentions of slavery, as noted in Anna Smith’s series of blog posts. Although these have not yet been fully digitized, we have made quick scans of everything available as downloadable PDFs on the Slavery and Amherst section of the Racial History of Amherst website. The finding aid for the Trask Papers is also available online.

Additional Readings:
Although there are many potential readings, these two books are conveniently available as E-books through Frost Library:

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Cornell University Press, 1998, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1tm7jcc
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2013, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjsf5q7 Although this book does not reference Israel Trask specifically, it covers the exact geographical area and time period of the Trask plantations, including details of the 1811 uprising.