The Oneida Institute: The Most Radical School in America

Four miles west of Utica, on a hundred-and-fifteen-acre farm along the Erie Canal in the village of Whitesboro, stood one of the most radical educational institutions in American history. The Oneida Institute of Science and Industry opened in eighteen twenty-seven as a manual labor school, meaning students worked the farm alongside their academic studies. That was not unusual. What happened when the abolitionist Beriah Green took over as president in eighteen thirty-three was.

Green arrived with two conditions: he would be allowed to advocate publicly for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people, and he would admit students without restriction by race or class. The board agreed. Overnight, the Oneida Institute became the first school in the United States to admit Black men on equal terms with white men. At a moment when virtually every American institution, North and South, maintained racial hierarchy as a matter of course, Green ran classes, shared meals, and assigned farm labor without distinction.

The students who came to Whitesboro under those terms included some of the most consequential Black voices of the antebellum era. Henry Highland Garnet, who had escaped slavery as a child, studied here. So did Alexander Crummell, who would become one of the leading intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and who later described his years at Oneida as three years of perfect equality. The school also served as a station on the Underground Railroad.

The institute closed in eighteen forty-three, succeeded briefly by a renamed seminary. Its building is gone. But the network of activists it trained helped shape the abolitionist movement that eventually broke the institution it was built to challenge.