Kendra Boyd

Kendra Boyd is a historian whose research examines Black business and economics, urban development, and African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

Publications:

• Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit (2025). University of Pennsylvania Press

• “A ‘Body of Business Makers’: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community,” Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, 23, no. 1 (March 2022): 164-205. doi:10.1017/eso.2020.39

• Scarlet and Black, Volume Two: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945, co-edited with Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University Press, 2020).

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Keynote address at Slavery, It Happened Here, Too – Stories from New Jersey workshop, Sankofa Collaborative, Hamilton, NJ, June 6, 2023.

• “Property Rights, Eminent Domain, and the Battle for African American Economic Self-Determination,” National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, PA, July 29, 2022.

• “The History of Racial Inequality in New Jersey,” Journeying Toward Reparations, Reparations Task Force, Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, September 28, 2021.

Previous Organizations: 

• York University

• Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis

Accomplishments:

• Author Award (edited non-fiction category), New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, 2022

• Public Humanities Fellow, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH), 2022

• Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize, Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), 2021