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:

• Advisory Committee member for the New Jersey Black Heritage Trail. 

• Steering Committee member for Truth and Repair: The History of Structural Racism in New Jersey.

• 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

The Black Camden Oral History Project aims to preserve the history of African American life and activism in Camden, New Jersey. This is a project led by Kendra Boyd, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers–Camden, and co-directed by Jesse Bayker, Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Rutgers University–Camden and an affiliated faculty member with the Digital Studies Center (DiSC), and developer of the New Jersey Slavery Records database. Several interviews have been added to Black Voices at Rutgers as a preview. Interviews conducted in 2022 in 2023 are currently being transcribed and will be added to the website in the coming months.

Learn more here.