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Biography

CJ Martin is a historian who focuses on Black history, and pays particular attention to the abolitionist movement and the politics of anti-slavery.  He teaches courses that run the gamut of African American history, and centers Black Americans’ struggles for justice, from slavery and abolition to Black Lives Matter.  CJ also maintains a public focus, and has consulted with public history and social justice organizations and museums.

His first book, The Precious Birthright:  Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island, tells the story of how Black Rhode Islanders were able to win back the right to vote in Rhode Island – the only instance before the Civil War in which a state re-enfranchised Black men it had previously barred from voting.  His current book project is a biography of Reverend John W. Lewis, a Black Freewill Baptist minister who helped spread anti-slavery around Northern New England and New York.

Selected Publications

For God and the Slave: The Abolitionist Life of Reverend John W. Lewis, manuscript in progress.

The Precious Birthright: Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island, October 2024, UMass Press.

“Frederick Douglass and the ‘Faithful Little Band of Abolitionists’ in Uxbridge, Massachusetts,” Commonplace, June 2023

“‘Forever and Hereafter a Body Politic’: The African Union Meeting House and Providence’s First Black Leaders,” Rhode Island History (Fall 2019), 20-47.

“The ‘Mustard Seed’: Providence’s Alfred Niger, Antebellum Black Voting Rights Activist,” Small State, Big History