Clement Alexander Price papers, multimedia materials, and artifacts

The historian Clement Alexander Price (1945-2014) was born in Washington, D.C and attended Dunbar High School. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Bridgeport (Connecticut), Price moved to Newark, New Jersey in 1969, where he joined the faculty of the Essex Community College and pursued doctoral work in history at Rutgers University. Price earned a Ph.D. in History at Rutgers University in 1975, and joined the Rutgers-Newark faculty. Price’s 1980 publication, Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey, served as a threshold to his career as a historian, educator, and advocate for the arts and humanities.

Throughout his career, Price garnered numerous appointments and invitations to advise and serve on the boards of arts, cultural, and civic organizations, both regional and national in scope. Price’s affiliations include but are not limited to: the board of Trustees for Newark Public Library; the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee; the Governor's Task Force on Literacy in the Arts; the Governor's Advisory Committee on Ellis Island; The Cultural Policy Institute; the Scholarly Advisory Committee of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. By 1998, Price was Chair of the Afro-American Studies department at Rutgers-Newark. As a historian, the city of Newark, New Jersey was one of Price’s areas of expertise. Price moved to Newark to begin his doctoral studies in history at Rutgers. Price was known for his History of Newark course and a walking tour, which evolved into the film Once and Future Newark; Price was a cofounder (with historian Giles R. Wright) of the Annual Marion Thompson Wright lecture series, which convened for the first time in 1981.