The Trenton Project

Historian Alison Isenberg and filmmaker Purcell Carson have collaborated since 2015 on a documentary film and book about the April 1968 uprising in Trenton, New Jersey. They teach a seminar “Documentary Film and the City” and have organized many public humanities events and student workshops. Their research focuses on the life and death of Harlan “Bruce” Joseph, a black college student who was fatally shot by a white police officer during the unrest.

In the volatile days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, around the country more than 40 people, mostly African-Americans, died. Most perished in unclear circumstances tied by the media to looted and burned stores. Many were shot by police. Trenton “riots” became a simplified explanation for that city’s downward spiral. Joseph's story reveals how little is known about the people who died under those violent circumstances, with individual accounts lost in the collective tragedy.

On Carroll Street where he grew up, Joseph was a thoughtful student at Trenton High and grandson of a local minister. Joseph’s stepfather was a career corrections officer at Trenton State Prison. Joseph served on the Mayor’s Youth Council and ran a youth program at Mercer Street Friends Center. He spent the summer of 1964 at Princeton University, among 40 hand-picked students attending a prototype Upward Bound program. In 1968 on the eve of Trenton’s unrest, he returned home from Lincoln University for Easter, and was mourning Reverend King. Downtown began to fill with teenagers that beautiful afternoon. When Joseph turned the corner onto State Street, two blocks from home, across from City Hall, none of this mattered. In the chaos, Joseph was seen as a looter.

This project engages two disciplines to explore why that is, while engaging Trentonians today with the surprising findings about the past.