The Cuffee Collaboration: CELS students, faculty reach out to help charter school

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, United States on 2011-07-02 23:27Z by Steven

The Cuffee Collaboration: CELS students, faculty reach out to help charter school

The College of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Rhode Island
CELS News Site
2009-10-27

Rudi Hempe, CELS News Editor

Spread over two inner city locations, one a former maintenance garage and the other one rented, the Paul Cuffee School in Providence is a far cry from the bucolic URI campus and yet a bond is being fashioned between the charter school and the university that has teachers beaming, students fascinated and professors excited.

The collaboration began about four years ago when Dr. J. Stanley Cobb, a professor emeritus in biological sciences, looked around his late mother’s house and saw scores of books and other documents relating to someone called Paul Cuffee, an 18th Century sea captain.

Cobb’s mother, Rosalind C. Wiggins, was an advocate for social and racial justice who spent much of her life studying and teaching about African-Americans and was editor of Paul Cuffee’s Logs and Letters

…Born on Cuttyhunk in 1759, Cuffee was one of 10 children. His father, born in Ghana, was a former slave and his mother was a Wampanoag Indian.

Cuffee became a wealthy sea captain and had his own ship with a crew of black sailors. He owned property in Westport, Massachusetts. In 1797, when his children were barred from attending a local school because of their mixed race, Cuffee decided to start a school for children of all ethnicities, one of several actions he took during his life to improve civil rights in this country…

Read the entire article here.

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