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Photograph of Professor Kendra Boyd

Dr. Kendra Boyd is a scholar of African American history whose research focuses on Black business and economic history, urban history, and migration. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Wayne State University and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

At Rutgers-Camden, Dr. Boyd is an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies Program and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE). She is currently recruiting participants for the Black Camden Oral History Project. She began developing this project as a Public Humanities Fellow at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) in 2022.

Select Publications

Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

“A ‘Body of Business Makers’: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community,” Enterprise & Society (September 2020). https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2020.39. Winner of the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Scarlet and Black, Volume 2: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865–1945, co-edited with Marisa Fuentes and Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Winner of the 2022 Edited Non-fiction Author Award from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance.