Kendra D. 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 co-directs the Black Camden Oral History Project.

Some select publications include:

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.