Press Release October 25

The area surrounding the boulder currently serves as space for contemplation on the campus, with benches situated nearby. A garden is planned for the area.

Born in what is now known as Jamaica, Rantus became a civil rights activist, educator, and landowner with holdings throughout the borough. He provided financial backing for the Anglo African, a magazine launched by pioneering African American journalist Thomas Hamilton in 1858. Rantus helped build a school for African American children and also worked to organize statewide conventions in support of an amendment to the New York State constitution that barred African American citizens who were not property owners from voting.

Rantus was buried in his family’s cemetery in 1861. In the early 50s, in preparation for the construction of an apartment complex on the cemetery site, the remains of three individuals were moved with the consent of Rantus’s descendants to Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. One of the two gravestones found was for Wilson Rantus. In June 2014, Rantus’s gravestone appeared without explanation in the backyard of a Flushing resident. The 153-year-old marble tombstone was relocated to Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn later that month where it now marks Rantus’s remains.

The approximately 13-ton gneiss boulder that will serve as Rantus Rock is thought to be a piece of bedrock from the Hudson Highlands picked up by moving glacial ice and deposited 13,000 to 18,000 years ago on what is now the Flushing campus. It is surmised that the edge of the glacier stood along the east-west rise of the wall where the boulder rolled off and was then buried in sand from the melting ice sheet. The fragment was originally located several kilometers beneath the earth’s surface and through subsequent erosion over hundreds of millions of years was brought to within 20 feet of the earth’s surface.