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    The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey
    The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey
    The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey

    By Walter D. Greason

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    T?he struggle for black freedom and equality is a legacy that belongs to all Americans. In the twentieth century, this story of triumph over injustice inspired the spread of democracy around the world. From the villages of Eastern Europe to the cities of Asia and Africa, people have found new strength, hope and courage in the ways African Americans defeated Jim Crow segregation in the United States. Liberty and equality required the sacrifices of many African Americans who lived and made a difference in New Jersey, including the Russell, Ham and Brown families whom Walter Greason documents in this book. This contemporary narrative of community uplift offers a fresh appreciation of just how long the path to justice is.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateAug 5, 2010
    ISBN9781614232612
    The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey
    Author

    Walter D. Greason

    Walter David Greason is an associate professor of history and American studies as well as the coordinator of the African American and Africana Studies Program at Ursinus College in suburban Pennsylvania. He has published work on race, segregation and metropolitan growth in publications ranging from Planning Perspectives to the Journal of African American History to Next American City magazine. Greason is one of the nation's foremost experts on suburbs, especially in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

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      Book preview

      The Path to Freedom - Walter D. Greason

      mine.

      INTRODUCTION

      When the historian and sociologist William E.B. DuBois wrote about the importance of pride in the African American community in the Crisis magazine in 1933, he addressed the pressing poverty, unemployment, segregation and discrimination that taught black people to be ashamed of themselves:

      American Negroes will be beaten into submission and degradation if they merely wait unorganized to find some place voluntarily given them in the new reconstruction of the economic world. They must themselves force their race into the new economic set-up and bring with them the millions of West Indians and Africans by peaceful organization for normative action or else drift into greater poverty, greater crime, greater helplessness until there is no resort but the last red alternative of revolt, revenge, and war.

      New Jersey was a terrain for advocates for racial equality, ranging from Florence Randolph (pioneering pastor of Wallace Chapel AME Zion Church in Summit, New Jersey) to George White (United States congressional representative, 1897–1901, and founder of Whitesboro, New Jersey) to Caleb Oates (pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Farmingdale, New Jersey, and founder of the Monmouth Community Action Program). These leaders and their communities transformed democracy in the Garden State during the twentieth century. Their legacy inspires new achievements as the bounty of human freedom.

      In 1900, most people in Europe and the United States considered African American history an oxymoron. The idea of Africa embodied the absence of progress or civilization. Thus, there was no history there or among anyone descended from that region. Religious and scientific arguments ranging from the Curse of Ham to craniology reinforced the social perceptions of black inferiority. While many of the obvious clashes about the humanity of Africans and African Americans unfolded in the rural South or the urban North between 1890 and 1930, some black families moved into western states or the rural communities of the North. Such black families in New Jersey believed that they could find a greater measure of freedom in small farming villages that permitted homeownership and educational achievement within the boundaries of the national system of Jim Crow segregation. In towns like Freehold, Asbury Park, Willingboro and Montclair, African American migrants crafted lives that their parents and grandparents could only imagine while living in southern states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. By 2000, the great-grandchildren of these migrants routinely graduated from integrated high schools and colleges, worked in corporations and government offices and traveled across the nation and around the world at their leisure.

      This transformation is the embodiment of human history. Understanding change over time is one of the most important purposes of studying the past. When racial slavery and subordination became a part of human civilization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it created a barrier to human advancement that had antecedents only in the treatment of religious minorities and women. For a people degraded as chattel property to escape that status and achieve a substantial degree of social and political equality within a century’s time spoke to the simultaneous greatness of the liberal idea of human freedom and of the dogged persistence among people of African descent in western society. The study of African American history offers the lessons of freedom, dignity, integrity and authority to every student who considers it. In a world where terrorism looms wherever resentment festers and fascism lurks in anticipation of restricting freedoms in exchange for safety, the story of black families in New Jersey presents an alternative narrative to violent resistance and expansive domination.

      The images that follow this introduction present a people who knew poverty intimately for multiple generations. They physically migrated to new homes throughout the twentieth century until they found places where their success would be tolerated, if not nurtured. They psychologically adapted themselves and their children to the methods of achieving an equality that the society at large believed was impossible. Work hard, seek higher education, be thrifty, organize the community, assert your humanity and earn rest and respect in your later years. These steps carried families, households and whole towns to the realization of racial integration as a reality at the start of the twenty-first century.

      Historian Andrew Wiese wrote,

      In the years before 1950, thousands of central city blacks moved to the suburbs. Long ridiculed as poverty pockets and suburban slums, the communities where they settled were often poor, but they were fully part of the national trend toward urban decentralization known as suburbanization. At the same time, they reflected a

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