African-American History in New Jersey

The story of a small cemetery founded by African Americans in central New Jersey's Sourland Mountain region and the political and preservation work the community undertook to tell its story.

In Union County, New Jersey, many soldiers and sailors of African ancestry answered President Lincoln's call for troops during the Civil War and enlisted in regiments organized in Union County, the United States Colored Troops (USCT), out of-state-regiments and the United States Navy and Marine Corps. ¬They fought not only for country but also for their comrades in chains in the South and for the promise of equality that they had for so long been denied. ¬ rough their stories, never-before-seen photographs, documents and service records, local historian Ethel M. Washington tells a largely overlooked but riveting history of patriotic black servicemen in the North who defended the nation's ideals on the battle field even as they faced discrimination in the ranks and back home.

Merging scholarly research and biographical narrative, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton reveals the true life of a freed and highly educated slave in the Antebellum North. Betsey Stockton's odyssey began in 1798 in Princeton, New Jersey, as "Bet," the child of a slave mother, who captured the heart of her owner and surrogate father Ashbel Green, President of Princeton University.Advanced lessons at Princeton Theological Seminary matched her with lifelong friends Rev. Charles S. Stewart and his pregnant bride Harriet, as the three endured an 158-day voyage as Presbyterian missionaries to the Sandwich Islands in1823. Armchair sailors will savor Stockton's own pre-Moby Dick whaleship journal of her time at sea, a shipboard birth, and life at Lahaina, Maui, where Stockton is celebrated as founding the first school for non-royal Hawaiians.Back on US soil, Stockton became surrogate mother to the Stewarts' three children, sailed with missionaries on the Barge Canal to the Ojibwa Mission School, and later returned to her hometown, establishing a church and four schools which are the centers of a still-vibrant African American Historic District of Witherspoon-Jackson.

A Marxist history of antebellum life in New Jersey

Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers's connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental--nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. Men like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810-1824), the Reverend Philip Milledoler, (president of Rutgers from 1824-1840), Henry Rutgers, (trustee after whom the college is named), and Theodore Frelinghuysen, (Rutgers's seventh president), were among the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic. See also: the Scarlet and Black Project website.

This groundbreaking volume explores the archaeology of African American life and cultures in the Upper Mid-Atlantic region, using sites dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Sites in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York are all examined, highlighting the potential for historical archaeology to illuminate the often overlooked contributions and experiences of the region's free and enslaved African American settlers.

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate--about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy"--became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans." Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free. In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.

This unique social history, focusing on a single community in eastern New jersey, addresses many long-held assumptions about slavery and emancipation outside the plantation South.

A comprehensive history of African Americans in New York City and its rural environs from the arrival of the first African--a sailor marooned on Manhattan Island in 1613--to the bloody Draft Riots of 1863. Throughout, he explores the intertwined themes of freedom and servitude, city and countryside, and work, religion, and resistance that shaped black life in the region through two and a half centuries.

This work reunites black and labor history, including the formation of slavery in the North, the American Revolution, blacks and the Workingmen's Movement, and interracial marriage before the Civil War.

This title is available in print or in eBook format. See also New Jersey Slavery Records database from Rutgers (under development).

This title is available in print or in eBook format.

James Collins Johnson was a Black man who escaped enslavement in Maryland and traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where he was tried and sentenced to be returned to enslavement. Instead, he was purchased by local Princetonians and remained a servant of the University in perpetual pseudo-enslavement.

William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole, was based in Philadelphia with extensive family ties and work in New Jersey.

This is the story of free Black man Jacob Francis of Amwell township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey who was indentured out by his free Black mother to age 21. Five different men "owned his time" during his indenture and each provided a different experience for him. The last man lived in Salem, Massachusetts and Jacob lived there between 1768 and 1775 during the buildup to fighting in the American Revolution. Jacob enlisted in a Massachusetts Continental regiment in October 1775 and served through the siege of Boston, the New York campaign, and the Battle of Trenton. When his enlistment expired on January 1, 1777, he left the army and went back to his birthplace to find his mother and learn his family surname. He established himself in Amwell and turned out for active militia duty for the rest of the war. In 1789 he married an enslaved woman named Mary whose master sold her to him on their wedding day. He freed her and together they raised a family of nine children. After his life of farming, Jacob and Mary moved into the village of Flemington about 1811 and lived there the remainder of their lives. They were active in the local Baptist Church and their youngest son, Abner, became an ardent abolitionist opposed to the idea of sending freed Black people as "colonists" to Africa. Abner always noted that his father's participation in the Revolution had been an inspiration for his lifelong endeavors to achieve equal rights Black people as well as White people. The story of Jacob and his family helps us understand the longstanding systemic racism that Black people in the United States have had to deal with while working to establish their place in society. It is a story of grit and determination combined with kindness and friendship.

In an extended interview, conducted in 1883 on Sourland Mountain, New Jersey, Sylvia Dubois - then nearly one hundred years old - told her life story to Dr. Cornelius Wilson Larison. It's not clear whether Dr. Larison's account of Sylvia's life is mostly history or mostly folklore. In either case, it remains a fascinating view of slave life and the life of free Black people in the North during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This title is in the public domain and can be read online free at Hathitrust.org.

This work was prepared for the Trenton Historical Society.

A print version of this title is available at the State Library.

Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three enslaved Black men in 18th and and early 19th century central New Jersey.

This book is now a database online, see Slave Manumissions 1787-1844 on the Monmouth Clerk's website.

In 1786, an enslaved man named Prime became one of only three enslaved people to be manumitted by act of the New Jersey legislature in exchange for his service during the Revolutionary War. See more about the manumission of Prime compiled by Princeton.

For slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad, names like Springtown and Snow Hill promised sanctuary and salvation. Under the pressures of racial prejudice, free blacks, runaway slaves and even many Native Americans formed island communities on the periphery of South Jersey towns. While Lawnside and others continue to thrive today, "fringe communities"? like Marshalltown and Timbuctoo now exist only in memory.

Comprehensive and frankly shocking history of slavery laws in New Jersey, as published in the Rutgers Law Review. Read online with NJSL library card at HeinOnline.

This title is also available in a digitized version from HathiTrust.org.

The names of Black New Jersey heads of household on the 1830 Census (the first existing census for our state) begin on page 74. This book contains the names of the Head of Household along with their approximate age, gender, and number of persons within his or her family. Information is broken down by state and then into counties. This book is also available to download from: Archive.org

Includes soldier profiles and photographs, brief regimental histories, and the names of all who served and their burial place

Miscellaneous articles on Gouldtown

The first man to register to vote under the 15th amendment was New Jersey's Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy. See also the Historical Commission's It Happened Here: Thomas Mundy Peterson lesson plan for educators.

Betty Livingston Adams examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century. When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just barely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of "the suburbs" depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation.

On March 1, 1894, two African American men broke into a home in rural Franklin Park and murdered a white woman and her daughter before her husband fought and killed the attackers. The newspapers called it the "Franklin Park Tragedy," and the story captivated public attention nationally and abroad. Another tragedy came afterward, with the racist forced expulsion of many local African American residents. Author Brian Armstrong tells the shocking story of this "sundown town" and how it evolved into the diverse community that exists today.

University of Pennsylvania dissertation on tradition (oral history, folklore, and archives) in a rural African American community in Greenwich Township, New Jersey.

State employees have electronic access to this dissertation from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Study of a cemetery which served the African American population of Bergen County, chiefly Hackensack, N.J., from the mid-19th century through the first quarter of the 20th century

Beginning in the 1880s, the economic realities and class dynamics of popular northern resort towns unsettled prevailing assumptions about political economy and threatened segregationist practices. Exploiting early class divisions, black working-class activists staged a series of successful protests that helped make northern leisure spaces a critical battleground in a larger debate about racial equality. Also available as an eBook for State employees and TESU.

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.

Suburbanization simultaneously erased the physical architecture of rural segregation in New Jersey and ideologically obscured the deepening, persistent injustices that became the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex. His solution for the twenty-first century involves the most fundamental effort to racially integrate state and local government conceived since the Reconstruction Era. Suburban Erasure is a must read for people concerned with democracy, human rights, and the future of civil society.

A heartfelt, and riveting biography of the short life of a talented young African-American man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets-and of one's own nature-when he returns home.

Black New Jersey tells the rich and complex story of the African American community's remarkable accomplishments and the colossal obstacles they faced along the way. Drawing from rare archives, historian Graham Russell Gao Hodges brings to life the courageous black men and women who fought for their freedom and eventually built a sturdy and substantial middle class. He explores how the state's unique mix of religious, artistic, and cultural traditions have helped to produce such world-renowned figures as Paul Robeson, Cory Booker, and Queen Latifah, as well as a host of lesser-known but equally influential New Jersey natives.  

In The Northside, Johnson brings the untold story of Atlantic City's black community vividly to life, from the arrival of the first African Americans to Absecon Island in the early 19th century through the glory days of the "World's Playground." Drawing on dozens of personal interviews and painstaking archival research, he reveals long-forgotten details about the people on whose backs the gambling mecca was built and offers a wide-ranging survey of the accomplishments of more recent generations.

This book gives an intimate look into the history of an African American National Historic Site that was located in Bordentown, New Jersey. It was known by many names: Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth; M.T.I.S.; or the Tuskegee of the North. Most commonly, however, it was called just the "Bordentown School." Bordentown was founded in 1886 by an ex-slave, Walter Allen Simpson Rice. See also our archival collection for the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth at Bordentown.

The case of the Trenton Six attracted international attention in its time (1948-1952) and was once known as the "northern Scottsboro Boys case." Yet, there is no memory of it. The shame of racism evident in the case has been nearly erased from the public record. Now, historian Cathy D. Knepper takes us back to the courtroom to make us aware of this shocking chapter in American history.

State employees have electronic access to this dissertation from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

African American Women Writers in New Jersey, 1836-2000 is the first and only reference book to identify and document the lives, intellectual contributions, and publications of over one hundred African American women writers in the Garden State from 1836 through 2000. Many, such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alice Perry Johnson, Sharon Bell Mathis, Ntozake Shange, Claudia C. Tate, Ruby Ora Williams, and Marion Thompson Wright, were born in the state. Others, like Amina Baraka, E. Alma Flagg, Helen Jackson Lee, Gertrude Williams Pitts, and Dorothy Porter Wesley, although not born there, were residents of New Jersey for more than fifteen years, and made significant contributions during that time. Sibyl E. Moses has enhanced the text with characteristic excerpts from the poetry and prose of selected writers.

Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of protest in the black community.

Stories of Newark's postwar decline are easy to find. But in The Fixers, Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city's decline mounted by Newark's residents and suburban neighbors, "fixers" who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state.

download a digitized copy from the North Jersey History & Genealogy Center

Founded in 1930 as the result of efforts by several black Catholic laywomen, Queen of Angels was the first African American Catholic congregation in Newark, New Jersey. The church quickly embarked on an outreach campaign that endured for decades and affected the entire Newark community - black and white, Catholic and Protestant. By the 1960's, many people looked to Queen of Angels as a model of social and civil rights activism.

The community of Trenton. New Jersey's effort to establish itself as a political and social force.

A vivid history of life in Princeton, New Jersey, told through the voices of its African American residents

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses--her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Hannah Crafts was America's first Black woman novelist, completing her "The Bondwoman's Narrative" while in hiding in New York. She was later a resident of New Jersey. This work includes Hannah's story and five of her contemporaries.

Was New Jersey the most resistant to ending slavery among northern states, or was it a progressive place where former slaves found unique opportunities to pursue freedom, self determination, and defense from determined slave-catchers? The answer depends on where you look.