Online Roundtable–The Georgia of the North
January 21 to January 28, 2025
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2024) by Hettie V. Williams. The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book.
This narrative is largely defined by a central question: How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle.
The roundtable begins on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 and concludes on Tuesday, January 28, 2025. It will feature essays by Cherisse Jones-Branch (Arkansas State University), Patricia Reid-Merritt (Stockton University), Marvin Walker (Morgan State University), Lacey Hunter (Rutgers University, Newark) and Katie Singer (UCLA). At the conclusion, the author Hettie V. Williams (Monmouth University) will respond.
During the week of the online roundtable, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:30AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter, like AAIHS on Facebook, or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.
About the Author
Hettie V. Williams Ph.D. is currently a professor of history at Monmouth University in the Department of History and Anthropology. Her research and teaching interests include African American intellectual history, women’s history, and race/ethnic studies in a global context. She is also the author/editor of seven books and several essays, papers, articles, and book chapters. Her writings have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Southern History, the South Carolina Historical Magazine, and in New Jersey Studies; as well as in the popular press including in BBC History Magazine, HuffPost, Asbury Park Press, Star Ledger and on several blogs. Williams is also the former director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture at UMass Boston and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Women’s History. Her latest book is titled The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2024).
About the Participants
Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Communication and Professor of History at Arkansas State University. A Rural, Women’s and African American history scholar, Dr. Jones-Branch is the author of Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II, Better Living By Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1913-1965, and the co-editor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times in addition to many articles and essays. She is working on a third book project titled “. . . To Make the Farm Bureau Stronger and Better for All the People:” African Americans and the American Farm Bureau Federation: 1920-1966. She is also the co-editor of the “Rural Black Studies” series for the University of Arkansas Press.
Dr. Patricia Reid-Merritt – author, educator, scholar, community activist, arts administrator and performing artist – is the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Social Work at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey. Dr. Reid-Merritt received the Doctorate of Social Work in Race, Law and Social Policy (University of Pennsylvania); the Master of Social Work (Temple University); and, the Bachelor of Arts in psychology and social science (Cabrini College). Her career at Stockton has been marked by tremendous contributions to the profession, Africana Studies and the University. She is the founder of the annual Kwanzaa programs (1974), launched the Council of Black Faculty and Staff Scholarship Fundraising Dinner (1984) spearheaded the annual Fannie Lou Hamer Human and Civil Rights Symposiums ((2004 – 2015), served as Chair for the National Fannie Lou Hamer Statue Committee, and as Coordinator of the African Studies Program (2003 – 2016), She is also the Founder and Artistic/Executive Director of Afro-One Dance, Drama and Drum Theatre, Inc., a community-based cultural and performing arts organization currently celebrating its 50th year of operation. Dr. Reid-Merritt is the author of numerous publications, including: the national Blackboard best-seller, Sister Power: How Phenomenal Black Women Are Rising to the Top; Sister Wisdom: Seven Pathways to a Satisfying Life for Soulful Black Women; Righteous Self-Determination: The Black Social Work Movement in America; Race in America: How a Pseudo-Scientific Concept