The Georgia of the North: An Author’s Response

This post is part of our online roundtable on Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North.

Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s critical essay “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” published in 2005, expanded the conversation among scholars writing about the civil rights movement with her long movement thesis. This reassessment has, over the past two decades, pushed scholars to interrogate more critically the popular Montgomery to Memphis chronology, the role of women, armed resistance in the movement, geographic location, and the role of local people and national organizations. These scholars–writing a few years before or about the same time as Hall’s essay was first published, including Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard with their book Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980–have come to reject the notion of a nonviolent movement that originated only in the South while also extending the parameters further of what scholars have come to understand as Black Freedom Studies. The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey is illustrative of this new wave of scholarship that challenges the shorter or more narrow framing of the civil rights movement in terms of geography, chronology, and the role of women.

“In addition, because their histories delve into local communities and organizations, they have uncovered an impressive array of women and men who remained invisible in the traditional narratives of the movement,” states historian Stephen F. Lawson about this generation of scholars who have written about the Black freedom struggle in the last twenty-five years. Though the long movement thesis has its critics (Lawson being one of them) as evidenced with the article “The Long Movement as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies” by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, in the last two decades a compendium of works on the Black freedom struggle have come to embrace the notion that the movement happened everywhere. Lawson also goes on to assert about this current generation of scholars that “the new scholarship has identified African American women—in their roles as organizers and movers and shakers in their neighborhood churches and civic associations—as the backbone of the movement.” The Georgia of the North is a part of this current historiography that focuses on local people, women, and the Black freedom struggle in the North—what scholars have come to understand as the Deep North.

My work is also representative of what Lawson calls a “short movement with long origins,” a synthesis that highlights the role of both local and national organizations beyond the Montgomery to Memphis narrative.

In the last twenty-five years, scholars of the Black freedom struggle in the North have focused on local people and women in these new histories. They include Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, Matthew J. Countryman’s Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, and more recently Zebulon Miletsky’s Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle. Books such as How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights by Belinda Robnett, Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement edited by V.P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas, and Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby, which speaks cogently to the role of women as local people instrumental to the movement, represent some key works on the role of women in the civil rights movement.

More recently, Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis, Keisha N. Blain’s monumental biography of Fannie Lou Hamer Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, and Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin all reflect how the scholarship has grown in its focus on women–a trend that is particularly clear within the intellectual and political biographies of Until I am Free and Civil Rights Queen. Black women and their ideas about freedom have increasingly become a focus of the new scholarship now defining Black Freedom Studies, which  includes those works on New Jersey.

There have been texts about New Jersey before The Georgia of the North that have pointed to a civil rights movement in the Garden State for several reasons. In 1901, New Jersey parents began the first freedom schools. NAACP operatives also became intimately involved with a series of school desegregation cases in the 1920s. Martin Luther King Jr. likely orchestrated his first non-violent direct action in New Jersey—a state identified by the NAACP as early as the 1930s as a “special” state of interest in the fight for Black freedom. It is well known that King, who occasionally lived in New Jersey while he attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in the 1950s, visited the state many times during the late 1950s and 1960s. Several historians including Clement Price, Giles Wright, Howard Gillette, Betty Livingston Adams, and Walter Greason have all documented in their writings evidence of the civil rights movement in New Jersey.¹

The Georgia of the North is a part of the new history of the civil rights movement in several ways while also departing from previous histories about the Black freedom struggle in New Jersey. This work is also, in many respects, a work of synthesis within which I integrate a discussion of the major foci that have defined discussions within Black Freedom Studies in the last twenty-five years including: the role of women in the movement, chronological parameters, geographic location, local people, strategy, and the involvement of national organizations. Women led the way in New Jersey through both local and national organizations such as the Montclair YWCA and the NAACP. There was a sustained civil rights movement in the Garden State by the mid-1920s that focused on the integration of public schools, access to public spaces, equal employment opportunity, and state military service in the National Guard that culminated in sweeping civil rights legislation in the state between 1942 and 1949, which included the passage of the New Jersey Civil Rights Law of 1949. Alice Hooe Foster, Hortense Ridley Tate, Mary Allen, Marion Thompson Wright, and Sara Spencer Washington led the way in helping to secure these major gains as members of local Black Republican Clubs, members of the NAACP and YWCA, and as operatives of local chapters connected to the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). New Jersey, as a result, became a blueprint for the passage of national civil rights laws in the 1950s and 1960s though they are customarily associated with the southern Black freedom struggle.

In The Georgia of the North, I not only extend the chronological parameters of the movement, but also the involvement of women at both the national and local level while illustrating that New Jersey’s more active civil rights chapters such as the Asbury Park NAACP were readily willing to take up arms to defend Black freedom as documented in a cross burning incident in Wall Township, New Jersey. There, more than two-dozen members of what was then the Asbury Park NAACP grabbed their guns and were willing to defend a Black homeowner in Wall who had a cross burned on his lawn–one year before landmark civil rights legislation was signed in the state in 1949.² There were also protracted battles to integrate New Jersey schools during the 1920s (New Jersey continued to segregate schools despite a state law making this illegal in the late 19th century) led by local parents and activists who sometimes sought out the NAACP for support. Marcus Garvey visited the state in 1924, and according to historian Mikal Nash, New Jersey had more than two dozen chapters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) during the height of the Garvey Era. By 1930, the NAACP had identified New Jersey as a special test state for the advance of Black civil rights.

While studies written about New Jersey and the Civil Rights Movement have mentioned the important role of women outside of the parameters of the Montgomery to Memphis narrative, my work moves beyond these previous social histories that tend to focus on urban rebellion, deindustrialization, suburbanization or are primarily community histories.

The Georgia of the North is a text that locates the origins of the movement in the interwar era while looking at the state as a whole–including some analysis of both the northern and southern regions of the Garden State in the context of the larger narrative. This is critical to the intervention that I am making here because the few studies that exist on New Jersey in particular tend to be chronologically focused on urban rebellions in the 1960s, suburbanization, community histories or analyses that focus mainly on a particular county or distinct cities in New Jersey such as Newark, Plainfield, or Summit and operate primarily social histories.³ Much of the work written about New Jersey in this era is about Newark or the Newark riots—studies that do not center women as a whole. The Georgia of the North is largely an intellectual history that traces the ideas and activism of Black women across the state before 1954. These women and their ideas about freedom are the central drivers of my narrative. This is only the second scholarly book published that is defined as a Black women’s history of the Garden State defined by an intersectional lens and the first Black women’s intellectual history of the civil rights movement in New Jersey.

The civil rights movement did not end social inequality in America nor did it end in New Jersey. Segregation in schools and cross burnings continued in places such as Salem, New Jersey, into the 1960s. Today, New Jersey has been criticized by civil rights activists for having egregious levels of inequality in the public school system. These factors prompt us to look more deeply at the Black freedom struggle in the Garden State to understand more succinctly why and how the civil rights movement began and ended in New Jersey. More work must be done to illuminate this important episode in U.S. history.

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