Black Women Activists North of the Mason Dixon Line

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

Over the past fifty years, scholarship on the Black Freedom Movement has expanded in scope, depth, and focus. As historian Steven F. Lawson described in his assessment of the field, early scholarship–written during and shortly after the waning years of the movement–centered on major male leaders, events in the South, national organizations, and legislative and judicial victories. The second generation of scholars, during the 1970s and 1980s, saw major gaps in the top-down, national approach and filled this void by shifting the focus to “local communities and grass-roots organizations.” A third generation of Black Freedom academics from the 1990s to the present, pursued “a more interactive model, recognizing the need to connect the local with the national, [and] the social with the political.” Beyond the regular governmental and institutional archives, these third-generation intellectuals have looked at nongovernmental institutions, which include the media, local archives, oral histories, and philanthropic foundations. Important additions to the current historiography on the Black Freedom Movement concern origins (when and where it began), the foundational role of Black women, and the struggle north of the Mason Dixon line. The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey by Hettie V. Williams contributes to and augments the field started by third-generation scholars by expanding the timeline, centering Black women, and giving prominence to New Jersey’s fundamental legislative role in the national Black Freedom Movement.

While there are noteworthy studies on nineteenth and twentieth-century New Jersey, Black women, and equal rights struggles in the North, Williams’s book is unique in its focus on Black women intellectuals throughout New Jersey during the interwar years.

Her intervention addresses what Peniel Joseph and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall saw as a “long movement” with roots planted in the liberal and radical struggles of the of the 1930s, while Williams is mindful not to collapse time periods, erase differences, or blur regional distinctions. The author’s main contention is that New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular were at the vanguard of the Black Freedom Movement. Additionally, before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Black intellectuals, mainly women, laid the imaginative groundwork for the national campaign for African American rights “while the Black professional class forged the ideological foundations of the mass nationwide campaign for Black equality” (2). Williams uses the term intellectual broadly to include “people who made a living by arguing as well as the people who made a living and argued” (11). Finally, contrary to southern states (e.g. Mississippi and Alabama) being the proving grounds for civil rights reform, “New Jersey’s civil rights legislation was fundamental to the development of national civil rights ideologies and strategies that were instigated by African Americans in the first five decades of the twentieth century” (3). For example, it was the research of Marion Thompson Wright of East Orange, New Jersey, that was important to the 1944 school desegregation victory in Hedgepeth and Williams v. Trenton Board of Education. It was the first legal case in the twentieth century to directly make it unlawful to segregate students based on race. The Hedgepeth case was a predecessor to Brown v. Board, and Wright served as a researcher on the case.

The proposition outlined in the book is substantiated by Williams’s utilization of primary sources including autobiographies, public records, oral history interviews, photographs, government documents, organizational records, periodicals, local archives, personal collections, historic Black newspapers, and print collections. The author weaves together a profusion of sources to create a seamless historical narrative that is accessible to academics and laypersons alike.

In doing so, The Georgia of the North describes the persistent agitation of New Jersey’s Black professional class in their pursuit of civil rights. The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 examines the African Americans who arrived in New Jersey during the Great Migration and the creation of a Black professional class. Factors that contributed to the rise of African American professionals and intellectuals in the state included “the rise of civil rights organizations dedicated to increased Black opportunities in education, employment, politics, and society more generally” (20). Chapter 2 explores the rise of the Black professional class, the development of community organizations, and early activism in the state. Early efforts in the 1920s by African Americans in New Jersey to challenge school segregation in Toms River and Atlantic City “set precedents in school integration” and “were covered in national and local newspapers, including in the Asbury Park Evening Press, Pittsburgh Courier, and New York Times” (51-52). Chapter 3 analyzes the various organizations established by Black women within the Garden State. Creating chapters and branches of established organizations such as the NAACP, National Urban League, the New Jersey Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, and the Montclair YWCA in particular, Black women used these institutions as a place of activism and as a refuge from misogynoir.

The final three chapters are devoted to the lives of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Sara Spencer Washington, and Marion Thompson Wright. Each one of these titans were active in New Jersey or based in the state, and each played an important role in local and national Black freedom activism, civil rights, scholarship, and entrepreneurship.

The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey by Hettie V. Williams represents a paradigm shift in the historiography of the Black Freedom Movement. It adds credence to the long durée, moving the origins back to the 1930s. In addition, Williams traces the locus to of the movement to the activism of Black women professionals, intellectuals, individuals, and organizations in New Jersey. Hettie V. Williams has provided academics with a Rosetta Stone that will open the door to advanced research on various topics regarding the Black freedom movement in New Jersey and the nation.