Race, Gender, and Religion in New Jersey’s Civil Rights Movement
This post is part of our online roundtable on Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North.
Hettie V. Williams has prodigiously crafted a narrative that significantly contributes to the scholarship of the Black freedom movement in a way that demands reconsideration of its nearly exclusive focus on southern Black activism. In The Great Georgia of the North, Williams explores Black women’s activism in New Jersey–the impetus for which was deeply embedded in the history of the Great Migration. Their southern-born families moved North to New Jersey, seeking to escape racism and in search of improved opportunities. Unfortunately, what they discovered differed little from what they had left behind. And this compelled them to resist the strictures that circumscribed opportunities for Black people.
Descended from southern-born parents like the women she chronicles, Williams has produced the first scholarly treatment of the Black women who were at the center of New Jersey’s Black freedom struggle. She skillfully outlines how they created and leveraged alliances across the lines of race, class, and gender to enact the passage of early civil rights legislation.
However, this work does more than focus on civil rights activism. It probes the inner workings of these Black women’s lives and, in doing so, affords us a deeper understanding of how they understood their activism and its impact on northern Black communities even beyond New Jersey.
Although titled The Georgia of the North with all that implies, Williams does speak to the limited access available to Black people in New Jersey before and after the Civil War. The focus, however, is very clearly on Black women who were the architects and leaders of Black freedom initiatives throughout the state. This emphasis is not unlike extant studies on southern Black women activists. What sets Williams’s study apart is the extent of civil rights activism in New Jersey during the interwar period, the legislation passed before 1955, and the depth of Black women’s unheralded involvement.
Black women like Marion Thompson Wright, for instance, played a critical role in the 1944 Hedgepeth and Williams v. Trenton Board of Education school segregation case. Her research on racial discrimination in South Jersey supplied the NAACP with critical information for its litigation, which changed the landscape for Black education in the state ten years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court.
Williams rightly identifies Black women like Wright as intellectuals, but we also are reminded that their lives were complex and nuanced. They made choices based on the options available to them, and in more than a few instances, they created opportunities where none had previously existed.
Wright is particularly intriguing in this regard. As one of six Black women who earned a doctorate in history in the 1940s, Williams invites readers to better understand the “impact of intersectional oppression” on her “lived experience” (117). A descendant of southern-born enslaved ancestors, Wright’s childhood and family were marked by dysfunction and trauma. A teen mother who married young, she became a domestic worker, the type of labor most commonly available to Black women at the time regardless of their location. Highly precocious, driven, and determined, Wright transgressed the racial and gender limitations of marriage, motherhood, and domestic labor by leaving her husband and children, graduating from high school, and attending Howard University on a scholarship. Her choices, however, came at a cost. Wright adamantly refused to return to her family and feared having her secret exposed at a time when sexist attitudes would have certainly ended her education.
Black women intellectuals in New Jersey, as Williams well notes, embraced intersectionality as “both a theoretical and methodological” activist strategy. They deployed their connections to such Black women-centered and led organizations–such as the National Association of Colored Women, the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, and the Colored Women’s Republican Club, among others–as spaces to coalesce around their shared social justice work to improve health, education, and political outcomes in their communities.
No one wielded their arsenal as well as Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1899, Hedgeman has long been a relatively unknown civil rights luminary. Williams has fleshed out her story to reveal yet another complex Black woman whose “pragmatic Christian feminist and pluralist-interracialist activism” permitted her to bridge chasms across multiple groups for the cause of Black freedom. Connected to many organizations–as executive director of the Black branch of the YWCA in Jersey City in the 1920s, a cofounder of the National Organization of Women, and the only woman on the 1963 March on Washington organizing committee–Hedgeman’s affiliations demonstrate how astutely Black women activists mobilized across diverse constituencies.
As a public intellectual, Hedgeman, like the other Black women Williams writes about, further understood that her role in the civil rights movement would likely be overlooked and forgotten. She wrote herself into the historical narrative through what was described as “self-life writing,” or scriptotherapy, wherein Black women crafted texts that centered their experiences and ways of knowing and being in a world determined to render them and their labors invisible. It was their “act of literary self-articulation” in a world that refused to acknowledge, let alone hear, Black women’s voices (76, 77).
Hedgeman’s Methodist upbringing further helped develop her diverse activist skillset. Although a pragmatic Christian feminist, she did not hesitate to distance herself from the YWCA because it failed to live up to its principles.
Hedgeman, however, only abandoned the YWCA, not her Christianity, and certainly not its usefulness as a vehicle for social justice. As the National Council of Churches (NCC) director of ecumenical action in the 1960s, she remained committed to Christian social ethics and interracial activism to cure social ills (80). She was not unlike her Arkansas counterpart, Ethel Dawson, who was also employed by the NCC and believed religious doctrine informed community uplift and Black freedom, although in a rural southern context. In the 1950s, Dawson was the NCC Division of Home Missions state director and employed a progressive and inclusive understanding of Christianity and African Americans’ political and economic efficacy in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It is entirely likely that the two women knew one another.
Williams has thoughtfully written about New Jersey-based Black women activists from a variety of vantage points. Black women had long labored in New Jersey’s freedom struggle. They were educated, intellectual, and some–like Sara Spencer Washington–were entrepreneurial and philanthropic. They used their myriad skills to engage in human rights reform efforts in New Jersey and indeed nationally. Most were born of families with southern lineages who resisted endemic racism by migrating to the Garden State only to learn that New Jersey, particularly the southern part of the state, was known as the “Georgia of the North” because it reflected familiar patterns of the racial segregation that pervaded the southeastern United States.
Black women in New Jersey, however, were undaunted and assumed leading roles in the freedom movement years before what many consider the modern civil rights movement. Williams has gifted readers with a book that explores the hidden silences and unexplored experiences of not only Black women’s activism and intellectualism, but also their lives. They are made visible in all of their humanity as the vanguards of the long civil rights movement. Readers would do well to be guided by their stories.
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