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The Civil Rights Movement Began in New Jersey
By Hettie V. Williams
New Jersey’s black professional class was uniquely positioned to exact collective changes in civil rights, at the state level, that were far greater than the reforms gained in any other state at the time. In other words, the black elite and professional class in New Jersey constituted a distinctly positioned local vanguard of civil rights reform from the Progressive Era to the emergence of the mass movement for civil rights in 1954. This is represented in the historic concessions secured in civil rights reform at the state level during the early black freedom struggle in New Jersey during a long Civil Rights Movement (CRM). These men and women who led the CRM in New Jersey included Otto Hill, a medical doctor from northern New Jersey, Marion Thompson Wright, a historian who taught at Howard University, businesswoman Sara Spencer Washington, and NAACP lawyer Robert Queen. Black activists in New Jersey were leading the way to national civil rights reform before the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. This argument challenges the more popular 1954 to 1968 narrative of the CRM that places a focus on southern states as the center of the struggle for black freedom.
New Jersey was a state pivotal to the development of national civil rights campaigns orchestrated by African Americans. This story has never been told. While Washington used her wealth to integrate the Atlantic City beaches, Wright helped to wage a war against segregation in the public-school system. Wright’s doctoral dissertation on the history of African Americans and education in New Jersey, published in 1943 by Columbia University, in many respects, served as the basis for the attack against school segregation in the Garden State and nationwide.
In 1944, the New Jersey Supreme Court declared that “it is illegal to deny any student” access to any public school on the basis of race in the case of Hedgepeth and Williams v. Trenton Board of Education. McQueen was the lawyer for the plaintiffs in this case. This case was settled a decade before the Brown decision. NAACP lawyers later cited the Hedgepeth and Williams case as a precedent in their legal brief for Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. This was the first legal precedent in any state during the twentieth century to explicitly call for an end to the practice of…
