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…