Black women and civil rights in N.J.

Black women in New Jersey played a crucial role in the civil rights movement.

This fascinating history was the subject of a presentation given by Professor Hettie V. Williams, author of “The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey.” The event was presented by The Durand-Hedden House in conjunction with the SOMA Community Coalition
on Race.

The event was originally to be held at The Woodland in Maplewood but due to the weather, the event was held via Zoom.

Williams is a professor of history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. She received the Eugene Simko Faculty Leadership Award, the PGIS Award in Social Justice, and is a co-founder of the Monmouth University Race Conference. She is the former president of the African American Intellectual History Society.

In her one-hour presentation, Williams explored how and why New Jersey Black leaders, community members, and women in particular affected major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before Brown v. Board of Education.

As a small child, Williams heard stories about the civil rights movement from her grandmother. She said her grandmother never worked outside the home because her grandfather said he never wanted her to work in the home of a white man. He was afraid she’d be assaulted.

Williams spoke about Rosa Parks reporting on sexual assaults on Black women and being involved in fighting for Black freedom as early as 1944.

“Books were being written. They led historians to expand on the Civil Rights Movement. Historians began to look at the Civil Rights Movement in the north. The history of Jim Crow in the north,” said Williams. “You heard the phrase ‘the deep south.’ It also happened in the north.”

In Williams’ book, Sara Spencer Washington is one of the lives looked at. Washington was the founder of Apex News and Hair Co. and was honored at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as one of the “Most Distinguished Businesswomen” for her Apex empire of schools and products. She was credited for the integration of beaches in Atlantic City. She was also one of the first women to have her own lab in the state of New Jersey.

“You can be independent was a message of women empowerment she wrote herself,” said Williams. “She left her fortune to some of her descendants and civil rights causes.”

Anna Arnold Hedgeman is another Black female whose story is told in Williams’ book. Hedgeman was an African American civil rights leader, politician, educator, and writer. She came to New Jersey in the 1920s and became executive director of a Black branch of the YWCA in Jersey City.

In 1963, Hedgeman was an organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That same year she began serving as coordinator of special events for the Commission of Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches.

Marion Thompson Wright was an African American scholar and activist, born in East Orange. As a teenager she expressed frustrations with the New Jersey school system as one of two Black students at her high school.

“She was a teenage mother before 18, but had a hunger to go to college,” said Williams.

Wright attended Howard University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1927, before earning her master’s in history and education. After that she attended Teachers College, Columbia University. Her completed dissertation, “The Education of Negroes in New Jersey” focused on the state of education for Blacks and its consistent segregated and unjust schools. She became the first Black woman in the United States to earn her PhD in history in 1940.

“We have a duty to hand the torch to the next generation,” Williams said. “The struggle for Black equality has kept going. It’s so easy to get beaten down. These Black women at Columbia, in the 1940s, can you imagine being told to your face ‘You don’t belong here’ and they go on to be doctors.”

  Black women, civil rights, New Jersey