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“Too many people believe [slavery] never happened here and that racial inequality is not a New Jersey problem,” Ryan Haygood, president of the racial and social justice advocacy group New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), told a crowd of spectators at a Juneteenth event in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
Because African slavery did take place in New Jersey, and because Jersey was the last state in the North to abolish slavery, activists have been asking legislators to establish a committee to examine the role Black enslavement played in the past and present.
The NJISJ has worked with the state’s Legislative Black Caucus since 2019 to push for passage of a New Jersey Reparations Task Force bill (A-938/S-386), but the state legislature has not pushed the bill forward. It is sponsored by Assemblymembers Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, Britnee N. Timberlake, and Shavonda E. Sumter.
Now NJISJ has said it’s moving to begin the work of documenting the information needed for a reparations push in New Jersey and has created its own New Jersey Reparations Council.
The council will be co-chaired by Taja-Nia Henderson, dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark and an historian of prisons and slavery in the U.S., and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and now a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Over the next two years, nine committees of the New Jersey Reparations Council will research topics such as the history of slavery in New Jersey; public education and narrative; economic justice; segregation in New Jersey; democracy; public safety and justice; health equity; environmental justice; and faith and Black resistance.
“The Council will study New Jersey’s history and its connection to its current racial landscape, making strategic and bold policy recommendations for reparative justice policies in New Jersey,” according to NJISJ. “The nine committees will hold virtual open meetings for which public comment will be solicited.”
Before an audience that included advocates and legislators, NJISJ’s Haygood said, “We are not afraid to say the word ‘reparations’!” He asserted that the harms of African slavery and the discriminatory practices waged against New Jersey’s Black citizens after slavery cannot be ignored.
Haygood reminded the crowd that Perth Amboy is home to a hallowed space: During the 17th and 18th centuries, Perth Amboy’s historic Ferry Slip was a major port for the disembarkation of enslaved Africans.
“During the Middle Passage, after they were stolen from Africa, [Black people were] chained and tightly packed into dark, filthy, stifling hot cargo holds, [and] subjected to unimaginable abuse, dehydration, malnutrition, and disease,” Haygood said. “With sober minds and heavy hearts, we honor the thousands of Black people who survived those months-long trips across the Atlantic Ocean, only to arrive here in New Jersey to be sold into a system of slavery that endured for more than 200 years.”
Enslaved Black labor helped make New Jersey one of the wealthiest states in the country today. During slavery, the place that today is nicknamed the Garden State could rightly have been referred to as the Slave State of the North, one historian noted: By 1830, New Jersey held more than two-thirds of all the enslaved people in bondage in the North. New Jersey was the last northern state to outlaw African enslavement—it passed a gradual abolition statute in 1804 and only finally proclaimed its Black residents free on January 23, 1866.
Noelle Lorraine Williams, director of the New Jersey Historical Commission’s African American History Program, has written that “we must remember that there were still enslaved Black men and women in New Jersey even after Juneteenth. Imagine—New Jersey’s death grip on slavery meant that until December 1865, six months after enslaved men, women, and children in Texas found out they were cheated of their freedom, approximately 16 African Americans were still technically enslaved in New Jersey.”
New Jersey’s original sin of slavery led to housing discrimination, exclusionary bank lending, and other race-based practices that continued to persecute the state’s people of African descent.
Senator Cory Booker has questioned why there was resistance to the creation of a Reparations Council to research the effects of slavery. He said efforts to obscure the painful truths about African enslavement––particularly things like book bans––“cheapens the greatness of a nation.”
“We are a nation that was founded and conceived in liberty,” Booker said, “but read the founding documents that refer to Native Americans as savages; to women, not at all; to Blacks as fractions of human beings—that enshrined that original sin into our history. We are not here because of some great collection of Founding Fathers alone; these ‘imperfect geniuses’ did not get us here. It was a collection of Americans who stridently and defiantly and persistently and resistantly, fought to make this nation live up to its ideals.
“You cheapen America when you don’t tell about the struggles of abolitionists. You cheapen America when you don’t tell about the struggles of the greatest infrastructure project America ever knew: the Underground Railroad. [Ignoring the] massacres of Native Americans and African Americans and Asian Americans––you obscure the truth of America.”
Activist Lawrence Hamm said the group he chairs, the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), has always had a demand for reparations “for the descendants of those who were enslaved in this country. It has always been our position from the time that our organization was founded,” he said. “It was part of our political program that there must be restitution, there must be compensation for the 250 years of stolen labor in this country. They stole us. They sold us. They owe us. We demand reparations!”
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka pointed out that many legislators were due to be out at Juneteenth events. They would be willing to participate in recognizing Black oppression, but are not as interested in Black restitution, Baraka said. “They will not provide a bridge for us to move from enslavement to democracy.” The New Jersey Reparations Council plans to hold meetings and seek public comment about Black issues in New Jersey. Check with the council’s website at www.njreparationscouncil.org to find out when meetings will take place.
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