Every history teacher has taught about the Statue of Liberty. We all know the story. A gift from France, our sister republique, she "stands tall" in the midst of New York's windswept harbor. Over the course of three very different centuries she has welcomed immigrants, refugees, returning troops and tourists alike. Countless political cartoons have employed her, or some version of her, to point out America's promise, hypocrisy and confidence. And in innumerable disaster movies, she's been damaged, frozen, cut up, knocked down, obliterated and washed away. No doubt such scenes were meant to demonstrate the futility of the nation's overconfident ego in the face of all-powerful enemies such as Mother Nature, aliens or sea monsters. Even this week, tri-state residents cheered as she again welcomed visitors, reopened with New York State funds in response to the recent silly Federal shutdown.

It must have meant a lot, really, more than anything, for immigrants arriving by ship to pass her by in a bygone age. Many of us might recall that amazing flashback scene from The Godfather Part II, when a young, lonely Vito Corleone rushes to the side of his ship to catch a glimpse of the Copper Lady.

Again, educators love to recount how the wretched millions escaped a Europe filled with ancient hatreds and hopeless poverty to our land of hope and opportunity. But what a lot of people don't know – including my students – is that Newark has its own version of a "Golden Gateway," a portal that openly welcomed, year after year, oppressed masses bolting from a life of hatred, unjust debt and endless penury. The locale is one of Newark's most beloved landmarks and its great Art Deco masterpiece: Penn Station.

Architecturally its one of the city's gems. Constructed during Newark's difficult Depression years, it opened to great fanfare in March of 1935. The building was designed by the famed firm McKim, Mead and White. In years past, they had been known for their marble wedding-cake structures of the more confident Gilded Age, especially the entire neoclassical campus of Columbia University in Manhattan.

Newark's Penn Station is a more distant relation of such grand assemblies. It's somewhat smaller, but still grand. Its balanced and stony, but sleeker. Its grand main room, like its haughty sister station Grand Central in New York, greets arrivals with a grand vision of chandeliers, dark, long wooden pews and reliefs in stone telling visitors of the nation's transportation history. Its high ceilings and gymnasium-like proportions mix with sleek art deco designs in an effort to remind travelers that this is a modern, industrial city. This is a city that makes things. Lots of things. This is a city that hums.

What the designers might not have expected is that Newark's grand portal would welcome hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south of the 1930's, 40's, 50's and 60's. Many of my students don't realize (and neither do most Americans) that the segregated South of poll taxes, lynchings and chain gangs didn't belong in some distant sun-soaked state like Alabama or Georgia. Rather, the "South" began an hour's train ride from Newark's Penn, in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. For many of these arrivees, the land of fear and fury was a mere two stops behind Newark.