"Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day,"



By Graham Russell Gao Hodges



(Rutgers University Press, 380 pp., $34.95)

When I moved back East, after a decade in California, people I had just met offered advice on where to live in New Jersey, which towns had good school districts. It quickly became clear their evaluations depended, not on test scores or curricula, but on how white the student body was.

It was appalling, yet not shocking. Although I've encountered prejudice myself - as a woman, as a Jew - it's minor compared to what African-Americans live with. And while some Northern whites try to convince themselves racism is strictly a problem of the small-town South, intolerance is everywhere, as is the fight to overcome it.



Graham Russell Gao Hodges, who has written or edited 16 other book, including some about blacks in New Jersey, examines that long, slow struggle here.

African-Americans lived in New Jersey when it was still a part of the Dutch New Netherlands. Enslaved people from the West Indies labored on a Pavonia plantation and free men and women on small farms in Bergen County.

Graham Russell Geo Hodges is a professor of history and Africana and Latin American studies at Colgate University.

The evils of slavery spread quickly, though. By 1745 there were 4,600 blacks in bondage in the state, out of a total population of 61,383.

Most worked on farms, although in Cape May and Salem counties some labored in the whaling industry.

Freedom was nearly impossible to gain. If a master wanted to liberate his slaves, he had to pay $200 to the colony, and $20 a year to the newly emancipated person.

Slaves who fled were flogged when caught, and any white person who had helped them was fined.

Some blacks revolted. Two men in Trenton were accused of poisoning several whites in 1738; a man on a Rocky Hill farm, in 1739, was said to have taken an ax to the owner's son; and in 1750, another black man in Amboy was accused of shooting a white woman.

There were, not surprisingly, no trials. Once apprehended, the men were tied to a stake and burned alive.

When the American Revolution began, the English promised freedom to blacks willing to run away and join them. Eventually, over 3,000 blacks took up arms. Most fled the new country after its victory. Some went as far as Sierra Leone; at least 300 New Jerseyans settled in Nova Scotia.

All of this should serve as a harsh reminder that human bondage was not only an evil of the South. No, slavery had deep claws in New Jersey. When the legislature finally passed "gradual emancipation" in 1804 - applying only to children born after that date -- it was the last Northern state to do so.

A meticulously researched, albeit slow-moving, history of African-Americans in New Jersey.

"Black New Jersey" is at its best in these opening chapters, as the author, a professor at New York's Colgate University, marshals a variety of sources.

Naturally, history needs to be factual, and should never be dull, which much of this book is. Telling any story, especially one this rich requires artistry, and the last half of the book is drily unimaginative.

Decade follows decade, with events grouped under broad headings. Hodges is so intently focused on amassing details he never paints a larger picture.



If there is a through-line, though, it is the resilience of a people.

While the end of the Civil War brought no immediate peace - in 1866, Governor Joel Parker warned that giving black men the vote would only ensure a "mongrel" government - the state's African Americans stubbornly pushed forward.

And their numbers grew quickly, as blacks abandoned the South for factory work in Newark, hotel jobs in Atlantic City.

Real advancement, though, was much slower. Black soldiers returning from World War II found a state still filled with segregated movie theaters and whites-only restaurants. A series of state laws in 1949 outlawing discrimination didn't truly end it - the "good" school districts remained mostly closed to blacks -- but at least the long process of change began.



The pace of progress picked up during the Civil Rights Era, but the effects of prejudice, poverty and de facto segregation festered, leading directly to the 1967 Newark riots (perhaps revealing his own politics here, Hodges uses the word "rebellion"). They still linger.

The book races over the last 50 years of history. And while there's never a doubt this is flawlessly researched, a history worth reading needs more. It needs to make the readers feel the people along the way, not just cite facts.