Against NJ Transit, a Paterson restaurant owner wages a long, lonely fight

Before he fought the state of New Jersey and lost, Russell Graddy was something rare in this country: A rich African-American man. A sharecropper’s son who grew up picking peanuts on a farm in Georgia, Graddy moved to Paterson alone at age 15 and built an empire of restaurants and real estate, mostly in neighborhoods where white people feared to buy.

At his peak he lived on 14 acres of waterfront land. He drove a Mercedes-Benz. Congressmen sought his money and his favor.

Now he is 86, a poor man again. At 6:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, Graddy opened the back door of his sister’s house, where he lives with his wife. He walked into the still-dark morning, a blue tie pulled tight against his neck. He started the engine of his black Hyundai and drove eight blocks to Mr. G’s, the restaurant he owns in Paterson.

Graddy could have retired 10 years ago. Instead he committed his fortune and his pride to fighting NJ Transit, and what money the state didn’t take his lawyers did.

So on this Wednesday, Graddy planned to work for 13 hours.

“They treated me all kind of ways,” he said. “And the only thing I got left is this restaurant.”

A long fight

This fight between Graddy and NJ Transit started nearly three decades ago. It involves the restaurant Graddy opened in 1987 inside the Atlantic City Bus Terminal. NJ Transit bought the building from the city in the early 1990s and soon tried to evict him, Graddy said, in violation of his lease.

Graddy sued for the right to stay, and won. From there the fight grew in scope, swelling to occupy three lawsuits and tens of thousands of pages of court documents, focused mostly on the day in 2004 when NJ Transit forced Graddy’s restaurant from the terminal.

Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for NJ Transit, declined to discuss the controversy. Instead the agency provided documents stating that Graddy verbally agreed to settle the lawsuit in 2007.

“The attached documents show that NJ Transit, in good faith, entered into a settlement on the eve of trial but that Mr. Graddy failed to follow through on his commitment,” according to NJ Transit’s summary of the case.

The agency’s documents confirm, however, that the agreement never was finalized because Graddy never signed it. The fight to save his business cost him at least $1.2 million, Graddy said, but NJ Transit offered just $183,000.

“How the hell am I gonna accept $183,000?” he said. “You’ve got to be out of your cotton-pickin’ mind.”

Graddy had good reason to stay.

“That was a fantastic business,” he said. “I was making $80,000, $90,000 a month.”

Graddy said NJ Transit’s leaders and lawyers never told him why they forced him out. With no kinder explanation offered, Graddy supplies his own, one based on his childhood in the Jim Crow South and decades spent fighting discrimination in the North.

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“I fought in Korea,” he said. “I educated my kids, worked night and day, two and three jobs, never been arrested, played by the rules, got to be successful. And because I’m African-American, this is where I end up.”

A lifetime of work

Russell Graddy was born in 1931 in Wrightsville, Georgia. Today, at the town’s main intersection of Elm and Marcus streets, two Confederate Army battle flags fly from a flagpole on the front lawn of the county courthouse. Beside the pole is a monument to 600 local men who died defending slavery during the Civil War, which reads in part:

Their cause was noble and just,

and Almighty God alone shall be

their vindicator.

When Graddy walked these sidewalks as a child, the threat of racist violence was even more explicit. One day when he was 15, Graddy passed a white man walking a dog. As Graddy drew near, the man released the leash and let the dog attack him. Graddy kicked the dog away, and the man smashed a Coca-Cola bottle against his head.

To stay in Wrightsville, Graddy’s family would have to accept this injustice and remain silent. If they fought back, the white people in town would attack.

“Georgia wasn’t a good place for an energetic, outspoken African-American,” he said. “They could beat you down in the street and nothing happens.”

Graddy left first. He moved to Paterson at 15 and got a job as a janitor for a roofing company and another at a Wright Aeronautical factory. He worked 15 hours a day, five or six days a week. At 17 he bought a house, and helped his parents move north from Georgia. By 29 he’d saved enough money to buy a piece of land on Governor Street, build a restaurant, and pay for a family of experienced barbecue cooks to move from the South and be his first employees.

“I was very thrifty,” he said, “and I worked very hard.”

Graddy used the restaurant’s profits to buy real estate. He also got involved in politics, helping to integrate Paterson’s East Side and plan Martin Luther King Jr.’s trip to Paterson in March 1968. Eight days after Graddy waved him goodbye, King was assassinated in Memphis.

“I always wanted to do something, to be something, and to make change where I thought change should be made,” he said.

In 1987 Graddy moved to Atlantic City to capitalize on the success of the casinos there. He bought commercial properties, including an entire block in nearby Pleasantville, plus a house along a creek in Absecon. His two daughters graduated from law school, so he purchased an office building in Atlantic City where he hoped they would practice law together.

“It was going to be the Graddy and Graddy law firm,” he said. “I thought we could build on my investments in real estate and grow together.”

Then came the expensive fight with NJ Transit. Graddy sold his entire portfolio of commercial properties to pay his lawyers, but never got his bus terminal restaurant back. His daughters moved away.

“When NJ Transit pulled the plug on us, we had to go our different ways to sustain ourselves,” he said. “I don’t feel good about it.”

A risk taker, uncowed

When Graddy first arrived in Paterson in 1946, Italians owned the diner that is now Mr. G’s. African-Americans were not allowed. When he bought the place in 2008, he said, it was boarded up and decrepit.

Graddy fixed it up. Since then he has hosted the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Phil Murphy, and thousands of people from Paterson who needed a decent meal at a decent price.

“All my life I’ve been a risk taker,” he said, sitting in a corner booth at the front of the restaurant. “How you gonna move from Georgia and buy a house at 17? That’s risk taking.”

At 86, he plans to continue serving food. And with a new governor in office, Graddy thinks this is the year to double down on lobbying politicians, raising a stink on social media and protesting at NJ Transit meetings, trying to force the agency to pay the $1.2 million he believes it owes him.

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“As an African-American, how can you make it?” he said. “How can you live so right and end up somebody treating you so wrong?”

Email: maag@northjersey.com