By Miriam Ascarelli
Growing up in Indiana as the child of Italian immigrants, the Underground Railroad was something I read about in books. These African American freedom stories empowering, even for a white girl like me.
Fast forward to the mid-2000s. I found myself teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, on a campus in the heart of Newark, a majority Black city with a rich history. I wanted to get to know the city, and I wanted my students to get to know it, too. After all, Newark is the American story in miniature, starting with its founding by New England Puritans in 1666 as a religious theocracy; then as a 19th-century manufacturing powerhouse; later as a city marked by racial tensions, disinvestment and white flight and today as an urban center working tirelessly to reinvent itself.
So after hearing an oft-repeated story about how the First Presbyterian Church of Newark, known by many as Old First, helped runaway slaves in the early 19th century, I returned to my earlier interests and decided to search for the Underground Railroad. This time, I would take my students with me.
The church — a white-steepled brick building in the middle of downtown — was founded in 1666 and remains filled with artifacts. But the highlight of our tour was a trip to the basement to see a tunnel that stretched to the shores of the Passaic River and helped shuttle slaves to freedom. We found that path, now blocked by the Prudential Center arena next door, was too dark and damp for us to investigate. Later, when I emailed two historians who specialize in this period, neither could vouch for the tunnel’s history. This left me with a nagging question: Was this story true? Clearly, more research was needed.
Fortunately for me, Noelle Lorraine Williams, an artist, researcher and director of the African-American history program at the state historical commission, has done much of that work. “My whole commitment is to tell the story of African American activism in Newark in the 1800s,’’ Williams explained as we sat together one recent Saturday in Newark.
Her exhibit — “Black Power! 19th Century: Newark’s First African American Rebellion,’’ available online or at the Newark Public Library through Aug. 31 — casts a harsh light on Old First. Blacks at Old First were not allowed to sit in the pews; they had to stand in a segregated area known as the “Negro corner.’’ This practice prompted Blacks to form their own Presbyterian congregation in 1830: the Plane Street Colored Church.
Old First was also known to host meetings of the American Colonization Society, which sought to persuade Blacks to move to Africa. Many Blacks in Newark were opposed to the idea, Williams says. This raises the question, could Old First really have been a stop on the Underground Railroad?
There are big doubts, Williams says.
“Newark was a site for the Underground Railroad, but I don’t think it was a site with hundreds of people coming through,’’ she says. “What some scholars have come to agree on is that people would come through Newark when other venues were not available.’’ That, she says, is because pro-slavery sentiment in Newark was high, so Newark was seen as a dangerous place for fugitive slaves.
As I combed through the exhibit, I was struck by the dangers Black people faced. Advertisements in 19th-century Newark newspapers announced rewards for the capture of runaway slaves and the sale of enslaved people. One offered a $10 reward for a “Negro man named Cato aged 34 years, about 5 feet 5 inches high, pretends to be religious, calls himself a methodist, is a great liar…” Another offers a woman with “a man child at the breast” and two children who can be bought separately. The Sentinal of Freedom offers a black boy for sale, saying “he is active, healthy and smart.”
I wish I could say the racism shocked me. It didn’t. Going in, I knew Newark’s manufacturers had strong business ties to the South, so there was a lot of pro-slavery sentiment in Newark. But what did shock me was the very existence of slavery in New Jersey. New Jersey’s 1804 Gradual Abolition Law allowed slavery to persist. For those born prior to July 4, 1804, there was no end to their enslavement; for those born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1804, they would be free only after age 21 if they were female, and after age 25, if they were male. This made enslaved children valuable property and allowed some New Jerseyans an opportunity to abuse the law.
The most egregious example was in 1818 when Jacob Van Wickle — a former member of the Middlesex County Board of Chosen Freeholders, a justice of the peace and a common pleas judge — conspired with interstate slave traders to kidnap at least 137 free and enslaved Blacks in New Jersey and sell them to slave owners in the South. Van Wickle was never charged with any wrongdoing. A memorial to those “lost souls’’ is now being planned in East Brunswick.
Slavery in New Jersey didn’t come to an end until Jan. 23, 1866, when the state legislature reluctantly ratified the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery “within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Another theme that comes through loud and clear in Williams’ research is that Newark’s Black churches provided sanctuary and advocacy for the city’s Black community. When the Colored Anti-Slavery Society of Newark was formed in 1834, it was not by accident that those efforts were spearheaded by members of the Plane Street Colored Church.
While many of those church buildings are now gone, many of the words spoken then still exist on tattered pages that Williams has rescued from the soot of history and reproduced for the exhibit. She points out that in the 1800′s, many of Newark’s white leaders like Sen. Theodore Frelinghuysen, a celebrated New Jersey historical figure who served as the president of both New York University and Rutgers University, noted publicly that they supported Black freedom. But Williams points out that, ”the freedom they advocated for Black people was one that they could define, control and profit from. They used religion and religious institutions to advocate for the segregation of African Americans in Newark and to plan for their removal to Africa.”
In an 1833 speech that Williams included in the exhibit, Frelinghuysen noted that Blacks were a lost and “depressed people in the midst of the white race and because . . . their condition is so obscure, they make no impression on the public mind. If we could embody them in one neighborhood, even in all their wretchedness, that would promise more good for them (than) their present state.”
That’s exactly what happened decades later. Thanks to discriminatory practices like racial covenants and redlining, the urban ghetto was created. Those forces laid the groundwork for Newark’s best-known example of Black “rebellion,’’ five days in July 1967 that not only marked a turning point in Newark’s history but also highlighted pent-up Black anger over issues like sub-standard housing, police brutality and discrimination.
My dive into Newark’s history served as a reminder that the legacy of slavery has continued to reverberate in all sorts of insidious ways, from the mass incarceration of Black men, to police brutality and the wealth gap, which has translated into white household wealth being worth 10 times that of Black households.
It has also reinforced my belief that documenting history is vitally important. Without acknowledging our past, no matter how shameful and painful, we will never be able to move toward a more just future.
Miriam Ascarelli is a senior lecturer in the Humanities Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark.
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