The Negro In New Jersey

Black New Jersey brings to life generations of courageous men and women who fought for freedom during slavery days and later battled racial discrimination. Extensively researched, it shines a light on New Jersey's unique African American history and reveals how the state's black citizens helped to shape the nation.

This project became available online in 1995 as "The Cemetery." The site was an attempt to provide access to my earliest artworks that addressed history, memory, and memorial within the African American community. In the late 1990's the web project evolved to include a wider range of works and the project title became "Small Towns, Black Lives." To coincide with a large survey exhibition and the publication of the book version of the project, I created the final version of the web project in 2002.

Focusing on the development of a single African American community in eastern New Jersey, Hodges examines the experience of slavery and freedom in the rural north. This unique social history addresses many long held assumptions about the experience of slavery and emancipation outside the south. For example, by tracing the process by which whites maintained "a durable architecture of oppression" and a rigid racial hierarchy, it challenges the notions that slavery was milder and that racial boundaries were more permeable in the north. Monmouth County, New Jersey, because of its rich African American heritage and equally well-preserved historical record, provides an outstanding opportunity to study the rural life of an entire community over the course of two centuries. Hodges weaves an intricate pattern of life and death, work and worship, from the earliest settlement to the end of the Civil War.

Dutch and English settlers brought the first enslaved people to New Jersey in the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolutionary War, slavery was an established practice on labor-intensive farms throughout what became known as the Garden State. The progenitor of the influential Morris family, Lewis Morris, brought Barbadian slaves to toil on his estate of Tinton Manor in Monmouth County. Colonel Tye, an escaped slave from Shrewsbury, joined the British Ethiopian Regiment during the Revolutionary War and led raids throughout the towns and villages near his former home. Charles Reeves and Hannah Van Clief married soon after their emancipation in 1850 and became prominent citizens of Lincroft, as did their next four generations. Author Rick Geffken reveals stories from New Jersey's dark history of slavery.

Sibyl E. Moses identifies and documents the lives, intellectual contributions, and publications of over one hundred African American women writers in the Garden State from 1836 through 2000. In addition to biographical and bibliographical information for each autho, photographs of the writers as well as citations for their published pamphlets, books, reports, and articles are provided. The text is enchanced with characteristic excerpts from the poetry and prose of selected writers. The two appendixes highlight the distribution of African American women writers in New Jersey both by city or town, and by genre.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.