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by Barbara J. Kukla
Nonfiction
Did you know Newark was an entertainment mecca between 1922 and 1950? Explore interviews with musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, bartenders, waitresses, nightclub owners, and their families as well as rare photographs from the author’s personal collection.
Book: BCCLS
by Dolores Van Rensalier
Nonfiction
The remarkable true story of an Underground Railroad site on Bridge Street in Paterson where an interracial team of abolitionists ran a safe house during ante bellum times and the fight to preserve it in the 1990s. By the descendant of one of the “conductors.”
Book: BCCLS
by Walter David Greason
Nonfiction
A short introduction to what is was like to be Black in the late 19th to mid-20th century US, loosely told through wonderful family photographs of people who lived during the period. These families achieved a substantial degree of social and political equality within a century.
by James J. Gigantino II
Nonfiction
NJ was the last Northern state to abolish slavery. The law freed children born to enslaved mothers only after serving their mother’s enslavers for more than two decades, keeping slavery alive in NJ until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery’s persistance limited the growth of African American communities and forced Jersey Blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing NJ slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s.
Book: BCCLS
by Rick Geffken
Nonfiction
Dutch and English settlers brought the first enslaved people to New Jersey in the 17th century. By 1776, slavery was well established on large farms throughout the Garden State. “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.
Book: BCCLS
by Kevin Mumford
Nonfiction
Drawing on newspapers, commission testimony, and government records, interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and rare photos, the author argues that political ideas and print culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness in “Brick City.”
Book: BCCLS
by Dennis Rizzo
Nonfiction
For those escaping on the Underground Railroad, names like Springtown and Snow Hill promised sanctuary and salvation. Under the pressures of racial prejudice, free Blacks, runaway slaves and even Native Americans formed island communities on the periphery of South Jersey towns.
by Dale Russakoff
Nonfiction
When Mark Zuckerberg announced to a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the majority Black and Brown public schools of Newark, then mayor Cory Booker was beside him. But putting their plans into action was quite a different matter.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Cathy D. Knepper
Nonfiction
When six local African American men were accused of murder in 1948, the sister of one of the Trenton Six, sometimes called “the northern Scottsboro Boys” took the case as far as the New Jersey Supreme Court, with the support of Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, Arthur Miller, and Albert Einstein.
Book: BCCLS
by Graham Russell Hodges
Nonfiction
A comprehensive history of African Americans in New York City and east Jersey from the arrival of the first African–a sailor marooned on Manhattan Island in 1613–to the bloody Draft Riots against the Civil War.
Book: BCCLS
by Joseph G. Bilby
Nonfiction
Former vaudevillians Arthur H. Bell and his wife used the tactics of public theater to advertise and recruit for the NJ Klan. At a massive riot in Perth Amboy, thousands of immigrants besieged a few hundred Klansmen, tossed them out of building windows, burned their cars and ran them out of town. The lead-up to World War II marked the end of the Klan’s foothold in NJ.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
eAudiobook: hoopla
Ed. by Clement Alexander Price
Nonfiction
The author vivdly details the struggles of NJ blacks in the period following the Civil War; fighting against the many legal roadblocks that continued from Reconstruction to the modern civil rights period.
Book: BCCLS
by Cheryl Woodruff-Brooks
Nonfiction
Chicken Bone Beach in Atlantic City attracted celebrities, civic leaders, and other races in its its heyday from the 1920s through the 1960s. With images, orginal sources, and oral histories.
Book: BCCLS
