“The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in Camden's

“The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement

By Laurie Lahey

B.A. in American Studies, May 2004, Rowan University B.A. in English, May 2004, Rowan University B.A. in History, May 2004, Rowan University M.A. in English, May 2005, Temple University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 19, 2013

Dissertation directed by

Joseph Kip Kosek Associate Professor of American Studies

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Laurie Lahey has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of March 26, 2013. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

“The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement

Laurie Lahey

Dissertation Research Committee:

Joseph Kip Kosek, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director

Thomas Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member

Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Committee Member

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Acknowledgements

This project represents more than a chronicle of interracial activism during

Camden’s civil rights movement; for me it also represents a decade-long journey both intellectual and personal. Dissertation-writing is not only a scholarly undertaking, but an act of perseverance. In the past ten years I have received more support and encouragement than I can do justice here. But, I will try.

I would like to thank the incredibly knowledgeable and helpful librarians and archivists at: the Camden County Historical Society, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, the Gloucester County Historical Society, the Paul Robeson Library at

Rutgers University, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the Urban Archives at

Temple University. These savvy professionals provided insight and guidance time and again. I would also like to thank the New Jersey Historical Commission for taking a chance on this project through a generous grant at a time when few states were funding humanities projects. I am also indebted to the many inspiring and generous people who stood where the flames burned hottest and shared their experiences with me: Don

Griesmann, Carolyn Burton, Juan Gonzales, Sam Appel, Amos Johnson, Malik Chaka,

Sharif Abdullah, and Gil Medina.

Rowan University will always have a special place in my heart. When I began college in 2000, I had no idea how enmeshed the school would become with my academic career. I wrote my senior theses, my Master’s thesis, and much of my dissertation on the 4th floor of Campbell Library over the span of twelve years. The

History Department in particular has been beyond incredible to me. As an undergraduate

Bill Carrigan and Cory Blake provided me the encouragement to pursue a graduate degree and were always available with advice. I was thrilled to return in 2011 as the Phi

Alpha Theta teaching fellow and grateful when they invited me to stay for another year as

I finished the Ph.D. The George Washington University has been incredibly generous, allowing me the time and resources necessary to complete this project. My dissertation committee--Kip Kosek, Tom Guglielmo, and Melani McAlister--have given me invaluable feedback and encouragement. They have pushed me to think bigger and helped craft a framework to give additional meaning to a story I have come to love so much. My fellow graduate students in the American Studies Department ensured the process was also fun. In particular, Charity Fox, Joan Troyano, and Amber Wiley, otherwise known as “the Plastics,” kept me laughing the entire time. Thank you, ladies, for your friendship and inspiration.

My family members have always cheered the loudest for me. The Grahams and the Mays, especially Dave Graham, who provided feedback on drafts of this project, have made school breaks the highlights of every year. We are always “making memories.”

My grandfather Tom Lahey taught me to think critically by never letting me get away with a lazy observation. When he passed away in 2012, I discovered I had one hundred pages of correspondence from our ten years of emails, ten years of debates. I do not think he would agree with everything in this dissertation but I wish now, more than ever, that we could argue about it. My grandmother Rose Gebhard took me to the library next door to her house every day when I was growing up. When I ran out of children’s books to read, she encouraged me to read Shakespeare and took me seriously when I reported back. She also always let me get two toys at the toy store and never forgot to get my

favorite bagels at the grocery store. I’m pretty sure being well fed and well read as a child helps you get a Ph.D.

My in-laws, Nancy and Steve Winings have been supportive in every way imaginable. From Nancy’s help selling all of our furniture in her garage to Steve sending glasses of wine down to my office in their shore home, where they also allowed my husband and I to live during the last year of writing, they have been there every step of they way since we became a family. I will never forget their love and support.

Everyone should get to have parents like Mike and Bonnie Lahey. There is no way to ever thank them for their unwavering support. My father always carried my backpack and drove me everywhere, even to the airport for a job interview when I was thirty-years-old. He’s also the best guy to get a beer with. My mother made every single achievement, no matter how small, incredibly special. She was also the world’s best (and worst paid) secretary any time I needed anything, which was often. In short, they did everything you’re supposed to do and so much more. I hope one day I can repay their kindness.

Finally, I thank my husband Brian Winings, who has lived with this project for more than five years. He never once judged the number of cheese sandwiches it took me to finish; he ensured I was the best-versed television and movie fan, despite having to work so much; he always cleaned up after dinner and never made me empty the dishwasher; he helped me study and prepare. He never complained, even once. I hope in the next hundred years I can match his love and generosity.

Abstract of Dissertation

“The Grassy Battleground,” Race, Religion, and Activism in Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement

My dissertation, “The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in

Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement, considers the shifting alliances of religious actors and lay people who comprised interracial coalitions in an American secondary city. This project uses the economic and social context of Camden, New Jersey-- the poorest city, in the richest, most racially segregated state in the nation-- to demonstrate how interracial alliances, consisting of black and white ministers, black and Puerto Rican militants, and other lay people, shifted from the 1930s and 1940s when they were organized around labor issues, to the 1960s and 1970s, when they were concerned primarily with social equality.

Specifically, this project constructs a big-picture analysis of black militant

Charles “Poppy” Sharp’s political ascendance to consider the shift from a strictly nonviolent movement devoid of the working-class and “poor,” to a radical, racially integrated movement. Sharp’s story complicates the discussion of the civil rights movement by demonstrating the role black and white churches, white suburbanites, and

Puerto Ricans played in a movement dominated ostensibly by Black Power politics.

While Sharp and his organization, the Black Peoples Unity Movement, were characterized by Black Power rhetoric and militancy, they worked closely with the mostly white Camden Metropolitan Ministry, the white, suburban Friends of the Black

Peoples Unity Movement, and members of the Puerto Rican community. The alliances fostered by these groups reveal unique opportunities for interracial organizing in secondary cities that were not realized in other corners of the movement. This dissertation

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argues that despite the militant rhetoric that pervaded the movement in Camden, due to its economy and demographics, activists organized across race and despite ideology.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Abstract of Dissertation...... vii

List of Figures...... x

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: “In All Defiance”: Labor, Migration, and the Origins of Interracial Protest in Southern New Jersey...... 23

Chapter 2: “Nothing in Common Except the Same Problems”: Postwar Social Organization...... 67

Chapter 3: “Too Much Singing”: Christianity and the Limitations of Nonviolence in the Ghetto...... 117

Chapter 4: “His-story”: The Black Peoples Unity Movement and Interracial Cooperation, 1968...... 150

Chapter 5: “Justice Now!, ¡Justicia Ahora!": Interracial Coalitions and Camden New Jersey’s 1971 Riot...... 196

Epilogue...... 238

Bibliography...... 244

List of Figures

Figure 1: Men attending the meeting for “Negroes and foreign-born” members of the agricultural workers' union. Bridgeton, New Jersey, 1936……………55

The city is man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city, man has remade himself.

-Robert Park 1

1 Robert E. Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers, ed.

INTRODUCTION

where the cattle graze near the grassy battleground: on the mounds of slaves

-Camden poet, Nick Virgilio1

Dozens of people gathered on the steps of Camden, New Jersey’s City Hall, where they formed a circle around effigies of Mayor Alfred Pierce and Chief of Police

Harold Melleby.2 It was June 13, 1968. They had been marching for six hours, singing all the way, in protest of the murder charges brought against three members of their organization, an African-American militant group called the Black People’s Unity

Movement (BPUM). These BPUM members had been charged with the brutal stabbing of a young, white, suburban father of four, who had been delivering milk in Camden.3

Leading them, and hundreds of others, was former gang member, ex-con, heroin addict, and BPUM founder Charles “Poppy” Sharp. Black Baptist minister Amos Johnson, white Episcopalian priest Donald Griesmann, and white Protestant minister Samuel

Appel, joined in support. Singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” the BPUM set fire to the

1 Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, ed. Raffael de Gruttola, (Arlington, VA: Turtle Light Press, 2012). 103-106.

2 “Police, Protesters Clash at City Hall,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), June 14, 1968. 3 John Way Jennings, “Convicted Killer Charged With Parole Violation,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Jan. 27, 1988; John Way Jennings and Larry Lewis, “A Killer In '68 Is Himself Slain As A Youth, Curtis Miller Joined In Killing A Milkman. Yesterday, He Was Shot To Death Execution-style,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Dec.18, 1993. Three of the six defendants were found guilty. It is not clear from the media coverage if they were BPUM members or not. One of the men found guilty testified that they killed the man (Daniel Morrell) to steal his money for a trip to the beach.

replicas of Pierce and Melleby, shielding the demonstration with their bodies. When firemen could not break their circle to extinguish the blaze, police beat the group apart with clubs. Several BPUM members required hospitalization from the assault.4 When

Sharp and Griesmann attempted to file a complaint at the police station, they were sent away.5

Four days later, one hundred whites, mostly from the surrounding suburbs, marched through Camden to City Hall again, where they sang freedom songs protesting police brutality. The group, who had organized themselves as the Friends of the Black

People’s Unity Movement (FBPUM) a month earlier, carried signs that read “Stop the

Clubbing of Defenseless People,” and “Harassment is not Law and Order.” Sharp, who joined in the protest, spotted Melleby in civilian clothes watching from the front of the police headquarters. Sharp shouted for him to “Call out your goon squad…Get your sticks… Call out the squad, man…You called them out to beat up black kids, why don’t you hit these white folks?” The crowd cheered as Melleby retreated, shouting “Hey, hey, what do you know, Melleby has got to go!”6

Sharp took up his bullhorn and told the crowd they had just witnessed “two kinds of Camden justice—one for whites and one for blacks,” and that the police would not attack whites as they had blacks. Sharp challenged the group to burn the dummies of

Pierce and Melleby that the BPUM had brought along. Appel, who had led the march, took a vote. Eight-five voted in favor. The BPUM members watched from the street as

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 “100 Whites Protest Police Brutality,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), June 18, 1968.

the white suburbanites lit the fire. The BPUM then joined the FBPUM around the flames, singing “We Shall Overcome.” The police did not interfere.7 By the end of the day, the FBPUM’s membership grew to 350.8

The story of Camden’s civil rights movement does not fit within the traditional narrative crafted in civil rights movement historiography, nor with the sentimentality that still surrounds the movement in popular memory. How can we explain white ministers’ willingness to march alongside black militants, despite myriad ideological conflicts?

How do we understand what motivated white suburbanites, at the height of the Black

Power movement, to risk their safety and social standing? How should we parse the symbolism residing in flames accompanied by songs we associate with nonviolent protest? This poignant, complex moment in American history demonstrates that we have not yet finished building a framework with which to address these questions and more.

This dissertation, “The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in

Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement considers the sometimes cooperative, and simultaneously conflicted, relationships that emerged as African Americans and Puerto

Ricans faced various inequalities in the middle decades of the twentieth century. While militant, black activist Charles “Poppy” Sharp and his organization, The Black Peoples

Unity Movement (BPUM), were characterized by Black Power rhetoric and militancy, they worked closely with the mostly white Camden Metropolitan Ministry (CMM), the white, suburban Friends of the Black Peoples Unity Movement (FBPUM), and members of the Puerto Rican community.

7 Ibid.

8 Guida West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” Interracial Bonds, eds. Rhoda Goldstein Blumberg and Wendell James Roye (Bayside, NY: General Hall, Inc.), 78.

This project constructs an analysis of the shift from a strictly nonviolent movement devoid of Camden’s citizens to a radical, racially integrated movement, which complicates civil rights movement historiography by demonstrating the role black and white churches played in a campaign ostensibly dominated by Black Power politics.

Despite the militant rhetoric that pervaded the movement in Camden, due to its economy, demographics, and shifting political ideologies, activists organized across race and despite ideology. Moreover, these interracial coalitions, though fluctuating and at times tenuous, were viable after the widespread dissemination of Black Power politics. This finding is compelling because the prevailing research has demonstrated that nearby cities, such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Newark, New Jersey could not sustain interracial cooperation—especially from suburban whites and Christian ministers-- amid Black

Power’s ubiquity in northern cities.9

CAMDEN: AN OVERVIEW

While the coalition of activists that assembled in Camden was unique, the circumstances that united them were not. Like so many cities, Camden succumbed to the

“urban crisis” that snaked its way across the North following World War II. While sections of downtown Camden remained stable and profitable during this time, entire neighborhoods, particularly in North Camden and South Camden, were populated with decaying homes and closing businesses. As early as 1951 it was reported that 70% of

9 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia. PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America, (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2007).

housing in South Camden could be classified as “slums.”10 From 1960 onward the value of property decreased steadily and by the mid-sixties, the city housing authority deemed that over half of all the housing in Camden was unfit for habitation.11 As late as 1966, the

Federal Housing Authority had not granted a single mortgage within the city limits.12

As the housing crisis was growing more urgent, the African American and Puerto

Rican populations swelled, while whites fled Camden for the suburbs. Between 1940 and

1960 Camden’s white population decreased from 104,995 to 89,267 and its nonwhite population increased from 12,541 to 27,892.13 In the late-1950s city planners embarked on several ambitious projects to address Camden’s housing issues and bring businesses into the city. Like many period-urban renewal projects, these plans required leveling the slums.14 Under this umbrella, officials planned to build a massive, 280-acre “City within a City” in North Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, which would include housing and retail space. Additionally, they devised a complex highway system, Highway 76, which required demolishing more homes occupied predominantly by African Americans and

Puerto Ricans. Finally, the -Liberty Park Renewal Project proposed to clear sixty-six

10 Wilda R. Smith, “Truman Okays Plan for Camden Low-Rent Project,” The Baltimore Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), Dec. 22, 1951.

11 Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States: An Introduction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 51.

12 Ibid.

13 U.S. Census of Housing, 1960. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1961).

14 For more on urban renewal projects, see: Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass- Roots Politics; Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940- 1964,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. (New York, NY: Random House, 2008).

acres of slums in the Centerville and Liberty Park neighborhoods in South Camden. The city promised the community these urban renewal projects would result in five hundred town houses, at least three shopping centers, and a park on the cleared land.15 Yet, by

1968, the year the Christian ministers, the BPUM, and the FBPUM joined together, five thousand families had been displaced with no substantive assistance from the government.16 In that time, only 101 new low-income homes had been built, which were reserved exclusively for the elderly. The city anticipated an additional three thousand residents would need to relocate by 1973.1718

Before the BPUM and FBPUM formed in 1967 and 1968 respectively, several organizations and individuals had attempted to promote activism in Camden. In the

1930s, radical labor leaders, typically Communist Party USA members, had some success crafting interracial labor strikes, although there is no evidence this cooperation extended beyond the workplace. In the 1940s the NAACP, led by Dr. Ulysses S. Wiggins, made some important gains in integrating elementary schools, and in the 1950s the Puerto

Rican government agency, the Migration Division, mediated workplace complaints and helped Puerto Ricans “assimilate” as they moved into Camden. Yet, by the late-1950s,

15 Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings, Before Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations (1968) (testimony of Donald Griesmann); “Centerville Area in Need of Redevelopment Study,” (Camden, NJ: Division of Planning, Department of Development and Planning, Hopeworks, Inc, 2003).

16 Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings, Before Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations (1968) (testimony of Donald Griesmann).

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

both of these organizations, which promoted a “politics of respectability” in an increasingly working-class town, failed to ignite any real community activism.

In the late-1950s and early-1960s, as Donald Griesmann, Samuel Appel, and

Amos Johnson found themselves in Camden, there was no effective leadership and no grassroots organizing. There was no civil rights movement. In 1964 Griesmann, sensing the need for a more concerted approach to community organizing, formed the Camden

Civil Rights Ministerium (CCRM), an interracial coalition of clergy, CORE, and NAACP members with the goal of involving the community more deeply in the quest for social justice. When the CCRM realized traditional, nonviolent methods of protest would not arouse Camden’s citizens, it tested a new approach and brought militant Black Power icon H. Rap Brown to Camden. This move fractured the CCRM. However, it did stimulate community activism. Poppy Sharp went to Brown’s rally and was so moved by his message that he formed Camden’s first indigenous civil rights organization, the Black

Peoples Unity Movement.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Histories of Camden are few and far between. There are various pamphlets, produced by local historians, at the Camden County, New Jersey, and Gloucester County,

New Jersey, historical societies, which focus on the city’s founding and early years.

Jeffery Dorwart’s Camden County, New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan

Community, 1626-2000 provides the most comprehensive chronicle of Camden’s history, from its founding until 2000.19 Other works, while not focused on Camden in particular, have considered the impact of major industries in Camden. Jefferson Cowie’s Capital

19 Jeffrey M. Dorwart, Camden County, New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community, 1626-2000. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, an account of the Radio Corporation of America’s history, comments on the relationship between the economy and social change from a global perspective. RCA was a major employer in Camden. Its slow move away from the city, which began in the 1940s, highlights Camden’s stalling economy and the effect it had on workers.20

Daniel Sidorick’s Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of

Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century considers how Camden’s largest employer, the Campbell Soup Company, unlike RCA, was able to stay in Camden until 1990.

Sidorick’s business history explores the important middle space between the industrial factory and the field that was vital to cultivating Camden’s unique population. While

Sidorick’s main objective is to locate the antecedents of supposedly innovative present- day management strategies in the early twentieth-century system deployed at Campbell’s

Soup, this work illuminates the dramatic influence the Campbell Soup Company had in shaping Camden’s demographics.21

Howard Gillette’s Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial

City, published in 2005, is the most critical examination of Camden’s history. Gillette takes a structural approach to understanding how circumstances devolved so dramatically in a city that made so many ostensible attempts at renewal. In an analysis of Camden from the Depression through the early 2000s, Gillette ultimately locates Camden’s inability to successfully revitalize in the corruption of the local political machine. While

20 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

21 Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century, (Ithaca, NY: 2009).

Gillette’s work engages the discussion of how the New Deal order collapsed, it is broad, expansive, and focuses less on the agency of individuals than the larger forces that shape their lives.22 Gillette is not concerned, nor does he have to be to execute his thesis, with the particulars of the civil rights movement, to which he devotes one chapter.

In the past twenty years historians have expanded the traditional parameters of civil rights movement historiography to demonstrate that race-based discrimination, unfair labor practices, insufficient educational opportunities, inadequate housing, and urban renewal brought about myriad civil rights organizations throughout the nation. Still engaged in what historian Patrick D. Jones calls the “archeological stage,” scholars have examined how the movement operated outside the South as well as beyond the 1954-

1965 classical phase.23 This challenging and exciting work has, for the most part, excavated the terrain of major cities in the North, Midwest, and California.

Collectively, these scholars have deconstructed the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement, which from the 1970s through the 1990s focused on watershed battles and larger-than-life figures, especially in the dramatic arena of the South. A major problem with the conventional conception of the civil rights movement is that it tends to confine the movement to the years between the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of

Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, or, less often, Martin Luther King,

Jr.’s death in 1968.

In his exploration of Black Nationalism in the early to mid-twentieth century, Black is a Country, Nikhil Pal Singh argues that this periodization produces a civic mythology of

22 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty.

23 Patrick D. Jones, “Coming of Age in Cleveland,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, January 2012, 8.

racial progress, via a legislative-driven narrative that highlights the defeat of Jim Crow, desegregation, and black voter registration.24 The result is the distorted belief that the

1954-1965 period was the apex of black struggles for citizenship. In expanding the story from the national to the local and from the South to the North, with attention to the political climate of the Cold War and the “legitimacy” of the Black Power Movement, many scholars have challenged common perceptions of this period, generally arguing that the civil rights movement was not a monolithic debate engaged principally by national figures.25 Instead, in Clayborne Carson’s words, the movement occurred in “a series of concentric circles with liberal supporters on the outside and full-time activists at the center.”26 For many scholars, the forces that shaped the vibrant atmosphere of the era can be best understood outside of the national, top-down configuration.

Thomas J. Sugrue, most forcefully, has brought the urban North into the civil rights movement story. His influential book The Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar

Detroit (1996), examines the economic and political forces, without discounting

24 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Singh contends that this narrative produces a variety of unexplained and simultaneous shifts after 1965: from civil rights to Black Power, from South to North, nonviolent to violent, tolerant to divisive, integrationist to black nationalist, patriotic to anti-American. Thus the 1954-1965/ 68 “King-centric” movement represents the achievement of racial equality fairly and peacefully won, while the post-1965/68 cultivation of Black Power in the northern, urban ghetto legitimizes the withdrawal of the public’s support for racial equality. Singh argues that the lesson of the “King-centric” periodization is that the civil rights movement was shattered by blacks who abandoned the normative discourses of American politics.

25 For example, see: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233-1263; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

26 Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in Charles W. Eagle’s, ed. The Civil Rights Movement in America (Jackson, MS 1986), 28.

individual agency, which shaped African Americans’ options in postwar Detroit. His examination of how the “urban crisis” originated challenges historians to consider structural shifts, like deindustrialization and white flight, that began the 1940s. Sugrue’s most expansive study of the North is Sweet Land of Liberty: the Forgotten Struggle for

Civil Rights in the North (2008). In this study, Sugrue provides the first large-scale, comparative study of the freedom struggle in the North, beginning as far back as the 19th century, but focusing most intently on the 1930s, when African Americans participated in militant, rights-based labor protests in the North for the first time, through the 1970s, when the prevailing conservative climate effectively ended the civil rights movement.27

Building upon Sugrue’s work, The Grassy Battleground is informed by two recent products of scholars’ augmentation of civil rights movement historiography: attention to interracial coalitions and the function of religion in social activism. In Camden, in the midst of the Black Power Movement, we find a coalition unprecedented in life and unexplored in the literature: black and white ministers, suburban whites, Puerto Ricans, and an organization of African Americans created and run by men and women from the city.

Interracial Coalitions

In the past ten years, especially, various studies have considered how interracial coalitions functioned as part of the civil rights movement.28 However, the majority of

27 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty.

28 See: R. Bentley Anderson, Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South; Christina Greene. Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Randal Maurice Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,

these works focuses either on the South, or, more recently, Los Angeles, the traditional

1954-65 timeframe, black/ white coalitions, or why a specific coalition failed. While

Latinos (and Asians) are featured less prominently in civil rights movement scholarship in the urban North because these groups were located, predominantly, in the West and

Southwest portions of the United States until the final third of the twentieth century,

Camden became home to a significant Puerto Rican population beginning in the 1940s.29

At this time, there are no texts that explore white, African American, and Puerto Rican cooperation in the urban North after the widespread dissemination of Black Power politics, which alienated most whites. Most books that examine comparative race relations have focused primarily on the African American and Mexican American communities.30 These studies have opened a window into African American and

Mexican American civil rights activism, but they do not examine other Latino/a groups.

2006); Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-54 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005); Kristine McCusker, “Interracial Communities and Civil Rights Activism in Lawrence, Kansas, 1945-1948,” The Historian, June 1999; Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America; Richard B. Pierce, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920-1970 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Allison Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925-1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Patrick D. Jones The Selma of the North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

29 Thomas J. Sugrue, “Northern Lights: The Black Freedom Struggle Outside the South,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, January 2012, 10.

30 These works include Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles; Allison Varzally, Making a Non-White America; Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Brian Behnken, The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Neil Foley's Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown

Moon-kie Jung’s and Mark Brilliant’s works have been influential in theorizing

Camden’s interracial cooperation through their examinations of why various groups did or did not cooperate in their quests for justice. In his study of Hawaiian labor organizing,

Moon-kie Jung posits several conditions necessary for cooperation. An important component of the Jung model is that Portuguese, Filipino, and Japanese workers were conceived and self-identified as distinct racial groups with differentiated economic and political interests. In effect, a racial hierarchy had to be deconstructed in order for the workers to foster a new vision, which did not erase their racial identities, in order to build a racially and class conscious labor movement.

The most expansive treatment of interracial coalition building in the twentieth century is Mark Brilliant’s study of California, which asks why Californians did not experience a civil rights movement on par with that in the American south, despite social and legal racism. Brilliant argues that in the large swaths of the United States, such as the

South, where the “race problem” referred to African Americans, civil rights reformers could and did focus their attention on it, rendering the “Negro problem” synonymous with the civil rights movement. In California, however, there were multiple “race problems,” not just one. These varied issues—housing, voting rights, employment, education-- tended to attach themselves to California’s different racial groups in different ways, or to varying degrees, and militated against the formation of any singular, cohesive civil rights movement. What emerged, instead, was a diverse and scattered set of civil rights struggles, which did not really come together in any meaningful way.

Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010); Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Function of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement

Long before Poppy Sharp was inspired to start a revolution, Protestant ministers and Catholic priests had been working in Camden neighborhoods--which had shifted from Irish, to Italian, to African American and Puerto Rican—to address the same issues with which black militants would later contend. These religious leaders established the

Camden Metropolitan Ministry, which later merged with members of the NAACP and

CORE in 1964 into the Camden Civil Rights Ministerium. This project probes how

Christianity engaged race and social activism in the North where it is understudied.

Camden’s story demonstrates the important, if anomalous, impact black and white churches made in an era ostensibly dominated by secular Black Power politics.

Numerous studies have considered the function of religion in the civil rights movement. However, much like the work on interracial coalitions, they tend to focus on the South, the traditional timeframe, Martin Luther King, Jr., or a specific church or religious group.31 There have been several attempts to assess how one denomination, or religious body grappled with racial injustice at a national level. These studies of mainline

31 Lewis V. Baldwin, “On the Relationship of the Christian to the State: The Development of a Kingian Ethic,” ed. Lewis V. Baldwin, The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 77-123; Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); John D’Emilio Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Urban North (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995); Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (New York, NY: Fortres Publishers, 2003); Nick Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Debra L. Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2001).

Protestant Churches, the National Council of Churches--an ecumenical consortium of

Protestant churches, and the Catholic Church tell very similar stories: after some internal turmoil and social pressure in the form of civil rights legislation or activism, the church’s governing body rules to support the civil rights movement. Many southern (and some northern) clergy and parishioners protest while others heroically support the movement by attending the March on Washington (1963) or march in Selma (1965) and do good works in their community. Inevitably, white support wavers, beginning in 1965, when

President Johnson sends troops into combat in Vietnam in July and the Watts riots and passage of the Voting Rights Act in August. By the time white activists are assaulted in

Chicago and Stokely Carmichael popularizes the concept of Black Power in 1966, the movement has lost the support of most whites, including religious leaders.32

The only study that really steps outside this narrative to consider collaboration between a white religious figure and black militants is Patrick D. Jones’s The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Jones considers cooperation between

32 Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954-1973 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Maurice E. Stevens, Troubling Beginnings: Trans(Per)Forming African-American History and Identity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).; C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); James F. Findlay, Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997); Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr., Episcopalians & Race: Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2003); David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., The Episcopalians, Denominations in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Joel L. Alvis, Jr., Religion & Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946-1983 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North; Amy L. Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

young men known as the “Commandos,” and their spiritual and strategic advisor, the white Catholic priest James Groppi, in several postwar campaigns for school desegregation and open housing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unlike Camden, this case involves only one religious actor and no suburbanites or ethnic minorities.

SCOPE AND METHODS

Nick Virgilio, “one of America’s premier haiku poets,” compared the devastation he experienced living in Camden during the 1960s and 1970s to what another Camden poet, Walt Whitman, experienced following the Civil War. In the haiku from which this dissertation takes its title, Virgilio fuses the long, arduous struggle for racial equality, from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, merging Whitman’s world with this own. As Virgilio explains, “the ‘poem,’ with one foot in Camden, NJ and the other on a southern plantation, planted both feet south of the Mason-Dixon line.” 33

I have appropriated the phrase “The Grassy Battleground” for the dissertation’s title for two reasons. First, this project is an attempt to make sense of how Camden residents confronted the social and political forces that ravaged their city in the middle decades of the twentieth century and Virgilio’s poem is a critically esteemed, artistic expression of that experience. Second, as this dissertation’s goal is to provide an analytic frame through which to filter these experiences, this title attempts to contextualize

Camden within historiography and to offer some new insights to this period. The phrase

“grassy battleground” is particularly fitting here because it comments on the consequential and conflicted ties Camden shares with the rural and suburban, or “grassy,” surrounding communities. Metaphorically, Camden rose from the fields that surrounded

33 For more on this haiku, see Nick Virgilio’s essay, “A Journey to a Haiku,” in Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 103-106.

it, as area farms provided the sustenance for Camden’s largest, most profitable industry, the Campbell Soup Company. The African Americans and Puerto Ricans who became

“Camden,” traveled from all over to harvest these fields and their produce.

Furthermore, this title is a comment on my intervention into urban history historiography. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue have critiqued urban histories for assuming urban processes are self-contained, obscuring larger forces that shaped the contours of the city and, therefore, modern America. Kruse and Sugrue, also using the same bellicose language this dissertation coopts, argue the “suburbs were battlegrounds over nearly every crucial postwar domestic issue.”34 While this project is not a sustained analysis of Camden’s suburbs, these surrounding communities are developed here as an antagonist: a “refuge” for whites in the postwar era, a rival for political and economic resources, an inaccessible fortress of opportunity. But, in this story, the suburbs also act as the source of vital alliances: financial, technical, physical, and moral support in the form of liberal, white ministers and lay people, both Christian and secular. Camden’s activism was driven by the African Americans and Puerto Ricans who resided there, but it was shaped by within the milieu of southern New Jersey.

Another important aspect of this project’s scope is its timeframe. This dissertation covers the 1930s through the 1970s but, because of the widely varying nature of local circumstances, does not implicitly argue that all civil rights protest should be fixed within this span. As scholars expand the parameters of the civil rights movement, debates have emerged that scrutinize just how much can be contained within this increasingly “long”

34 Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 9.

civil rights movement.”35 Perhaps the most widely cited piece on this topic is Jacquelyn

Dowd Hall’s article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the

Past,” which was delivered, originally, as the presidential address at the Organization of

American Historians national convention in 2004. Dowd Hall argues:

the story of a “long civil rights movement”…took root in the liberal and radical

milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the “rise and fall of the New Deal

Order,” accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was

continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a

“movement of movements” that defies any narrative collapse.36

Other scholars, such as Eric Arnesen, Harvard Sitkoff, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and

Clarence Long, find discontinuity in the freedom surges of the 1930s and 1940s with those in the 1950s and beyond, arguing this framework has become unwieldy. Mark

35 One of the first significant essays that encouraged scholars to consider the relationship between Depression and World War II-era protests with those in the classical phase of the civil rights movement was Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein’s, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December, 1988), 786-811. Other important works on the topic include: Joseph E. Peniel, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2010); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past”; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; Zargosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ken Kersch, Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Robert J. Norrell, The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005); Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

36 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1235.

Brilliant builds on the concept of the long civil rights movement in a manner that better captures this dissertation’s attempt to address Camden’s unique story. Brilliant conceptualizes the civil rights movement not simply “long,” but also as “wide.” By

“wide” Brilliant means the movement was a truly national phenomenon encompassing more than blacks and whites, and, most importantly, involving a broad range of race problems and, therefore, a broad range of responses to them.

Camden’s story is similarly variegated. This story begins during the Depression and World War II when labor militancy influenced politics in the Camden area and throughout the nation. This period, which saw interracial cooperation among black and white workers, marks an important shift for several reasons. 1. As blacks, in large numbers, were a new phenomenon in Camden, this is the first time interracial cooperation occurs. 2. These alliances are formed despite the increasingly segregated nature of Camden and despite growing disharmony among blacks and whites outside the workplace. 3. While most whites cared little for the plight of African Americans in this period, several Communist Party USA members, or sympathizers, lead and sustain interracial unions. This project ends in the 1970s because activism took a new direction in Camden. BPUM members like Sharp were elected to government positions; ministers like Griesmann and Johnson left religion behind; a host of other activists left town all together. This project concludes in the 1970s, simply because, to borrow from Thomas

Sugrue, “the marching stopped.”37

In terms of methodology, the breadth of ideological diversity of Camden’s freedom struggle is apparent only through close analysis of local sources, analysis that no previous scholar has undertaken, which include various primary sources in English and

37 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 494.

Spanish, including organizational records, interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, court documents, and various forms of correspondence. 38

Chapter 1 of The Grassy Battleground, “‘In All Defiance’: Labor, Migration, and

Interracial Protest in Southern New Jersey,” considers the founding and growth of the

Campbell Soup Company and its impact on migration to southern New Jersey. This chapter traces important shifts in labor organizing during the Great Depression to examine how the CPUSA supported interracial cannery and agricultural labor protests and promoted racial equality despite enormous odds.

The second chapter, “‘Nothing in Common Except the Same Problems’: Postwar

Social Organization,” evaluates social organization in Camden during the years immediately following World War II, when the Camden NAACP and the Puerto Rican

Migration Division emerged as the major community organizers. This chapter focuses on how these organizations, through promoting middle-class ideals, failed to develop grassroots organization among Camden’s African Americans and Puerto Ricans.

Chapter 3, “‘Too Much Singing’: Christianity and the Limitations of

Nonviolence in the Ghetto,” charts shifting community organizing during the classical phase of the civil rights movement and shows how the War on Poverty politicized various

38 The bulk of the primary sources I collected came from the Camden County Historical Society, located in Camden, Temple University’s Urban Archives, the Gloucester County Historical Society, Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Library’s Special Collections, the Presbyterian Historical Society, which houses the Camden Metropolitan Ministry and Friends of the Black Peoples Unity Movement’s records, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, where the Migration Division’s records are located, as well as the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Additionally I conducted approximately fifty interviews. I was fortunate to speak directly with major religious leaders, Donald Griesmann, Samuel Appel, and Amos Johnson, leaders in the BPUM, Sharif Abdullah and Malik Chaka, as well as Puerto Rican leaders, Joseph Rodriguez and Gualberto Medina, as well as many former and current Camden citizens.

groups. This chapter considers how various Christian churches responded to the civil rights movement and contextualizes Camden’s ministers and the creation of the Camden

Civil Rights Ministerium (CCRM) within this history.

The fourth chapter, “‘His-story’: The Black Peoples Unity Movement and

Interracial Cooperation, 1968,” looks at the movement’s shift to a radical, racially integrated movement through the formation of the Black Peoples Unity Movement and the Friends of the Black Peoples Unity Movement. This chapter considers how interracial organizing coalesced during housing protests in the summer of 1968.

The final chapter, “‘Justice Now!, ¡Justicia Ahora!’: Interracial Coalitions and

Camden New Jersey’s 1971 Riot,” examines African American and Puerto Rican cooperation during the summer of 1971. This alliance emerged amid a confluence of conditions that simultaneously weakened the (CCRM) and further radicalized the Puerto

Rican community—including arrests of several key CCRM members, nascent black/Puerto Rican cooperation during the 1969 Rutgers University protests, as well as an increasingly aggressive Camden police force.

The story of activism in Camden underscores how violence, threats of violence, and criminality functioned as methods of resistance. Camden’s civil rights movement was directed by individuals who were not moral paragons and groups who did not undertake rigorously disciplined nonviolent actions. Instead, we find people who used chains, set fires, and constantly threatened worse, but still managed to rally support from Christian ministers and white suburbanites. It is a story about people who defied the odds time and again. If Camden’s civil rights movement was a failure, and in so many ways it was, these years of protest are still meaningful in exposing the long, sordid tentacles of race

and class discrimination that we continue to confront today. More though, these years emphasize possibilities for cooperation despite differences. They show us how, in making and remaking our cities, we remake ourselves.

CHAPTER 1

“IN ALL DEFIANCE”: LABOR, MIGRATION, AND INTERRACIAL PROTEST IN SOUTHERN NEW JERSEY

in the young grass a fledgling jay and a worm stare at each other 1

In the 1930s, African-American organizer Lester Granger was leading the

National Urban League’s efforts to promote trade unionism among black workers and to challenge racism by employers and labor organizations. So, in 1934, when he heard about brewing unrest among workers in the Camden, New Jersey area, he came to see, firsthand.2 In an article entitled “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” Granger reported that poor housing, low pay, and long hours compelled workers to rally in South Jersey:

It was out of situations like this, to be found among Negro and Italian pickers in

the fields and workers in the canneries, that the strike idea was born in all

defiance of South Jersey public attitudes, in all defiance of Klan threats, in all

1 Nick Virgilio, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 61.

2 For more on Granger, see: Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008). In 1930 Granger founded Los Angeles, California’s National Urban League chapter. In 1940 Granger became the NUL’s assistant executive secretary in charge of industrial relations and continued to work to integrate racist trade unions. In 1941, he led the NUL's effort to support the March on Washington proposed by A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste to protest racial discrimination in defense work and the Armed Forces. In 1945, he began working with the Department of Defense to desegregate the military, seeing first success with the Navy in February 1946. During the 1960s, he insisted that the NUL continue its strategy of "education and persuasion," a view which the NUL continued to support.

defiance of the traditional belief that Negroes will not strike and that Negroes and

whites cannot organize together successfully.3

In 1934 both agricultural and cannery workers in southern New Jersey organized such alliances, inaugurating Camden’s long, clamorous campaign for social justice.

This chapter considers how, in the 1930s, Camden’s increasingly interracial community could “defy all expectations” in the workplace even as the city became more segregated. This chapter demonstrates how unions led or sustained by Communist leaders marshaled interracial cooperation by highlighting common goals and, even, promoted racial equality. These protests are significant to the larger story of rights-based protest in Camden because, as Thomas Sugrue has argued, during the 1930s and 1940s:

Black militancy, especially on economic issues, reshaped local and national

politics. The emergence of interracial coalitions, an emphasis on the intersection

of race and class, and the explosion of organized and unorganized protests give

this era importance in its own right. The vast majority of northern whites cared

little about African Americans and racial justice; many were overtly hostile to

blacks. Yet a small but growing number, most of the religious activists or secular

leftists, joined the struggle during the Depression and World War II. Sometimes

working together, sometimes apart, black activists and their allies accomplished

change.4

While religious activists became a significant force in Camden’s freedom struggle in the

1960s, during this period secular leftists, often Communist radicals, were an important

3 Lester B. Granger, “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 12, no. 8 (August 1934): 248.

4 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, xxi.

stimulus for interracial cooperation. As the story of the “civil rights movement in the

North” begins to gel, these Camden protests demonstrate how “wide” the movement truly was. In many ways, southern New Jersey blacks, taunted by a conspicuous Ku Klux

Klan and members of a working-class base of agricultural and cannery workers, left behind by the New Deal, had more in common with blacks in the South during this period than in New York City, Chicago, or even Philadelphia.

Chapter 1 begins by considering the rise of the Campbell Soup Company, a corporation that epitomizes the relationship between industrialization and urbanization, revealing that Camden was a city in the midst of nature, a proverbial machine in the garden.5 Next, the chapter explores what brought im/migrants to southern New Jersey and how their relationships were cobbled through shared economic and labor struggles.

In particular, this chapter considers how labor unrest in two locations—Camden’s

Campbell Soup plant and local farm, Bridgeton, New Jersey’s Seabrook Farms—secured interracial alliances as workers joined what some historians have called the most diverse union in the nation, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of

America.

Mass-Market Agriculture

The Campbell Soup Company was founded in 1869, in the midst of a frenzied explosion of urbanization and mass consumption. Remarkably successful, the Campbell

Soup Company marketed itself as “America’s Favorite Food.”6 At the turn of the

5 For more on the relationship between cities and nature, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, NY: WW. Norton, 1991). For more on Campbell Soup’s connection to area farms see: Stuart Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1975), 343-44.

twentieth century, Campbell Soup emerged as the most-advertised food product in the

United States while southern New Jersey blossomed into the nation’s tomato capital.7

Campbell Soup’s ascendency rested on Camden-area farms’ ability to yield produce for its food products. Additionally, the company used the same labor markets as New Jersey truck farmers. Campbell Soup was the first industry in Camden to hire African

Americans and Puerto Ricans, who often worked as farm laborers during the busy seasons. Because of the Campbell Soup Company’s entanglement with outlying farms, historian Daniel Sidorick has observed that the company “played a critical role as a transition point for agricultural laborers moving into the industrial sector.”8 The presence of these non-white laborers was felt so keenly in the city that long-time residents blamed

Campbell Soup for the crime and squalor that seemed to accompany their influx.9

During the nineteenth century’s final decades, southern New Jersey farmers diversified their crops through technological advancements including irrigation and drainage, refrigeration, and fertilization. “Truck farming” boosted crop production by

6 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 15; Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed The Making of the American Mass Market (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books: 1989), Chapter 1.

7 Tomato soup was the company’s most popular product. So many local farmers line up in the street to sell tomatoes to Campbell Soup that they would extend beyond the city limits. The whole area around Campbell Soup smelled like tomatoes and tomato juice ran through the streets. “Campbell’s Soup,” Fortune, November 1935, 130; Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism,8, 18, 22; Douglas Collins, America’s Favorite Food: The Story of the Campbell Soup Company (New York, NY: Harry N Abrams, 1994), Chapter 1; “Camden—A Great City Growing Greater,” Evening Courier (Camden, NJ), Feb. 13, 1928; Andrew F. Smith, Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 35-60; Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 8, 22.

8 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 8.

9 Ibid.

growing various items in alternating rows, versus the previous system of one crop per season. This advancement sustained small farms’ rapid transformations to larger agricultural centers due to South Jersey’s proximity to three growing markets: New York,

Newark, and Philadelphia. Truck farming became so fruitful in New Jersey that by1880 the New York Times reported every speech regarding New Jersey agriculture, which were many, boasted New Jersey’s crops were the nation’s most profitable.10

This shift is significant to the history of interracial organizing in New Jersey because it created a hefty demand for labor, which was never met adequately for long; through the twentieth century, New Jersey farms would be plagued by labor shortages. The work was tedious and, often, temporary: vegetables and fruits required handpicking, over a several- month period.11 This critical need for short-term labor led farmers to recruit people most requiring work, creating a market for migrants that would not have come to New Jersey otherwise. Italians, then African Americans, and, finally, Puerto Ricans joined the farm industry. Because of its adjacency to area farms, many migrants would later join

Camden’s industrial sector.12

10 Gonzalez, “Living Between Two Worlds,” 8-9; Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty 1870- 1945, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5, 20-23; “New Jersey Truck-Farms,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 9, 1880.

11 Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor, 6; Philadelphia Housing Association, Report of the Commission to Investigate the Employment of Migratory Children in the State of New Jersey, 12.

12 Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, House of Representatives, Seventy-Sixth Congress, Third Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 63 and H. Res. 491, Resolution to Inquire into the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, to Study, Survey and Investigate the Social and Economic Needs and the Movement of Indigent Persons Across State Lines. (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1940), 70-71; National Defense Migration Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of

Immigrants and Migrants: Labor Pools

Italians had been picking berries on South Jersey farms since the 1890s.13 While most Italians did not choose agricultural jobs initially, they were the Camden-area farms’ main labor source through World War II.14 In 1931 the New Jersey Commission to

Investigate the Employment of Migratory Children found that New Jersey employers specifically preferred Italian families.15 Simultaneously, the Campbell Soup Company began hiring nontraditional workers, such as women and African Americans, creating

Representatives, Seventy-Seventh Congress, First[-Second] Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 113, a Resolution to Inquire Further into the Interstate Migration of Citizens, Emphasizing the Present and Potential Consequences of the Migration Caused by the National Defense Program. Pt. 11-[34]. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1941. There is testimony in these reports that discusses how many industries in Camden employed former agricultural workers in the late-1930s through 1941. One example is that by 1940, 16-17% of the New York Shipbuilding Company’s employees had been agricultural workers, National Defense Migration Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, 5775.

13 Paul Taylor, “Migratory Farm Labor in the United States,” 95.; G. Thomas- Lycklama à Nijeholt, On the Road for Work, (New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1980), 33.

14 William Paul Dillingham, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries Volumes 21-22 of Reports of the Immigration Commission, (Washington, DC: Govt. Print. Office: 1911), 50. The Immigration Commission was known as the Dillingham Commission after its chairman, Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont. The purpose of the commission, formed in 1907, was to determine the origins and consequences of recent immigration. For several accounts of Italian families working in South Jersey, see: Work of Children on Truck and Small-Fruit Farms in Southern New Jersey (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, 1924). In part, this was because garment, hat, and artificial flower production slowed down during the summer months, which coincided with the harvest time for crops in southern New Jersey. The Dillingham Commission, organized to investigate the role of immigrants in American industries, found that most women and children worked on the farms without the father and eldest sons in the family because the men could earn more money working industrial jobs.

15 New Jersey Commission to Investigate the Employment of Migratory Children, Report, 51.; Philadelphia Housing Association. Report of the Commission to Investigate the Employment of Migratory Children in the State of New Jersey. pp.13-14; Work of Children on Truck and Small-Fruit Farms in Southern New Jersey (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, 1924).

additional job opportunities for migrants. Many Campbell Soup workers began as seasonal employees following the harvest, when farm work slowed.

One such laborer was Maria Tisa, who had emigrated in the early 1900s from

Sicily with her husband Benedetto. Maria and her sons worked Camden-area farms, picking tomatoes in the years before Maria heard Campbell Soup was hiring women for full-time, year-round employment. The Tisa family moved to Camden soon after. In

1930, Benedetto, Maria, and their four sons, Dominic, Charles, Joseph, and John, lived at

214 Benson Street in North Camden. At that time, North Camden was emerging as an

Italian immigrant community as more families sought jobs with nearby Campbell Soup.

During the summer months, the neighborhood streets ran red with juice as farmers lined the city blocks with their trucks, hoping to sell some tomatoes to Campbell Soup.16

As northern cities exploded with industrial work opportunities, farms conjointly endured labor shortages despite the Italian workforce, creating opportunities for the southern blacks who migrated north steadily. The apogee of black migration, 1916-1930, produced a massive demographic shift, causing economic, social, and political changes throughout the United States. Approximately 400,000 African Americans moved north during the two-year, 1916-1918 period, alone. The northern African American population increased by twenty percent between1910 and 1930.17 Dwindling immigrant

16 Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.

17 For more information on the Great Migration, see: Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migration of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Carole Marks, Farewell, We’re Good and Gone: The Black Migration, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land:

labor, especially after the restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 imposed a harsh national quota system, encouraged northern businesses, including the Campbell

Soup Company and Camden-area farms, to recruit African Americans in the South as a cheap labor source. By 1937, two-thirds of black migrant workers either had a prearranged contract with a farmer or were brought by agents.18

The pilgrimage to New Jersey was unforgiving. Crammed fifty per truck, black migrants had to take turns sitting or lying down. Others hitchhiked or camped along the way.19 Once they arrived the migrants were subjected to racial violence, disease, low wages, and poor housing conditions. By the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had a strong, albeit less brutal, presence in the North. New Jersey was home to 60,000 Klan members, the tenth highest concentration in the nation. More Klan members inhabited New Jersey than

Alabama, Louisiana, or Tennessee.20 Racially motivated violence earned New Jersey the moniker “the Mississippi of the North” within the black community.21

African American Religion and the Great Migration, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 209-232.

18 Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 82, 362.

19 Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States, (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1942), 177.

20 Jon Blackwell, “1924: Hatred Wore a Hood in Jersey,” Trentonian (Trenton, NJ), Feb. 15, 1998; Marc Mappen, Jerseyana: Underside NJ History, (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992), 166. The first Klavern was established in Newark in 1921. Soon after, others formed in Hoboken, Camden, the shore towns, Trenton, and eighty other communities.

21 Kathleen O’Brien, “Black History Month: Integrating New Jersey’s Schools,” Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), Feb. 1, 2008.; H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary

African Americans migrating to Camden tended to settle in the southern part of the city, where they were at the mercy of an evolving racial panic spurred on by the Great

Migration. The abrupt arrival of thousands of African Americans in northern cities had whites clambering to segregate neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and leisure spaces.

To divert blacks from all-white neighborhoods, whites used violence and collaborated with realtors to create racially restrictive covenants.22 Camden’s recently arrived black families navigated a new system of racial repression. In racially mixed south Camden,

African Americans adhered to rigorous de facto segregation. They had to sit on the back of the bus and in the upper balcony at the movie theater. They could not receive service at white restaurants.23 Children attended segregated schools. African Americans were not allowed to visit the local hospital unless sent by a white doctor. They had few recreational facilities, no community center, and abhorrent housing conditions. Realtors raised African-Americans’ rent disproportionately, especially in the low-rent districts, as housing became scarcer.24 Any dream black families had of owning a home was deferred

3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives, February 6, 1943).

22 For more on African-American migration to New Jersey, see: Migrant War Workers in Newark (Newark, NJ: The Housing Authority of the City of Newark New Jersey, 1944); Leonard Blumberg, Migration: A Pilot Study of Recent Negro Migrants, (Philadelphia: Urban League of Philadelphia, 1957).

23 James Troutman, interview by Howard Gillette, November 6, 1997.

24 National Defense Migration Hearings, 5874. For example, a 1941 study found that from October 1939 to April 1941, “43 percent of the white tenants paid an average rent increase of 12 percent; and 16 percent of the Negro tenants paid an average rent increase of 16.8 percent. Rents were raised more sharply in the lower rent brackets. Of the Negro tenants paying less than $15 a month, 19 percent paid an average increase of 19 6 percent; while 15 percent of those in the $l0 to $20 bracket paid an increase of 14.3 percent.”

in 1934 with the National Housing Act’s passage, which ushered in the nearly insurmountable “redlining” policy.25 By 1966, the FHA had not insured one mortgage in

Camden.26

“Never a Thing of Beauty”: The Depression in Camden

The shadow of the Great Depression settled on Camden as the city prepared for its

250th anniversary. Despite plant closings, layoffs, and work-related violence and arrests throughout the city, the Camden County Chamber of Commerce buoyantly anointed

Camden “New Jersey’s most highly industrialized city,” boasting it led “the entire Nation in the proportion of its population engaged in industry.”27 Yet, the atmosphere seemed

25 Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51. The National Housing Act of 1934 established the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and create "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real-estate investments in each surveyed city. Such maps defined many minority neighborhoods in cities as ineligible to receive financing. The maps were based on assumptions about the community, not accurate assessments of an individual's or household's ability to satisfy standard lending criteria. Camden was one of the surveyed cities. Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (June 2005): 207-233. There are several studies that comment on the limited options and discrimination African Americans faced in Camden: The Relation Between Housing and Delinquency in New Jersey (Trenton, NJ: Division of Statistics and Research, New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies, 1936); H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 2/19/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives); H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives); “No Homes for Negro Workers,” (Philadelphia: Youth Committee for Democracy, 1945); Bernard J. Newman, “Philadelphia’s Program for Negro Migration Problems,” The American Missionary 78, no.4 (April 1924), 8.

26 Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 51.

27 Cranston, Camden County, 1681-1931, 60. Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 15; Ann Marie T. Cammarota, Pavements in the Garden: The Suburbanization of

ominous. Martha Gellhorn, who would become one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents and one of the most legendary when she married Ernest Hemingway in

1940, covered the Depression’s impact on Camden as a Federal Emergency Relief

Administration (FERA) investigator. Reporting to FERA supervisor Harry Hopkins,

Gellhorn limned a bleak account:

Housing is unspeakable. No doubt the housing was never a thing of beauty and

general admiration around here; but claptrap houses which have gone without

repairs for upwards of five years are shameful places. There is marked

overcrowding (and it is to be noted that T.B. is on the increase.) I have seen

houses where the plaster had fallen through the lathe, and the basement floated in

water. One entire block of houses I visited is so infected with bedbugs that the

only way to keep whole is to burn the beds twice a week and paint the wood work

with carbolic acid, and even so you can just sit around and watch the little

creatures crawling all over and dropping from the ceiling... Household equipment

nil. Apparently what goes last is the unused overstuffed furniture in the front

room. Clothes nil. Really a terrible problem here; not only of protection against

the elements (a lot of pneumonia amongst children: undernourishment plus

exposure) but also the fact that, having no clothes, these people are cut out of any

social life. They don't dare go out, for shame. The men feel it in applying for jobs:

their very shabbiness acts against them. I am now talking primarily about the

white collar class. 28

Southern New Jersey Adjacent to Philadelphia, 1769 to the Present, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 191.

Everywhere Gellhorn went, she found men and women in despair, searching for work that did not exist. Camden’s police and fire departments estimated that forty-nine percent of Camden’s housing as “crowded” or “congested.”29 Approximately three-fourths of all black families and more than a quarter of the white families lived in substandard houses.”30 Seventy-seven percent of black residents relied on relief.31 The psychiatric hospitals had reached capacity.32

Camden’s situation was desperate, but it was not unique and neither was the radicalism it engendered. In the early 1930s, a shift occurred among disempowered laborers: in East Pittsburgh, in Chicago, in New York, in Flint, in Camden, and in cities throughout the nation that had morphed into industrial powerhouses on the backs of

28 Martha Gelhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey, April 25, 1935; Martha Gellhorn reported on virtually every world conflict in her sixty year career, including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Six Days War. She was also a novelist. From 1940-1945, Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway, whom she met just a year after submitting this report to FERA. For more on Gellhorn, see: Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003).

29 Division of Statistics and Research, New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies, The Relation Between Housing and Delinquency in New Jersey, 9. A survey conducted by the Police and Fire Departments in 1933 revealed that “Of 2,800 houses found unoccupied, 838 were declared to be absolutely unfit for human habitation owing to lack of repair and deficient sanitation facilities.” Writers’ Program (U.S.) Housing in Camden. Housing Authority of the City of Camden (Camden: Huntzinger Co., 1942).

30 Robert C. Weaver, “Negroes Need Housing,” The Crisis 47, no.5 (May 1940), 139.

31 H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 12/19/42” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives). In this report Parrish discusses the Depression’s impact on Camden.

32 Gelhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey, April 25, 1935.

newly arrived immigrants and migrants, protest erupted.33 These retaliations were partly inspired by New Deal legislation. The “First New Deal,” as some historians call the reforms passed during 1933, created key organizations and laws that impacted banking, farming, and job creation. Additionally, the government offered, via FERA, $500,000 in relief money to state and local governments and to individuals.34 Workers were encouraged further by President Roosevelt’s confident and comforting rhetoric. As

Gellhorn reported from Camden, “people had faith in the New Deal and the President and

[that] things would surely pick up.” Camden residents placed in Roosevelt “an almost mystic belief.”35

While the Chamber of Commerce advertised in 1931, “In all its history, Camden has never known a major strike,” the city’s increasingly diverse community of immigrants and migrants joined together in their shared workplaces to bargain collectively.36 Strikes, riots, or demonstrations erupted at the Congress Cigar Factory, the

33 Cowie notes that “Between World War I and 1927 iron and steel production in the region grew by 55 percent, autos by 178 percent, and rubber by 292 percent” Capital Moves, 25.

34 For more on the New Deal see: Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (New York: Penguin, 2009); Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); David M. Kennedy, “What the New Deal Did,” Political Science Quarterly 124 (Summer 2009): 251–68.

35 Martha Gelhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey, April 25, 1935. Gellhorn refers to the change in attitude among Camden residents between 1934 and 1935, when this report was submitted.

36 Camden County Chamber of Commerce, Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, 1681-1931, 68, 75; Cowie, Capital Moves, 20; Dorwart and Mackey, Camden County, 259-260.

New York Ship building Company, and RCA-Victor, among other places. 37 Even relief clients went on strike, because they felt the twenty-percent bonus they earned for performing work relief, was “sweated labor.”38 Gellhorn noted that the relief client strike, especially, pointed to a shift in citizens’ beliefs about their rights:

The whole thing is hard to understand--you have to start from the original

principle that society owes a man a living and that he has a right to relief.

Therefore, his relief food order is not a gift, it's his inalienable heritage, not to be

considered as part of his pay.39

While Americans’ views of “relief” were varied and complex, and would grow progressively so in the coming decades, the Depression impelled many to expect government protection in ways they had not in the past.40 Yet, in 1930, black and white workers did not have much organizational power. Klan violence in the Camden area, coupled with racist attitudes in the labor movement made any possibility of interracial labor strikes dubious. As the Depression’s impact grew, there was little workers could do to combat layoffs and grim working conditions.41

37 For information on RCA’s strike see: Cowie, Capital Moves. For information on the New York Shipbuilding Company strike see: Unionism at Work (Camden, NJ: Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, 1943).

38 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 50; Martha Gelhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey, April 25, 1935.

39 Martha Gellhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey,” April 25, 1935.

40 Gauti B. Eggertsson, “Great Expectations and the End of the Depression,” American Economic Review 98, no.4 (September 2008): 1476-1516.

41 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 10.

Labor Rights are Civil Rights

The Roosevelt administration attempted to address workers’ weak position; although, the start was slow. In the “first hundred days” of Roosevelt’s presidency, the federal government specifically sought to protect the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy. For example, the Agricultural Adjustment Agency reset prices for agricultural products and subsidized farmers to cut back on production so they could earn more money. The Farm Credit Act provided emergency loans to farmers in danger of losing their land. One of the most important pieces of legislation for workers was the

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which attempted to drive up the prices of consumer goods by limiting their production. Section 7(a) of the NIRA aimed to protect organizing and collective bargaining rights for unions through corporate codes of conduct. Yet, while the NIRA inspired labor protests because it encouraged union organizing, ultimately, it was unable to fully protect workers because it was poorly structured. It was effectively impossible to execute government oversight in labor disputes. 42

Additional difficulties in organizing interracial groups of cannery workers and agricultural workers existed beyond legislative red tape in southern New Jersey. Because

42 Phillip Dray, There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 426-27. The NIRA’s structure was complicated and unclear at times. For example, in a collective bargaining situation, the NIRA allowed for proportional representation. This complicated the negotiation process because a company union was entitled to participate even if a legitimate union had enrolled a majority of the workers. Additionally, the NIRA was ill equipped execute its goals. For example, the National Labor Board was charged with the responsibility of forcing employers to comply with the legislation. However, it possessed no actually powers of enforcement beyond referring incidents to the Compliance Board. The Compliance Board could only remove a company’s blue eagle insignia—a symbol of its participation in the National Labor Board’s economic recovery. More serious cases could be referred to the Justice Department; however, employers knew there would be little repercussion for non-compliance.

many cannery and agricultural workers were seasonal employees, establishing stable locals was difficult. Moreover, in the 1930s, a higher concentration of people worked in canneries and on farms than in any other industry in the United States and one-fifth of these employees were African American.43 Thus, labor organizers met with fierce opposition from the Ku Klux Klan and other local vigilante groups throughout New

Jersey.

The first notable instances of rights-based interracial cooperation in the Camden- area were the 1934 labor protests at Campbell Soup in Camden and Seabrook Farms in nearby Bridgeton. These strikes took place in the midst of a larger shift in labor organizing. For most of the 20th century, black and white laborers were divided along racial lines as ethnic whites ostracized African Americans, who were frequently used as strike breakers.44 Yet, the simultaneous drop-off in immigration and the internal migration of African Americans from the South desegregated the working class in work places. Between 1890 and 1930, the number of black men working in the industrial sector increased from seven percent to twenty-five percent, ensuring black workers were an essential constituency for winning labor disputes, which were happening more and

43 Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, 488.

44 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919- 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Black Americans, 141;. A notable exception was the Philadelphia shipyard’s Local 8 (International Workers of the World’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union), which organized across racial lines in the 1920s. For more on this see: Cohen, Making a New Deal, 27-28; Howard Kimeldoif and Robert Penney, “‘Excluded’ by Choice: Dynamics of Interracial Unionism on the Philadelphia Waterfront 1910-1930,” International Labor and Working Class History 51 (Spring 1997): 50-71; Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: International Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2007).

more frequently.45 From 1932 to 1933, the number of work stoppages doubled to 1, 695;

1,117,000 workers took part, which was almost four times the 1932 number. In 1934

1,470,000 workers took part in 1,856 strikes.46

Aside from the growing number of African Americans in industrial and agricultural jobs, another reason for the interracial nature of 1930s strikes was the

Communist Party’s growing influence in labor. Sharon Smith maintains that 1934 strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis, were an important turning point for the labor movement as their victories were highly visible. These strikes were saturated with

Communism.47 Historian Adam Fairclough asserts, “The Communist Party opposed the racial and economic oppression of black people with greater energy, militancy, and imagination than any other organization”; and in the 1930s, interracialism became an important component of the Communist Party’s project. This commitment to fighting racism was abetted by growing class-consciousness among the working classes during the Depression.48 Workers of all backgrounds were hungry, homeless, and constantly battling the possibility of unemployment; in other words, they were open to the

Communist Party’s calls for multiracial unity, if it meant job security.49

45 Sharon Smith, “The 1930s: Turning Point for U.S. Labor,” International Socialist Review 25 (September–October 2002).

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (New York, NY: Viking Adult); Thomas Sugrue points out that the actual membership numbers for the CPUSA were relatively small, peaking at 100,000; however Communist organizers had a significant presence at civil rights rallies, Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 25.

49 Smith, “The 1930s: Turning Point for U.S. Labor.”

The Communist Party was well entrenched in Camden in this period. In 1921, following the formation of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a group was organized in Camden by Francis Morrow. Morrow, a shipfitter at the New York Shipbuilding

Company, had a covert side-job with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ was concerned with the potential for radicalism to entice the largely working-class

Camden community and enlisted Morrow to infiltrate the CPUSA in the Camden area.

To his fellow party members Morrow was known as “Comrade Day.” To the DOJ, he was Special Agent K-97. But Morrow moved up too quickly within the CPUSA to make much of an impact in Camden. By 1922 he was the secretary of the district committee and acted as a delegate to the CPUSA’s “secret convention.” By the time the strikes took place at Campbell’s and Seabrook Farms, Charles S. Danenhower had replaced Morrow as Camden’s Communist Party organizer. Presumably, Danenhower was not a secret agent.50

Newspaper accounts reveal that Communism was an important political force in

Camden from the late-1920s through the 1940s. Communist (and Socialist) Party representatives are casually and frequently mentioned in the Courier-Post in these decades, especially in discussions of city taxes, where they are mentioned petitioning the city on behalf of the working class against deadlines or increases. By the 1950s, Cold

War anticommunism would effectively stamp out radical organizations in Camden, but in the 1930s left-leaning radicals, such as Donald and Eleanor Henderson, John Tisa, Joseph

50 Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 366; Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000); “Commission Kills Circular Ordinance,” (Camden, NJ) Courier-Post, Feb. 14, 1936.

Gallo, and Antionio Valentino, led and sustained union organizing. Many of these organizers viewed the labor unrest in southern New Jersey within the context of a larger, worldwide class struggle.

“Just a Few More Weary Days”: Campbell Soup Strike

In 1934, The Campbell Soup Company was the only thriving industry in Camden, earning a $10 million profit per year.51 Despite the grim job outlook elsewhere, workers inaugurated a labor struggle that would last through 1940. This battle for workers’ rights would gain national attention and bring together black, white, and eventually, Puerto

Rican laborers in a common protest. Campbell Soup’s recruitment and compensation strategies came together in a general campaign to divide and conquer. From the beginning, Campbell Soup divided its workforce by maintaining a rigid separation between permanent and seasonal workers and by recruiting female, African-American, and Puerto Rican workers who were carefully segregated in inferior job positions.52 In his study of interracial labor organizing in Hawaii, Moon-kie Jung argues that a result of the

“divide and conquer” strategy was imaginary class lines between workers. Jung finds that employers played into racial antagonisms and reified racial differences in order to keep workers from developing any budding sense of worker solidarity.53 To this,

Campbell Soup added a compensation system designed to galvanize the workforce by

51 Gellhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey,” April 25. 1935.

52 For more on this strike see: Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism.

53 Jung, Reworking Race.

tying pay directly to individual productivity. Campbell’s management devoted immense energy to delineating and grading every process and every job.54

Workers especially loathed the Bedaux system of compensation, which the company adopted in 1927. Every job, even every task and every operation, was broken down into separate activities and each was given a “B” value setting for the work effort required. Each worker’s hourly output was then compared with this ideal and evaluated according to the number of Bs accomplished per hour. Ultimately, the Bedaux procedures book grew into a seven-inch thick tome, spread across two volumes, assigning a name and numerical value to every process in the Campbell Soup plant.55 Via the Bedaux system, Campbell’s management segmented the workforce by making pay a reflection of individual productivity. According to management, workers’ pay depended on their own skills and work rather than the result of collective action; to earn more money, employees simply had to work harder and better. In profitability, growth, and productivity,

Campbell Soup was an American success story. Campbell Soup executed this labor strategy so effectively that it faced little labor unrest and found no need to pursue any of the techniques of welfare capitalism developed elsewhere.

All of this changed precipitously in 1933. That fall, workers, black and white, men and women, began meeting to discuss their complaints about the company. While issues abounded, two salient problems affected workers in all divisions: 1. pay decreases due to the company’s compliance with the NIRA “work-spreading scheme,” which required employers to hire more workers and offer all workers fewer hours, and, 2. work

54 For a detailed account of the 1934 strike, see Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, Chapter 2.

55 “Campbell’s Soup,” Fortune, November 1935, 124-126.

speed-up that followed the Bedaux system implementation.56 The employees formed an independent union, the Local 1 Canners’ Industrial Union (CIU), and attempted to meet with company representatives to discuss their complaints. Management responded slowly to the CIU’s requests and eventually formed its own union for “loyal” employees, the Employees’ Representation Plan (ERP). The EPR, essentially a company puppet, submitted several demands in early 1934, which Campbell Soup “conceded.” The CIU took its case to the National Labor Board (NLB), which had been created by the NIRA to handle labor disputes. While the NLB agreed to intervene, it had little power to execute its promises and stalled its response. The CIU grew frustrated with the NLB and voted to strike. On April 2, 1934, 2,000 employees walked out of the Camden Campbell Soup plant. The strike would last until May 5.57

Workers throughout the nation shared similar issues as the CIU with the NLB. As the Campbell Soup strike continued, it drew national attention from workers waiting to see how it would end.58 For the next month, protesters surrounded the Campbell Soup

56 The idea was that each employee’s hours should be cut (with pay increase), so that additional jobs could be created. Campbell Soup cut hours, but did not increase pay.

57 For coverage of the strike, see: “Camden Strikers Stick to Demands,” Evening Bulletin (Camden, NJ), Mar. 31, 1934; “Strike Started on Wage Demands at Soup Factory,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 2, 1934; “Women Strikers Maul Two Men,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 3, 1934; “Soup Co. Plans ‘Armed Defense,’” (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 4, 1934; “Soup Firm Seeks Court Aid on Strike,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 5, 1934; “Hints Soup Firm May Quit Camden, “Evening Bulletin (Camden, NJ), Apr. 18, 1934; “Labor Board Acts in Soup Co. Strike,” Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 21, 1934; “Pepper Throwing Picketer is Fined,” Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 23, 1934; “500 Soup Plant Strikers Storm Camden City Hall,” Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia, PA), May 2, 1934; Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, Chapter 2.

58 “Says Johnson has Given up to Big Business,” The Citizen-Advertiser (Auburn, NY), Apr. 7, 1934; “Camden Labor Spreads Revolt,” Union Labor Record, (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 6, 1934; Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 54. According to Sidorick: “When

plant. Black and white workers, women and men, marched on city hall. According to an

African-American striker, the workers chanted and sang a mix of traditional union songs and religious hymns such as “I’ll Fly Away,” a song gaining popularity in the Baptist churches, where many Camden African Americans worshipped.59 The inclusion of gospel hymns was likely new to labor protests in Camden. According to Marianne Mueller’s study of the use of spirituals as protest songs, before in the mass migration of African

Americans in the urban north, songs, especially religious songs, were not a significant part of labor protests. Moreover, leaders, through the civil rights movement, complained that African American protesters often sang hymns that did not correspond with the message of the protest, which may explain how “I’ll Fly Away,” a song about bodily death that gives way to everlasting life, came to be associated with the Campbell’s Soup strike. “I’ll Fly Away” endured through the 1960s as a protest song, confounding even

African-American activist ministers. For example Atlanta civil rights leader, Reverend

C.T. Vivian complained when protesters sang the hymn: “Now that didn’t fit at all. In fact it was a direct contradiction to what I was saying. How much different it could have been if they had followed with a movement song that was also religious.”60

the company sought an injunction against the union, a Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reporter described the spectators at the court hearing as ‘five hundred in the courtroom (and 500 others outside), sixty lawyers as spectators, photographers, movie cameramen, representatives of other unions who might be affected by the Court’s ruling

59 Joseph Califf, interview by Robert Korstad, August 26, 1996. This song was written in 1929 and published in 1932 and was a “hit” in the 1930s. For more, see: Paul Harvey, “‘The Color of Skin Was Almost Forgotten’: Biracialism in the Twentieth Century Southern Experience,” in Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, eds Winfred B. Moore, Kyle S. Sinisi, David H. White (Charleston, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 175.

Singing aside, ultimately, the results of the strike were limited. Workers were allowed a “joint committee for the purpose of bargaining” and a seven-percent wage increase. Once workers returned, their support for the CIU swayed under company pressure. When the Labor Board finally held a vote that summer, 1,200 workers voted to join the CIU. 1,000 voted to join the ERP. The most surprising outcome of the strike was that, despite the company’s best efforts to segregate employees, and despite the racial segregation of Camden, blacks and whites spent a month picketing and marching together in harmony.61 Of course, even if the racial hierarchy could be dismissed however briefly among workers, it persisted in Camden’s legal system: the most severe prison sentences went to two black male protesters, James Thompson and Walker Rollins.62

Following the strike, Campbell’s Soup sped up production even more, often giving two employees the work of four. Those who joined the CIU were laid off quickly.

In 1935 Martha Gellhorn speculated that the CIU would be obsolete in six months because all members would either quit or be let go. The CIU president, an “intelligent, cynical, calm” man, who had been laid off, reported that the workers were quickly becoming dispirited: “it takes about three months for a man to get dirty, to stop caring about the way his home looks, to get lazy and demoralized and…unable to work.” The union president shared Gellhorn’s assessment that most of the union members would be

60 Marianne Mueller, “Spirituals as Protest: The Power of Music in Grassroots Organizations in the Civil Rights Movement and Before” M.A. Thesis, Stanford University, 2012, 1-4, 71.

61 Had the strike taken place a few months later, during tomato season, there likely would have also been seasonal Puerto Rican employees.

62 These sentences were for assault and battery on a black strikebreaker, Henry Warner.

unemployed within a few months time.63 With the exception of affiliating with the

American Federation of Labor (AFL), the CIU became virtually inactive.64

“From Kin See to Cain’t See”: The Depression on the Farm

As more people were engulfed in financial crisis, farming became a last resort.

By January 1935 the U.S. farm population had reached its peak, with 31,800,907 laborers employed on farms-- up 1,356,557 from April 1930.65 Most migrants went to New

Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. New Jersey farms became a refuge for Philadelphia and Camden residents that might not have otherwise sought farm work, as well as for migrant laborers, particularly African Americans, from the South.66

During the Depression and War years diverse groups worked together closely in ways they never had before and in conditions they had never considered possible. One camp reported that “professional” African Americans, meaning those who had previously held stable, estimable jobs, including nurses, plumbers, mechanics, railroad engineers, and firemen, were unaccustomed to camp life and feeling hopeless. African Americans were welcomed on many New Jersey farms because they could speak English and most

63 Gelhorn, “Report, Camden, New Jersey, April 25, 1935; Jeffery Cowie. Capital Moves, 29. RCA-Victor took more drastic measures in response to its 1935 strike. To avoid dealing with the newly formed union, the corporation simply moved its home instruments productions, because, as one manager remembered, when the RCA could not fix something, it went somewhere else. In the mid-1930s Camden’s RCA plant manufactured almost one hundred percent of RCAs products. Ten years after the strike, only twenty-five percent of the manufacturing took place in Camden.

64 Sidorick, 57. The CIU became Federal Local 20224.

65 “Farm Population at High Mark,” New York Times (New York, NY), Jun. 17, 1936.

66 Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 307.

had prior farming experience; however they were relegated to the worst jobs in the fields.67

Italians would often work for less pay than African Americans and therefore filled a large quantity of agricultural jobs in New Jersey. Italian immigrant, Joseph Lapolla, owned a sandwich shop in Philadelphia from 1910 until 1935. Lapolla was forced to become a migrant laborer at age fifty-six when “the business… went shot.” Initially, he got a job with the city of Philadelphia, sweeping streets and cleaning, which lasted until

1937. After finding only intermittent work, he decided to come to New Jersey, along with his wife and two of their eight children, in June 1940. On the farm, Lapolla and his family “live[d] like rats,” picking lima beans everyday for two months, beginning at 4am and ending the day at 5:30pm. Lapolla described the housing as not fit for human beings.

The Lapolla family and the thirteen other migrants they worked with were kept awake at night by mosquitoes. The farm lacked even adequate toilet facilities. According to

Lapolla there was “No pit, just a box, and they lay them on the ground and we can't sit, we can't do anything.”

After two months of work, Lapolla’s family of four had made $200 but spent half of it on food. Lapolla explained to the Tolan Committee that the small profit was worth

67 Paul Taylor, “Migratory Farm Labor in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics United States Department of Labor Serial No. R 530 (March 1937); Edith Lowry, Migrants of the Crops: They Starve That We May Eat, (New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missions Education Movement, 1938), 13; Sara Amy Leach and Kimberly R. Sebold, Historic Themes and Resources within the New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail – Southern New Jersey and the Delaware Bay: Cape May, Cumberland, and Salem Counties, (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, 1991), 73.

the effort because that money would buy coal for the winter.68 Carey McWilliams reported in his 1942 study, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the

United States, that farmers falsely advertised earning potential in newspapers:

“Regardless of what has been said in newspapers to the effect that workers can earn $3.00 and $4.00 a day, I know definitely that the average top wage per workers during the five- weeks period July 24- August 26 was about $5.60 a week while the wage for many as 30 per cent was anywhere from $1.00 to 75 cents.”69 Many migrant farmworkers, like

Lapolla, found themselves working from “kin see to cain’t see,” barely making enough money to survive.70

On one farm in Bridgeton, one could find “Half-clothed, half-starved, completely dirty children, poor white and Negro, run about in hopelessly squalid surroundings.” The shacks the migrants lived in were falling apart; many had leaking roofs and broken furniture. The air was permeated with “An acrid odor…the odor which spells no running water, no toilets, not fit habitation for humans.”71 Edith Lowry, the national director of

Interdenominational Protestant work among agricultural migrants, visited southern New

Jersey when she was compiling information for her 1938 pamphlet, Migrants of the

Crops: They Starve That We May Eat.72 She found the conditions appalling:

68 Testimony of Joseph Lapolla, of Philadelphia, Pa. U. S. Congress. House. Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens. Interstate Migration. Hearings (Washington: GPO, 1940-41), 195.

69 McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 178.

70 Lowry, Migrants of the Crops, 25.

71 Granger, “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” 248.

72 Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary. Eds. Carol Hurd Green and Barbara Sicherman, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of

Tumbled-down shacks, barns, and chicken coops—every place observed as a fire

trap—ventilation was poor—no screens are provided flies and mosquitoes

become almost unbearable—no beds or bedding are provided nor bathing

facilities—sanitation is almost nonexistent. Shoes are a rarity and most of the

children and workers go barefoot.”73

Lowry also found that parents were forfeiting their children’s education to ensure financial survival. Some 2,000 children working on New Jersey farms were able to avoid school because they were residents of Pennsylvania; thus, living outside the state’s jurisdiction but not subject to New Jersey’s compulsory school attendance law, as they were non-residents. Throughout the United States, Lowry found numerous migrant camps strategically placed just outside of towns so that education laws could not be enforced.74

In short, agricultural work was a last resort for many people during a hopeless time. People found themselves in living conditions they likely never could have envisioned previously. They worked in impossible conditions for little pay, alongside people they may never have interacted with before the world fell apart. Life was hard.

Employers were unfair. Options were few.

Harvard University Press, 1983). This project was funded by various Christian churches, according to Lowry, “It started in 1920 as a result of a survey that was made by the Inter- Church World Movement, and among various needs in the community that were pointed out, this situation among migratory workers was described, and at this time the Home Mission Agency said that this was an area in which we must do something. And so for 20 years we have been at it,” Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 302.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid; Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 71.

“Let’s See What We Can Get for Fighting!”: Seabrook Farms Strike

The trouble began at Seabrook in April, when Jerry Brown, a black farmhand and

President of the Agricultural and Cannery Workers' Industrial Union (ACWIU), was fired for organizing workers. When other workers walked out in protest, Seabrook Farms white owner C.F. Seabrook, notorious for his icy blue glare and aversion to dirt, was forced to negotiate with Brown.75 Seabrook reportedly told Brown that company had “always been for the colored people, [that Seabrook had] always hired them… right along with the white folks." Seabrook told Brown if he got rid of the union, Seabrook would “fire all the

Dagoes and just keep colored on” when the slack season came, “ [because he would] rather have colored anyhow."76 Brown, apparently willing to sell-out the Italians, agreed.

He and the other workers returned to their jobs.

75 Granger. “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” 248.

76 Ibid.

Men attending the meeting for “Negroes and foreign-born” members of the agricultural workers' union. Bridgeton, New Jersey, 1936 (Corbis)

Brown did not remain the union’s leader for much longer, however. Soon after

Brown’s agreement was made with Seabrook, the Klan began burning crosses on his front yard; he left town immediately. It is not clear from the media coverage if the Klan, or anyone, was aware of Brown’s consent to let Italian workers go when lay-offs were to take place. It does seem possible that at least some Italians were suspicious, because when Brown left an interracial leadership team replaced him: President Clarence Cain, who was white, and Vice President Clifford Whiteas, who was African American. The most significant change was the introduction of radical labor organizers Donald and

Eleanor Henderson. In 1934, Donald Henderson was already something of a cause célèbre. He had been teaching economics at Columbia University in the early-1930s when he was fired for his “radical activities,” a move that inspired protest among many

New York City college students. Following his departure from Columbia, Henderson devoted himself fulltime to labor organizing and the CPUSA. He served as the Acting

Section Organizer of the Communist Party while organizing workers at Seabrook

Farms.77

Both Henderson and Seabrook anticipated a strike that summer and each rallied preemptive support from the community between April and June. Seabrook, an innovative “self-made” man of wealth, played on people’s fear of Communism. He convinced large growers, cannery owners, industrialists, and others in big business that the Hendersons represented the “red menace.” The workers stood behind the Hendersons.

Seabrook laborers and the CPUSA appealed to the sympathy of unemployed workers nearby in an attempt to convince them not to act as strikebreakers or vigilantes should a mass walkout take place. Finally, the CPUSA sent an experienced farm organizer, Leif

Dahl, to organize small area farmers into locals of the United Farmers League.

In June of 1934, just two months after Seabrook’s agreement with Brown,

Seabrook laid off 125 workers, almost all black, and announced a pay-cut for the remaining workers. According to plan, workers walked off the job. This walk-out commenced what Stuart Jamieson has called “the most serious agricultural strike in New

77 Ibid; Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor, 142; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 365-66; Lowell K. Dyson, Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 93.

Jersey history”; Seabrook Farms made headlines in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New

York. 78 Some local white farmers, who the Hendersons could not rally and Dahl could not organize, joined Bridgeton police. Nevertheless, the three hundred strikers effectively prevented non-union workers from coming onto the farm, and kept trucks with deliveries from leaving the farm. A small vigilante group of fewer than thirty, a number smaller than what might have been without Henderson’s preparation, was deputized by the sheriff and began arresting pickets. Throughout the community, the

Klan stepped up its terror campaign with fires, drive-by shootings, and more burning crosses. When black strikers armed themselves as defense against the Klan, the Seabrook strike became even more visible within the surrounding community. 79

Governor of New Jersey Harry Moore, a Democrat, refused to send state troopers to quell the dissent because he would not interfere with the efforts of men and women who were making as little as twelve to eighteen cents an hour. Finally the Republican-led

State Assembly passed a resolution, ordering the Governor to send the troopers; he ignored the mandate for five days. Police eventually used teargas once the picketers attacked them in a “hand-to-hand scuffling”; they made twenty-seven arrests, approximately half were African American. The imprisoned workers prompted the press to cover the poor living conditions of South Jersey farms. Eventually, federal and state mediators came to settle the strike in deal brokered by John A. Moffett, a conciliator for

78 Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, 451. For additional information on this strike, see Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, Chapter XIX; Henry Anderson and Joan Landon, So Shall Ye Reap (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), 38.

79 Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 252.

the U.S. Department of Labor. Seabrook was forced to restore wages and rehire workers. 49 In all, the strike lasted two weeks and cost Seabrook Farms $100,000.80

Jim Mills, a black striker, was ambivalent about whether the workers had won the strike: "Did we win the strike? Brother, I don't know, and that's a fact. I know we didn't lose it. We ain't got nothin' now, maybe, but we didn't have nothin' befo'-so how could we lose?” At the Bridgeton Elks Hall, where local black men socialized, the strike was met with feelings of empowerment, regardless of the outcome. A farm truck driver reflected:

I've been hanging around this town a good while too damned long. I've never seen

a colored man get anything for his work but a beating. He works his head off all

day long, and all he's got is enough to eat on…I say, if we can't get anything for

working, let's see what we can get for fighting. This ain't the only town in God's

country. If we can't make it here, we'll let these pecks have the town. But we'll

make 'em sweat for it first!81

The strike at Seabrook Farms demonstrates how, in a highly racist atmosphere, the

Communist Party played an important role in supporting workers’ rights, but also

African-American equality. While the achievements at Seabrook Farms do not indicate racial harmony beyond the workspace, they do show how the CPUSA was able to rally workers in defense of a common goal.

In the aftermath of the strike, the surrounding community grew more polarized, both racially and ideologically. The union won the strike, even if Henderson wanted more for the workers. He began a campaign to expand the union in South Jersey, and

80 Granger. “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” 248; “Labor Groups Mass Against Vigilantes in Bridgeton Area,” Record (Philadelphia, PA), Aug. 13, 1934; Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, 452.

81 Granger, “The Negro Joins the Picket Line,” 248.

beyond. The union’s opponents highlighted Henderson’s Communist ties and embarked on a counter-movement, which included an attack on free speech. As the union opponents’ tactics became more ferocious, liberals and labor organizations became sympathetic to Henderson and the workers. As a result, when the Trade Union Unity

League which charted Seabrook’s union, was dismantled in 1935, Seabrook workers were welcomed into the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Donald Henderson, now a nationally acclaimed figure, founded the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and

Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), as part of the AFL.82 South Jersey’s black workers became further empowered when Seabrook Farms’ workers and Campbell’s

Soup workers joined the UCAPAWA, which promoted racial equality and inclusion.83

“An Injury to One is an Injury to All”84: UCAPAWA in Southern New Jersey

By 1935, as the economy stabilized, big business began to desert President

Roosevelt. Reluctantly, Roosevelt tailored his campaign for the 1936 presidential election to winning the working class vote.85 Between 1935 and 1938, Congress passed a second wave of New Deal legislation. The “Second New Deal,” differed considerably from the

“First New Deal” in its goal to create long-term policies, based on Keynesian deficit-

82 “United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America,” Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History ed. Eric Arnesen, (New York: Routledge, 2006): 1414. Henderson lost his job at Columbia University in 1933. He then joined the labor movement, organizing agricultural workers, such as those in the 1934 strike at Seabrook Farms, discussed later in this chapter.

83 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 59.

84 This was the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America’s motto.

85 For more on labor and the Democratic part in the 1930s, see: Mike Davis’s “The Barren Marriage of American Labor and the Democratic Party,” Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

spending. A major piece of legislation, and a major concession Roosevelt made to workers, was the National Labor Relations Act, or the Wagner Act, in 1935. The Wagner

Act was an appreciable improvement over the NIRA, actually providing the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with the means to enforce its provisions.

Almost immediately, workers took advantage of their newfound protections.

In 1935 the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO), an idea conceived in

1932 by United Mine Workers of America President John L. Lewis, came to fruition and began organizing industrial workers into unions.86 The CIO was the result of a revolt within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was hesitant to organize semi- skilled workers, focusing instead on highly skilled craft unions.87 Before the formation of the CIO, unskilled and semi-skilled workers were forced to apply for membership within the AFL, but were ignored or treated with hostility by the leadership. Moreover, the AFL had a long tradition of racism, consistently ignoring the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pleas to support black workers.88

Initially, in 1935, the CIO was organized within the AFL, because Lewis, a pragmatist, reasoned that if the AFL did not promote industrial unionism, another labor organization would. In 1938, the AFL finally expelled the CIO, along with its one million members, leading the organization to change its name to the Congress of

Industrial Organizations. The CIO advertised itself as a new kind of union, which welcomed black workers, and began an outreach program to connect with African

86 The organization was initially called the Committee on Industrial Organization, but changed its name in 1936.

87 The CIO’s Left-Led Unions, ed. Steven Rosswurm, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

88 Smith, “1930s: A Turning Point for Labor.”

Americans. This branding was strategic, as racism and its vicious manifestations were stifling the labor movement at this time. The CIO officially opposed lynching and segregation and openly censured all discriminatory practices.

In his study of Chicano workers, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican

American Workers in Twentieth Century America, Zargosas Vargas highlights the symbolic nature of the CIO’s integrationist stance, by demonstrating places where it demurred when white workers showed resistance to equal treatment. Vargas contrasts these unions with the Communist-influenced CIO unions, such as the Mine, Mill, and

Smelter Workers Union, which tended to support equality regardless of white protest.

While John L. Lewis made public displays of anticommunism-- even having suspected-

Communist leaders accosted physically and publically—Communism among both leaders and the rank-and-file became widespread. According to Sharon Smith, the Communist

Party better infiltrated the working-class movement during the Depression than other left- led organization because of its relatively large size and its genuine industrial worker base.89 The CIO’s commitment to ending racism is significant to the history of interracial labor organizing, even if it was predominantly a symbolic gesture. This was a dramatic break with the AFL’s policies and demonstrated that black workers were a crucial part of the workforce. For labor to make strides, it needed African-American support.

In 1937, after being expelled from the AFL, the UCAPAWA became the CIO’s agricultural arm, renamed UCAPAWA-CIO. 90 Founded, with the intention of aiding cannery and agricultural workers, UCAPAWA sought out laborers that other unions

89 Smith, “The 1930s: A Turning Point for Labor.”

90 After 1945, the UCAPAWA is known as the Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers (FTA).

considered too difficult to organize, including oyster shuckers and cemetery diggers.91

Robert Korstad argues that UCAPAWA’s organization of black tobacco workers in

Winston-Salem, North Carolina induced the civil rights movement in that area.92

Michael Honey has demonstrated how the UCAPAWA managed interracial organizing against all odds in Memphis sweatshops.93 In New Jersey, the UCAPAWA organized cannery and agricultural workers.

This task was complicated because even though the Wagner Act supported unions more effectively than the NIRA had, it did not protect all workers equally. Canneries, such as the Campbell’s Soup plant in Camden, were allotted a fourteen-week exemption from the laws and an additional fourteen weeks of limited coverage. New Jersey state legislation further reduced protection of cannery workers, rationalizing that because the workers were responsible for processing perishable goods, they should not be afforded the same protection as other workers. Agricultural workers, on the other hand, were not included in the Wagner Act at all.94

During the 1934 Campbell Soup strike John Tisa, Maria and Benedetto’s son, was a high school student, who worked shifts at Campbell’s Soup with his mother. When the

91 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 59.

92 Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

93 Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

94 To appease Southern Democrats, agricultural and domestic workers, sectors in which most minorities were employed, were included within the purview of the Wagner Act. For more information, see: Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

strike ended, Tisa lost his job at the plant and briefly attended Rutgers University. In

1936 he took a job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and in November of that year, he was sent as a delegate to the AFL national convention in Tampa, FL, where he learned about the struggle of the Republicans in the war against the Fascists in Spain.

John Tisa boarded a French passenger ship headed for Spain in January of 1937 to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was just 22 years old. He fought at the battle of

Jarama and later became the editor of Volunteer for Liberty, the official English-language brigade publication. At the defeat of the Republicans, he remained in Barcelona to help collect documentation on the International Brigades; he was the last of the Lincoln

Battalion volunteers to escape from Spain.95 He continued his documentation efforts in

Paris and then returned to Camden in 1939.96 The brigadiers were widely associated with

Communism and many became targets of the House Committee on Un-American

Activities (HUAC). This sentiment is well captured in Illinois Congressman Fred E.

Busby’s 1948 testimony before HUAC: “Now anybody…knows that the Loyalists in

Spain and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were definitely 100 percent Communist outfits.”97

Upon his return, Tisa renewed the effort to organize workers at the Campbell

Soup plants. Tisa helped organize and win the first union contract for UCAPAWA Local

80. In 1940, Local 80 launched a major campaign for a NLRB representation election.

95 Will Kaufman, The Civil War in American Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 145.

96 “Tisa/ Fowler Collection,” Camden County Historical Society, Camden, NJ.MSS #757, Acc. #98.32.

97 Robert A. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 355.

Donald Henderson assisted the campaign in Camden, as the Camden Campbell Soup plant was “the largest cannery in the world,” and a union victory would be significant.98

Local 80 won by an overwhelming margin. While Local 80 could not abolish the Bedaux system, it did garner wage increases, more vacation time, and improved pensions. Most importantly, Local 80 evolved into a powerful union with a strong shop-steward program that would span the next three decades. Under Tisa’s leadership, racial inequality was not tolerated at the cannery.99

In his thorough analysis of the Campbell Soup Company’s labor practices,

Daniel Sidorick argues cogently that “several of the activists most committed to building unity and ending discrimination were members of the Communist Party.”100 John Tisa was Local 80’s most charismatic leader and most outspoken advocate of labor militancy.

Local 80’s leftist leaders, which also included Italian Americans Joseph Gallo and

Anthony Valentino, were committed to worker solidary and, as a result, promoted racial equality as a standard union practice. Following the 1940 victory, Tisa went to Chicago to help organize another Campbell Soup plant. Eventually, Tisa returned to Camden to help organize unions at the La Palina Factory of the Consolidated Cigar Company, the

Siegel Cigar Company, the Knox Gelatin Company, and tobacco companies in Trenton,

Philadelphia, Charleston, and the Midwest.101 Yet, as one might expect, leadership’s

98 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 64; Camden County, Chamber of Commerce, “Let’s Consider Camden, New Jersey”(Camden, NJ: The Chamber of Commerce, 1946).

99 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 66.

100 Ibid, 101.

101 John Tisa, Recalling the Good Fight: An Autobiography of the Spanish Civil War (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1985); Edward Colimore, “John Tisa; Fought Franco’s Revolt,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Dec. 17, 1991. In 1941,

attitudes were not always mirrored by union members. For example, when the first

African American began working in the pressroom at Campbell Soup in Camden during the 1940s, white workers retaliated by walking out. The union pressured them to return.102

Even as the UCAPAWA-CIO fostered interracial unity in the workplace, which at

Campbell Soup and Seabrook Farms was growing more diverse, it could not influence community practices. During World War II, Seabrook Farms became more interracial.

The federal government contracted Seabrook to produce sixty million pounds of processed vegetables and fruit for C-rations to feed soldiers. Because of the immense manpower necessary to fulfill these demands, manager Jack Seabrook, C.F.’s son, recruited from non-conventional labor pools. Seabrook turned to The War Manpower

Commission (WMC), a federal government agency created in 1942 with the task of managing labor needs in industry and agriculture. The WMC supplied Seabrook Farms with German Prisoners of War and, later Japanese Americans who had been interned in

U.S. camps, with the stipulation that the farm install barbed wired fences around the barracks.

The United States government also captured potential enemies from Canada,

Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Approximately 3,000 Japanese,

German, and Italian residents of Latin America were deported to the United States for internment in the American detention camps—the WMC sent many to Seabrook Farms.

Edith Lowry testified that while conducting research for her 1938 work on the topic, Migrants of the Crops, 1/3 of migrant workers were children, Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 302.

102 Sidorick, 102.

Perhaps the most unique group at Seabrook Farms was Japanese Peruvians, kidnapped by the United States government in an effort to barter with Japan for American prisoners of war. When the war ended, the U.S. government attempted to deport the Japanese

Peruvians, but the Peruvian government would not allow them to return. Some went to

Japan and others won battles to stay in the United States. More than two-thirds of

Seabrook’s population was Japanese; over eight percent were taken from Peru.103

By 1947 Seabrook Farms reached its peak employment of 5,000, it had workers from twenty-five nations, speaking thirty languages and dialects. Seabrook claimed to employ the highest percentage of Japanese Americans in the United States, the largest number of people from one ethnic group to work for any one company at the time.104 In a marked shift from its 1930s policies, Seabrook instituted a strict policy of non- discrimination. Seabrook Farms sponsored English classes, had bilingual supervisors, and printed the company newsletter, Seabrooker, in many languages including English,

Spanish, Japanese, and Estonian.105

Yet, despite the gains made in through interracial labor organizing as well as the ability of both Campbell’s and Seabrook’s diverse workforces to perform in relative harmony during World War II, racial tension continued to exist in the surrounding communities. Renford Glanville, a Jamaican farmhand at Seabrook Farms, remembers

103 Seabrook at War: A Radio Documentary, Narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Written and Produced by Marty Goldensohn and David Steven Cohen. A co-production of WWFM/WWNJ, Trenton and the New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State, 1995; Charles Hampton Harrison, Growing a Global Village: Making History at Seabrook Farms, (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2003).

104 Cheryl Baisden, Seabrook Farms, (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007).

105 Seabrook at War: A Radio Documentary; Harrison, Growing a Global Village: Making History at Seabrook Farms.

that he was “treated nicely” at Seabrook by workers and management alike. However, one evening when he and a group of black workers from Seabrook went to a local diner, they were refused service. In retaliation, they “turned the place upside down”; jumping over the counter, breaking dishes, smashing glasses. The owners called the police and

Jack Seabrook. To the their surprise, Seabrook demanded the owners serve his employees and apologize.106 The diner’s owner complied.

Conclusion

While gains were made in the workplace, interracial solidarity did not seem to extend to residential spaces. Between 1930 and 1945 Camden grew more segregated. In 1930, most neighborhoods had a majority of one racial or ethnic group; however, virtually no blocks were all-black, all-Italian, all-Jewish, or all-anything. This changed with the advent of public housing. In the mid-1930s Camden developed two public housing complexes, Westfield Acres, for whites only, and Branch Village, for blacks only. This was repeated in the 1940s when the Ablett Village and Chelton Terrace projects were built. Puerto Ricans, who were becoming a sizable demographic, were evaluated on a case-by-case basis and placed in housing with occupants most closely matching their skin tone.

Even labor gains were buffeted by shifting attitudes toward the New Deal. In the

Cold War years following World War II, Communism, and anyone who leaned too far left, came under fierce attack. Italian-American, Anthony Valentino, one of Local 80’s leaders in Campbell’s packing house, became the first person in the United States convicted for violating Section 9(h) of the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, which

106 Ibid; Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 6.

required that union leaders sign noncommunist affidavits. Valentino, who was popular among Campbell’s growing black and Puerto Rican populations because he strongly supported the Communist Party’s opposition to racism, was sentenced to five years in federal prison.107 Although Valentino’s conviction was eventually overturned, anticommunism sowed dissension in the union’s ranks and weakened its leadership. John

Tisa was called in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952.

When asked the now-infamous questions “Are you a member of the Communist Party,” and “have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,” Tisa refused to answer on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment. His reputation was irrevocably damaged. Tisa lost his union position and opened up a pet shop.108

The CIO expelled Local 80’s parent union, now the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and

Allied Workers of America. While Local 80 found a new home in the United

Packinghouse Workers (UPWA), a militant and leftist union, its sister organizations in other Campbell facilities settled in different unions. Soon, Campbell workers were organized in five different unions: UPWA, the Teamsters, the Amalgamated Meat

Cutters, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, and the International

Association of Machinists. While these different unions consulted with each other, rivalry undermined effective action allowing the company to play each against the others. The

Communist Party was weakened substantially in the postwar years. While white liberals and middle-class blacks associated with the NAACP began to agitate against poverty and racism, neither the NAACP, or the Migration Division which would minister to the large

107 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 140-141.

108 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 110; United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, “Communist Activities in the Philadelphia Area, Hearings,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print Office, 1952).

influx of Puerto Ricans coming to occupy the same cannery and agricultural jobs, provided the support for poorer minorities in the way the Communist Party had for

African Americans in the 1930s.

The nation’s attitudes toward the New Deal also shifted in this period. Historians largely characterize the war and postwar years as a time when American liberalism began to decline. During the war Congress cut back or eliminated New Deal policies such as the

Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth

Administration, and the National Resources Planning Board. The Farm Security and

Rural Electrification Boards were cut back. The expansion of Social Security was put on hold.”109 In Camden, whites taking advantage of the G.I. Bill and new highways, began a mass exodus to the suburbs.110

Still, economically, the city flourished. Camden’s slogan during the immediate post-war years was: “We Make Everything from Pen Points to Battle Ships”111 As in many industrial centers throughout the North, Camden’s economy thrived during the war years. The New York Shipbuilding Company received twenty-five naval contracts.

South Camden Works reached an all-time employment high of 33,000. Camden Forge received a three-million-dollar grant from the federal government to provide forging for warships. RCA Victor received numerous contracts for the development of radar, sonar,

109 For more on the New Deal during World War II, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995).

110 Federal Housing Administration, Division of Research and Statistics, “Memorandum Report of the Current Housing Situation in Camden, NJ” (Washington, DC, May 15, 1942).

111 Camden’s slogan in the post-war period. Ralph Cirrillo. Letter to Howard Gillette and Kevin Riorden, February 4, 1998.

and proximity fuses.112 The Campbell Soup Company became the world’s leading producer of condensed soup and canned pork and beans. Mac Andrew and Forbes sold ninety percent of the world’s licorice products. Kind and Knox was the only American manufacturer of bone gelatin products. RCA began building televisions. The Cold War also provided economic opportunity for Camden. The New York Shipbuilding Company was contracted to build the formidable aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, and the first nuclear powered cargo ship in the world, the Savannah. RCA developed electronic warfare systems. 113 In years to come, a Camden mayor would fondly remember the

1940s and 1950s as a time when “Camden was the center of everything.”114

112 For more information of Camden’s postwar demographic and material conditions, see Jeffrey Dorwart, Camden County New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community 1626-2000. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001): 144-153.

113 Ibid.

114 Dorwart, 141.

CHAPTER 2

“NOTHING IN COMMON EXCEPT THE SAME PROBLEMS”: POSTWAR SOCIAL ORGANIZING

the old neighborhood falling to the wrecking ball: names in the sidewalk1

In a May 1960 nationally syndicated article, entitled “The Negro in the Deep

North: Puerto Rican Migration Creates New Tensions,” Harry Ashmore, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the chaos surrounding school integration in Little

Rock, Arkansas just three years earlier, argued “In culture and temperament [Puerto

Ricans] are as separate from the Negro community as they are from the white.”2 Ashmore traced black-Puerto Rican relations back to the years immediately following World War

II, when Puerto Ricans began “swarming” the mainland, concluding “Puerto Ricans have nothing in common with Negroes except the same problems of poverty, housing, employment, and general discrimination.”3 In Camden, African Americans and Puerto

Ricans faced these same problems in the 1940s and 1950s, as the city underwent significant demographic and economic shifts.

1 Virgilio, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 58. According to David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal, authors of Our Town: Race Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia, this poem mourned the decay of Camden’s housing, 183.

2 Harry Ashmore, “The Negro in the Deep North: Puerto Rican Migration Creates New Tensions,” Boston Globe (Boston, MA), May 16, 1960, 7.

3 Ibid.

Signs emerged in the 1950s indicating Camden’s wartime prosperity would be abrupt.4 A $1.4 million deficit forced the Philadelphia and Camden Ferry to close in

1952. In 1956, Camden’s major newspaper, the Courier-Post moved to Cherry Hill. The

Walt Whitman Bridge opened in 1957 as part of the Highway 76 development project, allowing prospective shoppers to bypass Camden on the way to Philadelphia. In 1958, the

Stanley and Towers theaters closed, irrevocably damaging the city’s nightlife scene.5

While sections of downtown Camden remained stable and profitable during this time, entire neighborhoods, particularly in North Camden and South Camden, were populated with decaying homes and closing businesses; the 1950 Census reported that over 5,000 homes in Camden were without indoor plumbing. The Courier-Post compared these declining neighborhoods to those inhabited by “Asiatics,” rife with “filth, overcrowding and all the factors that breed disease and crime.”6 In 1951, The Baltimore Afro-

American reported that 70% of South Camden, which was predominantly black and

Puerto Rican, was “slums.”7

The braking economy coincided with a surging minority population. Between

1940 and 1960 Camden’s white population decreased from 104,995 to 89,267 and its nonwhite population increased from 12,541 to 27,892.8 By 1954, no Puerto Rican had a

4 Jeffrey Dorwart, Camden County New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community 1626-2000 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 141-152.

5 Gillette, Camden After the Fall; Dorwart, Camden County, New Jersey.

6 Dorwart, Camden County, New Jersey; Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 70-71.

7 Wilda R. Smith, “Truman Okays Plan for Camden Low-Rent Project,” The Baltimore Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), Dec. 22, 1951.

white-collar job in Camden.9 Five years later, less than 1% of Puerto Ricans owned a business, other than a few grocery stores.10 Both African Americans and Puerto Ricans had a difficult time joining unions.11 By 1960, like cities across the urban North,

Camden’s wartime boom had busted, leaving the city rapidly spiraling into squalor.12

Chapter 2 evaluates social organization in Camden during the years immediately following World War II, when the Camden National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) and the Puerto Rican Migration Division emerged as the major community organizers as these “same problems” intensified. This chapter considers the formation of these organizations amid a mounting minority population in the wake of white flight and anticommunist hysteria to argue that despite a variety of shared problems, the NAACP’s and Migration Division’s promotion of a “politics of respectability” in their respective communities arrested not only interracial cooperation, but any working-class, grassroots organizing at all. Any militancy hatched under the aegis of 1930s left-led labor protest fizzled temporarily, until a mid-1960s resurrection by an improbable collaboration between Christians and Black Power activists.

8 United States. 1961. U.S. Census of Housing, 1960. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.

9 Thomas Bogia, “The Minority Group Worker in Camden County,” A Report Prepared for the New Jersey Department of Education Division Against Discrimination, November 1954, 6.

10 Anthony Vega, Letter to Eulalio Torres, March 7 1960. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ, The Puerto Rican Experience, 1948- 1993, Regional and Field Office Farm Labor Files, Box 857, F8.

11 The Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Reports on Apprenticeship,” January 1964.

12 Gillette, Camden After the Fall.

“No Chip on Its Shoulder”: Camden’s NAACP

The most important African-American organization in Camden in the 1940s and

1950s was the Camden branch of the NAACP, founded initially in 1918 with 42 members as the result of a massive organizing drive throughout the nation. However, it seems the branch was inactive or insignificant until it was reinvigorated in 1941, in the midst of a statewide movement for school integration.13 While fair employment remained an important goal, integrating schools was the driving force behind black organization in the 1940s and 1950s.

Dr. Ulysses S. Wiggins and Walter Gordon were the two main figures responsible for the Camden branch’s 1941 formation. Wiggins, called “Wig” or “Wiggie” by friends, and presumably named for Ulysses S. Grant, whose middle name he also shared, served as the branch’s president.14 Wiggins came to Camden in 1928 to establish a private practice affiliated with Cooper Hospital. His parents, Randall and Hannah, had been born into slavery in Americus, Georgia. Randall became a merchant and a planter, eventually saving enough money to purchase the plantation where he had been enslaved. Ulysses

13 “The Moorfield Storey Drive,” The Crisis 16, no. 2 (June 1918): 74. The Camden branch is not mentioned in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis after 1918 until 1942.

14 W. Montague Cobb, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, April 3, 1956. NAACP 1956- 65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12; Executive Secretary (Walter White), Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, February 8, 1954. NAACP 1940-55, General Office File. The “S.” stands for Simpson in both names; however, Grant’s name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant. In a recommendation letter to West Point, his middle name was mistakenly recorded as Simpson, his mother’s maiden name. See: Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 24.

Wiggins married Alice Turner in 1933 and the couple moved to 1025 South 4th Street, where they were members of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church.15

Walter Gordon, who served as the branch’s treasurer, had been a teacher in

Camden since 1935 and became one of the city’s first black principals in 1939. The same year he and Wiggins restored Camden’s NAACP branch, Gordon took a position as the supervising principal of Camden’s Sumner School.16 Walter’s wife Violet, an elementary school teacher, was also an active member of the NAACP. The Gordon family lived on

Langham Avenue in Parkside and attended the Kaighn Avenue Baptist Church, on the corner of 9th Street and Kaighn Avenue.17 In 2005, when the Gordons’ son, Bruce, became the national NAACP’s President and CEO, he recalled being led “to NAACP meetings since I could walk,” where he learned “first-hand the critical role the NAACP plays in fighting for justice and equality.”18 In 1945, Bruce Gordon became the first

African-American student to attend the all-white Parkside Elementary School.19

15 Rebecca Batts Butler, Profiles of Outstanding Blacks in South Jersey During the Cams, 1960s, and 1970s (Greensboro, NC: Reynold Publishers, 1980); Rebecca Batts Butler, Portraits of Black Role Models in the History of Southern New Jersey (Henderson, NV: Acme Craftsman Publishers, 1985); “Dr. Ulysses S. Wiggins." [obituary] Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey 63, no. 215 (June 1966).

16 Mark Fazlollah, “Walter L. Gordon, Longtime Educator,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia: PA), Jul. 26, 1999; Dana Forde, “Camden Minister Follows Family Tradition,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 15, 2006.; Julian Bond, Speech during the 96th Annual NAACP Convention, Jul. 9, 2005. Transcript available at: http://www.naacp.org/press/entry/transcript-of-julian-bond--39-s-speech-during-96th- annual-convention, Last accessed: August 15, 2010 at 6:30pm.

17 Forde, “Camden Minister Follows Family Tradition,” Courier-Post.

18 “Bruce S. Gordon Selected as NAACP President and CEO,” Jet 8, no. 2 (July 11, 2005): 6.

Legal scholar Davison Douglas argues that New Jersey was among the five "most stubborn" northern states when it came to eliminating segregation, particularly in the southern counties, where Camden is located.20 New Jersey passed legislation in 1844 and

1850 allowing communities the option to segregate schools. Many communities chose segregation and continued to do so even when an 1881 law prohibited it.21 Not only did the 1881 law fail to eradicate segregation, but it also failed to prevent its growth, even when it was unanimously upheld in an 1884 case tried in the New Jersey Supreme

Court.22 In 1940 there were as many segregated schools in New Jersey as there had been at any time since the 1881 law was passed.23

In Camden, which had a large black population in the state with the highest percentage of African Americans in the North, elementary schools were segregated but high schools were integrated. There were no African-American teachers in the high schools.24 Still, school attendance rates for black students remained high, even during the

19 Albert P. Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.; Public Schools; Cities in the North and West, 1963: Camden and Environs,” A Staff Report Submitted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: The Commission, 1964), 16.

20 The other four were: Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.; Davison M. Douglas, "The Limits of Law in Accomplishing Racial Change: School Segregation in the Pre-Brown North" (1997). Faculty Publications. Paper 118, 688.

21 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 4; Douglas, "The Limits of Law in Accomplishing Racial Change: School Segregation in the Pre-Brown North," 687-690.

22 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.; Public Schools; Cities in the North and West, 1963: Camden and Environs,” 6.

23 Douglas, "The Limits of Law in Accomplishing Racial Change,” 721.

24 Davison Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98, 149.

Great Depression, despite insufficient resources. In 1930, black students in Camden attended school at higher rates than native-born white students of immigrant parents.25

In 1925, the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, observed increasing school segregation throughout the North and cited Camden as a particularly alarming example.26

That same year, Lester Granger, who would report on the interracial strikes in Bridgeton nine years later, argued that New Jersey’s public schools were more like schools in the

South than the North:

While most of New Jersey is geographically above the Mason-Dixon line, the

history of its public school education system, especially at the elementary and

junior high school levels, has had more in common with states below than above

the line. In the [state’s] southern counties, both basic policies and prevailing

practices have been essentially similar to those of the Southern states.”27

African-American students, like African-American workers, faced circumstances quite similar to what many of them had tried to escape by migrating North. Camden was very much like the South.

The Camden NAACP, which met regularly at Walter Gordon’s church, focused on increasing its membership in the early 1940s through several fruitful membership drives.28 In March, membership reached 207.29 By that November, the organization

25 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 186. This statistic potentially reflects the job discrimination African Americans faced in Camden. Because they were less likely to find employment, many blacks attended school for longer and more regularly than their white counterparts.

26 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 188, n46.

27 Lester Granger, “Race Relations and the School System,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 3, no.25 (November 1925): 327.

added 1,200 members, exceeding its goal by 200.30 Just a year later, there were 2,748 members.31 The organization had success in placing African Americans into jobs they had been excluded from previously. As more African Americans moved into Camden, the NAACP pressured Mayor George Brunner into opening Camden’s war industry jobs to blacks. In a 1942 speech, Brunner further courted the black vote by stating: “The practice of discrimination against any group of American citizens because of race, creed, or color is a poor example of Americanism, particularly during this national emergency.”32

According to H.L. Parrish, an agent with the Office of Strategic Services, a World

War II-era predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1942 was a banner year for

Camden’s NAACP. Parrish reported the organization’s membership surge, observing:

“The local NAACP has no chip on its shoulder but it has firm leadership which feels that the negro cannot sit back and wait if they ever hope to get ahead.”33 Parrish interviewed

Wiggins about the drive, asking how he was successful. Wiggins outlined three reasons:

First, it was organized by a professional and the job was well done. Second, for

the last two years the NAACP has been actively pressing industry to hire more

28 “Branch News,” The Crisis 50, no. 11(November 1943): 340.

29 “Branch News,” The Crisis 49, no. 3 (March 1942): 101.

30 “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” The Crisis 50, no.1 (January, 1943): 23.

31 “Branch News,” The Crisis 51, no.1 (January 1944): 23.

32 “Branch News,” The Crisis 48, no. 5 (May 1942): 169.

33 H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives).

negro[es]. The war and the manpower shortage have made their efforts fruitful

and the NAACP has risen in the estimation of the negro community. Third, the

negro[es] are beginning to realize that only through organization can the negro

hope to be heard. All social action comes through organized pressure, was the

way one man put it”34 This membership growth, which would continue, was

consistent with the trend of spiking NAACP membership throughout the urban

North.35

While Wiggins was pleased with the labor gains, his main concern was education.

In 1943, his goal was to place teachers in Camden’s high schools.36 The NAACP won a major victory in January 1944 when the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of

Gladys Hedgepeth and Berline Williams, African-American mothers and NAACP members from Trenton, NJ, who wanted their children, Leon and Janet, to attend an all- white junior high school.37 Through its Legal Defense and Educational fund, the NAACP provided legal aid for their case. In his decision, Chief Justice Newton Porter stated, "It is unlawful, for boards of education to exclude children from any public school on the ground that they are of the Negro race." This case would be cited as legal precedent in the

1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In fact, Hedgepeth-Williams v. Board of

34 H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives).

35 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 40.

36 “Branch News,” The Crisis 50, no. 9 (September 1943): 283.

37 Hedgepeth-Williams v. Board of Education of the City of Trenton, NJ (1944).

Education of the City of Trenton, NJ was the NAACP’s first legal success in its fight to integrate elementary and secondary schools.38

An important outcome of the Hedgepeth-Williams decision was the Fair

Employment Practices Act, passed by the New Jersey Legislature in 1945. This legislation forbade racial discrimination in employment. The Department of Education created the Division Against Discrimination (DAD) to administer the act. This was the first state agency established to eliminate racial and ethnic discrimination. The DAD had the authority to investigate complaints of racial discrimination, including segregation in the public schools.39

Despite the Hedgepeth-Williams victory, in 1945 schools remained segregated in

Camden and no black teachers had been hired in the high schools. The national NAACP promised legal support as it had done in Trenton, but the Camden NAACP could not file a case because no black teachers would apply for a job in the high schools, regardless of their qualifications.40 The Camden branch of the NAACP lobbied the school board to desegregate schools, but was told that it was parents’ responsibility to request that their children attend white schools. The Camden branch enlisted ministers, labor groups, and advertised in newspapers in an effort to persuade African-American parents to petition for transfers. Wiggins complained he had “no help from the Board of Education and all

38 “New Jersey: Trenton High School-- Hedgepeth-Williams v. Board of Education of the City of Trenton. 1943. NAACP Papers Box II-B-143 (Library of Congress, Washington, DC).

39 Peter Genovese, “Separate but Average: Segregated South Jersey,” The Star- Ledger (Newark: NJ), Feb. 15, 2008; Douglas, "The Limits of Law in Accomplishing Racial Change,” 722.

40 “What Are the Branches Doing,” The Crisis 52, no. 12 (December 1945): 360.

too little help from the Negro community,” in the fight to desegregate schools.41 Still, the

Camden NAACP’s persuasion campaign eventually paid off. Several hundred black children attended white schools for the first time in the 1946-1947 school year.42

Following World War II, New Jersey, at the state level, had begun to relax its stance on segregation. In September 1947, Oliver Randolph, the author of the state’s anti-lynching law and the only black delegate to New Jersey’s third constitutional convention, secured a 50-18 vote in favor of banning segregation. The New Jersey

Constitution of 1947 outlawed racial discrimination in the public schools and in the state militia. New Jersey became the first state in the nation to make such provisions constitutionally. Additionally, in 1948, New Jersey took the unusual, radical step of protecting black teachers’ jobs through additional legislation, which prohibited the dismissal of any teacher on the basis of race.43 The number of black teachers in the state increased by nearly seventy-five percent between 1943 and 1954.44

However, recalcitrance persisted in Camden. When pushed to apply integration uniformly throughout the city, Leon Neulen, the Superintendent of schools, argued:

“Until the Supreme Court defines the term ‘segregation’ and it is implemented by statute,

[the new constitution] doesn’t mean much.”45 When the school board still refused to fully

41 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 20.

42 Letter from Juanita Dicks to Gloster Current. November 11, 1948, NAACP Papers Box II-B-144, (Library of Congress, Washington, DC); Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 243.

43 Kathleen O’Brien, “Black History Month.”

44 Peter Genovese, “Separate but Average: Segregated South Jersey,” The Star- Ledger (Newark: NJ), Feb. 15, 2008.

integrate schools in 1948, the NAACP filed a suit with the DAD to have funds withheld from all schools in Camden. The threat was successful: the school board voted to establish a “unitary pupil assignment plan.”46 The Camden Board of Education agreed to redistrict the schools immediately, sending students to the schools closest to their homes.

No one protested the new zoning lines that accompanied this change.47

These victories catapulted Ulysses Wiggins into the national spotlight. In

February 1948, Wiggins was elected to the Board of Directors of the NAACP.48 The following July he was invited to speak at the NAACP convention in Los Angeles,

California about the NAACP’s role in securing New Jersey’s new state constitution and desegregation of Camden schools.49 Although Wiggins enjoyed enormous political success, his correspondence with NAACP headquarters office manager, Bobbie Branche, reveals his modesty. For at least five years, she “begged” for a photo of him for the office walls, apparently, to no avail.50

While the civil rights movement is typically recounted vis-à-vis legal victories at the state and national levels, school segregation in New Jersey belies the efficacy of these

45 O’Brien, “Black History Month.”

46 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 245.

47 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 16.

48 NAACP Secretary Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, February 20, 1948, NAACP 1940-55, General Office File

49 Henry Lee Moon, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, June 27, 1949, NAACP 1940-55, General Office File.

50 Bobbie Branche, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, January 13, 1949; Bobbie Branche, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, February 20, 1952; Bobbie Branche, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, April 22, 1952; Bobbie Branche, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, January 29, 1953; Bobbie Branche, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, January 19, 1954. NAACP 1940-55, General Office File.

laws and court decisions. Much like the National Industrial Recovery Act, both the

Hedgepeth-Williams v. Board of Education decision and the 1947 New Jersey State

Constitution did not ensure laws would be practiced. Despite major gains made in the late

1940s in school desegregation, de facto segregation remained in Camden schools because of widespread residential segregation.51 In 1948, a DAD survey revealed forty-three school districts, most in South Jersey, still operated segregated schools. Between 1948 and 1951, the DAD pressured ten more districts to eliminate school segregation.52 Yet, housing segregation continued to grow even worse.

In 1954—the same year he became the first African American to run

(unsuccessfully) for the Camden City Commission--Ulysses Wiggins acted as the plaintiff in an NAACP-supported suit against the Camden Housing Authority, which had deliberately segregated the public housing project, McGuire Gardens in East Camden.

While the NAACP called for a moratorium on applications until the housing became integrated, the New Jersey Superior Court ruled to have the issue settled voluntarily.

Only four African American families were then admitted into McGuire Gardens.53 There was no NAACP protest.

Partially the result of continuing housing segregation, schools in Camden saw increasing segregation in both student and faculty populations between the 1950s and

1963.54 In 1963 six of the seven “Negro schools” from prior to 1948 still existed; four

51 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 15.

52 Genovese, “Separate but Average: Segregated South Jersey.”

53 “Negro Worked on Segregation,” Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, PA), Nov. 11, 1954; Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 72.

remained, essentially, all-black: Powell was 100% African-American; Sumner was 99.8%

African-American; Whittier was 99.1% African-American; Bergan was 82.8% African-

American. The final two schools, Camden Junior and Catto Opportunity, were designated for students with special needs.55 While divided student populations seemingly were caused by residential segregation, critics charged that faculty segregation was the Board of Education’s transgression.56 Apparently, white teachers assigned to black schools typically declined the appointments and waited for an opening at a white school. Black teachers were only assigned to black schools.57 Wiggins’s tactic for addressing housing segregation, not unlike the McGuire Garden’s case, was to publicize the issue in NAACP meeting and the press when possible, and to provide Congressional testimony.

When Wiggins testified before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in

1962 he contended:

Now as to the [de facto] segregation, or whatever you want to call it, that

definitely is here and of course as we know, it’s due to residential patterns. But

according to the [Brown v. Topeka Board of Education] Supreme Court decision

of ’54, it states that segregation for any cause is inherently discriminatory and

54 For example: Broadway School: student population 60.9% black. In 1960 there were 9 white teachers and 9 black teachers, in 1963 there were 2 white teachers and 16 black teachers; Fetters School: student population 91.6% black. In 1954 there were 6 white teachers and 12 black teachers, in 1963 there were 1 white teachers and 14 black teachers; Central School: student population 72.9% black. In 1955 there were all white teachers in 1963 there were all black teachers. Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 24.

55 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 16.

56 Ibid, 24.

57 Ibid, 27.

there’s no such thing as “separate but equal.” Consequently, regardless of the

cause, it would be unconstitutional according to my understanding; and under

those conditions, we will try to correct it by whatever means at our command…

By some means we have to break this form of segregation.58

Wiggins argued that changing the residential patterns of Camden would have “more effect than any acts of the school authorities.”59 Wiggins implored the city to

reexamine and, to the extent possible, redraw the school boundary lines to achieve

integration…Innocent or not, they do perpetuate segregation, and thus there is a

serious legal question whether such boundaries can be judicially permitted to

stand. Negro leaders also assert that Camden City should forcibly assign more

Negro teachers to white schools and vice versa. This would require a policy of

color consciousness.60

The new Superintendent of schools, Anthony Catrambone, was sympathetic to this issue:

Racial segregation is one of the most serious problems faced by the city school

administration, and I would be more than stupid to create my own problem.” 61

Puerto Ricans were not specifically mentioned in this report, which only discussed

“white” versus “non-white.” Walter Gordon’s and Ulysses Wiggins’s responses to this segregation were even-tempered, absent of any vitriol for those in power. Gordon

58 Ulysses S. Wiggins, Testimony, United States Commission on Civil Rights. October 15, 1962.

59 Ibid.

60 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 10.

61 Ibid, 11.

contended that “Everything was started off right and Neulen did one of the best jobs in the state.” Wiggins said, the “Response to the 1948 change was in good faith.”62

During this time Wiggins continued to enjoy professional success. Despite frequent, serious illnesses in the late-1950s and early-1960s, Wiggins remained an active

NAACP member, eventually serving as President of the New Jersey State Conference of

Branches and, in 1963, the Vice Chairman of the NAACP.63 Later that year, the Camden

NAACP branch completed a citywide survey of African-American employment and then successfully placed blacks in several positions not previously available to them— including fourteen white-collar jobs at Campbell Soup. That November, the Camden branch had its most successful drive in its history, reaching its goal of 4,000 total members. This made the branch the largest in New Jersey and the 25th largest in the nation.64

Membership drives, however, are not necessarily indicative of indigenous, grassroots organizing. By the late 1950s Camden’s NAACP middle-class leadership maintained a relatively conservative organization. Like other NAACP chapters, throughout the country, it focused, almost entirely, on fundraising for civil rights efforts that were thought to have the potential to make reforms at the national level. While

62 Ibid, 17.

63 Roy Wilkins, Letter to Members of the Board of Directors, March 28, 1956, NAACP 1956-65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12; Gloster B. Current, Letter to NAACP Board, March 23, 1956, NAACP 1956-65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12; Channing H. Tobias, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, September 12, 1956. NAACP 1956-65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12; John A. Morsell, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, October 27, 1961. NAACP 1956-65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12; Gloster B. Current, Letter to Ulysses Wiggins, October 25, 1961. NAACP 1956-65, General Office File, Part 16 Supplemental, Reel 12.

64 “What the Branches are Doing, “The Crisis 71, no .1 (January 1964): 50.

Camden’s NAACP made important strides in the 1940s through early-1960s period, the organization as a whole was looking to the South, while Camden’s housing problems grew worse. In the years during and after World War II, Puerto Ricans came to share these problems, as they settled in and around the city where they had come to pursue labor opportunities.

“Our Own Puerto Ricans”: Puerto Rican Migration

In 1948, Campbell Soup was recruiting heavily in Moca, Puerto Rico. Amália

Reyes convinced her husband, Julio, to move their family to the United States. They settled in Northwest Camden and sought employment at Campbell Soup. In those days, according to family lore, Campbell’s had a weight requirement and Julio, a slight man, barely passed with a brick in each pocket. Amália and Julio were happy with their new lives and sent word to their family in Puerto Rico. Soon all four of Amália’s sisters persuaded their husbands to move to Camden; although, they would have moved without them. The women in Amália’s family were quite strong-willed.

The final sister to move was Laura Medina, whose husband, Armando, was the most difficult to sway. Armando was ardently pro-independence and an active member of the Nationalist party. He refused to serve in the military during World War II, arguing that the United States had no authority to recruit Puerto Ricans because Puerto Rico was an independent nation. Armando’s entire family passionately opposed Puerto Ricans’ service in the U.S. military. One of Armando’s brothers was blind and needed only to apply for an exemption, but would not. All five Medina brothers served time in prison for refusing service-- some for as many as five years. When their father was chastised about his sons’ disregard for law and order, he responded, “Where tyranny is law, revolution is

order."65 Following the war, Armando was blackballed from employment, partly because of the Nationalist Party’s willingness to embrace violence. Laura, although she shared

Armando’s political views, was a pragmatist. Besides, she argued, the economy was in shambles anyway. In 1954 Laura, Armando, and 1-year-old Gulaberto joined the family in Camden.66

The Reyes and Medina families are two examples of a much larger government- supported migration that took place in the 1940s and 1950s. As southern New Jersey farms contended with mounting labor shortages, employers turned to a new labor source:

Puerto Ricans. In 1943 Willard Kille’s son came home on leave from Puerto Rico, where he was stationed with the Army. The young Kille told his father, a member of the

Gloucester County Board of Agriculture, that he thought New Jersey farmers should use

Puerto Rican labor to help fill the farm labor shortage. Kille agreed and wrote a letter to

Rexford G. Tugwell, the governor of Puerto Rico.

Tugwell had been an agricultural economist at Columbia, where he was labor- organizer Donald Henderson’s boss and travel-companion through the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In 1932, President Roosevelt drafted Tugwell into his “Brain Trust,” where he served as the undersecretary for the United States Department of Agriculture and created the Resettlement Administration. In 1941, he became the last American- appointed Governor of Puerto Rico. Tugwell’s critics preferred to call him “Red Rex.”

In his letter, Kille contended that “our own Puerto Ricans” should be working in

New Jersey labor camps instead of the “slow” and “contentious” Jamaicans, who had

65 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

66 Ibid.

been filling the demand.67 Kille and his son were not the only ones who thought the

United States should employ American citizens instead of foreigners in the war effort.

Senator Dennis Chavez, who became famous during World War II for saying “We are

‘Americans’ when we go to war, and when we return, we are ‘Mexicans,’" was publically outraged when 3,000 workers from Barbados came to Florida in 1943 to work the fields, instead of Puerto Ricans.68

The request to hire Puerto Ricans instead of Jamaicans seems illogical from the perspective of agricultural employers, Kille’s constituents, which suggests a subtext to his letter. As Cindy Hahamovitch explains in her text, No Man's Land: Jamaican

Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Jamaican workers were an ideal labor solution for many farmers because, besides speaking English, they could be deported and, therefore, had little power to contest labor conditions. Jamaican workers tended to serve as competitors into the labor force, forcing non-deportable,

American workers to adhere to the same labor standards, or be replaced. Thus it seems employers would prefer Jamaican labor to Puerto Rican labor.69

Perhaps Kille’s request for Puerto Rican labor was racially driven. As discussed in Chapter 1, Jamaican migrants like Renford Glanville confronted prejudice in the community regularly, even if their interracial relationships at Seabrook Farms were amicable. Perhaps Kille was attempting to mask overt racism in cultural generalizations like “slow” and “contentious.” Still, when we situate the mass migration of Puerto Rican

67 Willard B. Kille, Letter to Rexford G. Tugwell, 27 September 1943, National Archives Box 126.

68 Dennis Chavez, Letter to Paul V. McNutt, June 5, 1943, Record Group 211.

69 Hahamovitch, No Man's Land, 33.

labor into a global, Cold War context, other—potentially concurrent—reasons for hiring

Puerto Ricans instead of Jamaicans emerge.

Historically, Americans did not prefer Puerto Rican labor. The United States had a long history of importing Puerto Rican workers, which resonated poorly in American memory. Prior to World War II at least seven organized Puerto Rican migrations took place; all failed. The government organized three large migrations to Hawaii, Brooklyn, and Arizona between 1919 and 1926. The particularly dismal Arizona migration was brought to the attention of the War Food Administration and the War Manpower

Commission as an example of why importing Puerto Rican laborers was not ideal. The

Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association recruited Puerto Ricans to pick cotton in 1926. In

Puerto Rico, they were shown films depicting comfortable, modern housing and promised they would earn two dollars per day in exchange for eight hours of work.

However, when the workers arrived in Arizona, they endured miserable living conditions, earned far less than promised, and worked sixteen hours per day. The workers reportedly earned 1 and ¼ to 1 and ½ cents per pound of cotton picked. When the men refused to work, Phoenix labor unions and the state welfare department housed and fed them.70

The prevailing issue concerning Puerto Rican labor, as exposed by the press during the Congressional debates in 1944 and argued by Hahamovitch, was that foreign workers could be deported while Puerto Rican laborers could not. Additionally, many farmers preferred English-speaking workers and considered Puerto Ricans lazy and

70 Edwin Maldonado, “Contract Labor and the Origins of Puerto Rican Communities in the United States,”110; B.W. Thorton to Rexford G. Tugwell, April 22, 1944 and Mason Barr to Tugwell, April 28, 1944, Record Group 126; Carmen Teresa Whalen, “Colonialism, Citizenship, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” 21; “Local Labor Men Caring for Porto Ricans,” Arizona Labor Journal 25 (September 1926): 190-93; Clarence Senior, Puerto Rican Emigration, 22.

strange.71 Ralph Astrofsky, the Director of Shelter Care for the New York City

Department of Welfare, summarized the mainland-prejudice of Puerto Ricans in his 1941 testimony before Congress, arguing Puerto Ricans were “clannish” and “odd,” difficult to communicate with because of the language barrier, frequently ill because northern U.S.’s climate was too harsh for them, and had a peculiar tradition of perplexing last-name combinations.72 The crux of the Puerto Rican “problem” was that they were simultaneously American and foreign.

While the decision to import Puerto Rican labor was promoted as patriotic, and certainly many Americans viewed it that way, it was in fact the product of Cold War foreign policy. Following World War II, the Puerto Rican government began a process of economic modernization through a program encompassing industrialization, land reform, and education in an effort to invigorate Puerto Rico's economy. The Industrial Incentives

Act of 1947 formally initiated what was popularly called “Operation Bootstrap.” This state-supported project, which was coupled with agrarian reform aimed at the sugar industry, was supplemented by a system of incentives and tax breaks with the goal of attracting private U.S. capital to Puerto Rico. The U.S. minimum wage was not applied in

Puerto Rico until the 1970s, so labor was less expensive on the island than the mainland.

71 Edwin Maldonado, “Contract Labor and the Origins of Puerto Rican Communities in the United States,” International Migration Review 13, no. 1 (Spring 1979), 110.

72 Ralph Astrofsky, Testimony. Interstate Migration. Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, House of Representatives, Seventy-Sixth Congress, Third Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 63 and H. Res. 491, Resolution to Inquire into the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, to Study, Survey and Investigate the Social and Economic Needs and the Movement of Indigent Persons Across State Lines. (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1940), 201, 210-11.

Moreover, when the Industrial Incentives Act of 1947 was amended in 1948, it granted private firms a ten-year exemption from insular income and property taxes, excise taxes on machinery and raw materials, municipal taxes, and industrial licenses.73

A key component of this process was the permanent emigration of large numbers of the Puerto Rican population. Critics had argued for some time that overpopulation was the root of Puerto Rico's unemployment and poverty. Despite the high economic growth rate and job creation expected from industrialization, policymakers did not believe the

Puerto Rican economy could absorb the displaced agricultural workforce. The continued emigration of workers from Puerto Rico was essential as the island restructured its economy.74 A process of rural-population expulsion developed alongside the cultivation of urban growth. Simultaneously, the Cold War ensured “American” Puerto Ricans favorability with U.S. employers.75 The United States and Puerto Rican governments promoted contract labor programs. Additionally, women of childbearing age were encouraged to leave the island for the U.S.76

73 Carmen Teresa Whalen, “Sweatshops Here and There: The Garment Industry, Latinas, and Labor Migrations,” International Labor and Working-Class History 61 (Spring 2002): 47.

74 Informe Annual, Division De Migracion, Departamento Del Trabajo Y Recursos Humanos. Records of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. The Library and Archives of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York; “An Interview with Joseph Monserrat,” The Rican 3 (Spring 1973): 38–47; Lapp, Michael. “Managing Migration: The Migration Division of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1948–1968,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991; Stinson Fernández, John H. “Hacia una antropología de la emigración planificada: El negociado de Empleo y Migración y el caso de Filadelfia.” Revista de ciencias sociales (Nueva época) 1 (1996): 112–155; Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia.

75 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 66.

Yet this charge of the island’s “overpopulation,” a seemingly genuine concern in the 1920s and 1930s, was more complicated in the postwar period. The postwar discourse of Puerto Rican overpopulation was an extension of a reciprocal U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship, fraught with myriad agendas, which impacted American foreign policy for decades. The overpopulation argument was sustained as solution to the waning popularity of colonialism in the Cold War context. In an effort to shift the source of

Third-World poverty away from the international capitalism or colonialism inflicted on these newly “free” nations by democracy-promoting countries, strategists successfully deployed what would become a familiar Cold War-era argument: overpopulation engendered poverty, which made Third-World nations susceptible to Communism. Thus

“development” became an anti-Communist U.S. policy, which aside from population control, relied on crafting a centralized state, and fostering industrialization and an improved standard of living through U.S. loans and aid.77

Still, Operation Bootstrap, somewhat to the chagrin of Puerto Rican nationalists, did successfully redistribute income. In 1950 there were 203,000 workers employed in agriculture in Puerto Rico; by 1960 the number had decreased to 124,000. During the

76 For more on specific changes in the Puerto Rican economy see: Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 49-92; José Hernández Alvarez, Return Migration to Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Rexford G. Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico. Garden City (New York, NY: Double Day and Company, 1947); Charles W. Kriedler A Study of the Influence of English on the Spanish of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City New Jersey. Ph.D. diss. University of Michigan, 1957, 36

77 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 8, 18-19, 109-141. For more on the politics of population control, globally, see Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008) and M. Catherine Maternowska’s Reproducing Inequities: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti (New Brunswick, NJ: 2006).

same period, manufacturing employment increased from 55,000 to 82,000. In 1950, 35.9 percent of the labor force was engaged in agriculture and generated 24.3 percent of the net income of Puerto Rico. In 1960 the industrial sector employed 15.1 percent of the labor force but generated a proportionally higher share of net income at 21.3 percent.

The collapse of employment in the sugar cane-producing countryside, together with the growth of towns and conditions of rising employment in the U.S. buttressed the massive migration of the 1950s.78

Between 1940 and 1950, New Jersey’s Puerto Rican population increased 519 percent.79 New Jersey’s Puerto Rican net migration index was double New York’s, as it became the most popular destination for Puerto Rican contract workers: between 1952, when the first direct flights began between San Juan and Philadelphia, and 1965, 93,155 contract laborers went to New Jersey, while 27,031 went to New York, and 20,420 went to Pennsylvania.80 Colonias, or Puerto Rican settlements, spread throughout the urban

North as many Puerto Ricans left New York City and islanders joined their families.81 In

1940, New York City was home to eighty-eight percent of Puerto Ricans in the United

78 David F. Ross, The Long Uphill Path: A Historical Study of Puerto Rico's Program of Economic Development, (San Juan: Editorial Edil, 1976), 157.

79 Isham B. Jones, “The Puerto Rican in New Jersey: His Present Status,” Report commissioned by the NJ State Department of Education, Division Against Discrimination (Newark, NJ) July 1955, 8.

80 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 74.

81 Charles W. Kriedler, A Study of the Influence of English on the Spanish of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City New Jersey. Ph.D. diss. University of Michigan, 1957, 38, 42; Vilma Ortiz, “Changes in the Characteristics of Puerto Rican Migrants from 1955 to 1980,” International Migration Review 20, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 612-28.

States; by 1970, only fifty-eight percent of U.S. Puerto Ricans lived in New York City.82

Every Puerto Rican community on the mainland was growing.83

There were several reasons Puerto Ricans ended up in New Jersey, specifically.

New Jersey was an attractive choice because of the vast farmland, as well as the many industrial opportunities. Moreover, New Jersey became home to many Puerto Rican New

Yorkers, due to its proximity to the city, when New York promoted employment elsewhere to disperse Puerto Ricans outside of New York City. Puerto Ricans in the southern U.S. had received such harsh treatment that the federal government stopped recruiting them for employment there. Many Puerto Rican migrants from the South, who had been employed on farms, sought similar opportunities in New Jersey.84

It is difficult to obtain an accurate record of exactly how many Puerto Ricans had settled in Camden by this point because the Census recorded only “white” and

“nonwhite” racial categories. Sociologist Clarence Senior estimated there were 5,000

Puerto Ricans in Camden in 1960, while the New York Times reported there were already

7,000 there in 1953.85 However, other experts, including local church officials who worked directly with burgeoning Puerto Rican communities, believed these numbers

82 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 2.

83 Ashmore, “The Negro in the Deep North: Puerto Rican Migration Creates New Tensions,” 7. Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, “From Aguada to Dover: Puerto Ricans Rebuild Their World in Morris County, New Jersey, 1948-2000,” The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives eds. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vasques- Hernandez. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 107-110; Hernández Alvarez, 3; Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 2.

84 Whalen, “Colonialism, Citizenship, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” 29-32.

85 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 96.

were very low.86 A report produced by the Center for Hispanic Policy, Research, and

Development in Trenton, New Jersey remarked that the number in the 1960 Census

is accepted only by those naïve enough to suppose that census counters actually

climbed all the stairs and visited all the tenements in a densely populated area, or

that a wary and suspicious head of a Puerto Rican household would necessarily be

telling the truth when he gave seven as the number living in his home rather than

the ten which might be closer to fact.”87

Overall, in this period, New Jersey had the second highest population of mainland-Puerto

Ricans; by 1955, Camden was home to more Puerto Ricans than any other city in the state.88

While most Puerto Ricans migrating to southern New Jersey were agriculturally oriented—to an even greater degree than those relocating to other parts of the state, or

New York—in the 1950s and 1960s they tended to move away from the farms to local cities, such as Camden, Vineland, and Salem, after what one report on Puerto Rican

86 Velez, 44.

87 Carlos E. Veguilla and Rev. J.C. Faulkner, S.J., “Report on Puerto Ricans in Jersey City,” Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Trenton, NJ: Department of Community Affairs, Center for Hispanic Policy, Research and Development), January 12, 1970. This research was conducted with the intention of making recommendations to the state government regarding New Jersey Puerto Ricans.

88 J. Hernández Alvarez, The Movement and Settlement of Puerto Rican Migrants Within the United States, 1950-1960. International Migration Review 2, no. 2 (1968): 44- 45; Whalen, “Colonialism, Citizenship, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives eds. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vasques-Hernandez. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 29; “Estimated Size of Puerto Rican Population of U.S. States and Cities, 1950-56,” Migration Division. Department of Labor OGPRUS 62147 F27, 3.

migration called “the purgatorial period” of the farm contract ended.89 For example

Camden resident Paulino Velez recalls:

It was 1950… I came to Camden over here because I quit from the farmer. I quit

the farmer and come to Camden to look for more money and more work… I got

some family who live over here in Camden so I come over here with my family.90

Camden became particularly attractive to Puerto Ricans because of the Campbell Soup

Company, which recruited Puerto Ricans on the island and Camden-area farms.91 Many migrants had visited Camden to sell tomatoes as agricultural workers, or had friends or family who had gone to work in Camden. Other Puerto Rican farmhands supplemented their income at the Campbell Soup Company once the crops had been harvested.92

Campbell’s Puerto Rican laborers lived in the Dexter Building on Market St. until they could afford their own rooms, where six-hundred or seven-hundred men shared one, large

89 Carlos E. Veguilla and Rev. J.C. Faulkner, S.J., “Report on Puerto Ricans in Jersey City,” 3. This research was conducted with the intention of making recommendations to the state government regarding New Jersey Puerto Ricans.; Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, “The Past Informs the Future: A Historical Perspective, 1975-1997,” Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 13.

90 Paulino Velez, interview by Deborah Velez, August 4, 1989. CCHS

91 Kevin Riordan, “Community Honors its Founders: Puerto Rican Families Recall Lure of Jobs,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun, 20, 1992; Jose and Olga Vasquez, interview by Howard Gillette, April 25, 2002; “Hispanics Celebrate Past, Future,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ) Jun. 17, 1994, 4B; Juan Gonzales, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 26, 2010; Whalen, “Colonialism, Citizenship, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” 29; Michael Lapp, “The Migration Division of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1948-1969,” 204-5.

92 Ishmael Garcia-Colón, “Prisons of Hope: A Historical Anthropology of Puerto Rican Farm Labor in the U.S.” Unpublished paper presented at Rutgers University Symposium on Puerto Rican history, May 14, 2010, 30-31; OGPRUS, Activity Report from George Colon to Ralph S. Rosas, August 3, 1966 File 49.

room and slept on cots. Many Puerto Ricans referred to this building as the Campbell

Soup barracks.93

Yet, as the contract labor market was virtually unregulated, Puerto Rican workers encountered abusive and exploitative conditions. Puerto Ricans on the farms and in

Camden confronted what historian Carmen Theresa Whalen has called a “plethora of limited opportunities.”94 For example, Andre Torres, who came to Camden on August 23,

1954, one week after his divorce, worked several low-paying jobs in local restaurants, hotels, and a shopping mall throughout the 1950s and 1960s. According to Torres:

I came to Camden because I knew many people who had come there. About two

weeks later I found a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant... A few months later I

stated working in the salad department as the cold-meat man, making all kinds of

salads, salad dressing and cold-meat platters. Between 1957 and 1960 I worked

as a cook.... Then I was a cook at two other hotels…. Then I worked for about

twelve years at the Hawaiian Cottage…until it burned down…Because it had had

some union troubles, arson was suspected. I collected unemployment for three

months and then worked in a restaurant at the Echelon Mall for three months.

Then it burned down. Arson was also suspected in this fire. So I collected

unemployment again for several months and then got my present job in the

cafeteria at the Bank of New Jersey... When I first came here I rented a room in

South Camden, Porter Street. Very cheap— twenty-five dollars a month. I went

93 Jorge Melendez, quoted by Dan Freedman in “Hispanics—The Minority of the 1980s,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), Sept. 23, 1979.

94 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia.

to night school for about six months in North Camden, at High Point, trying to

improve my English. But I had to quit because it interfered with my job.95

Adjusting to Camden was much more difficult for Puerto Rican migrants who could not speak English and often the source of ridicule. When the Campbell Soup

Company recruited Juan Gonzalez in 1944, he came to Camden knowing no one, and was unable to speak English. He left his wife, Ramona and their five daughters in Puerto

Rico, until he could afford to bring them, one by one, to Camden. When Ramona arrived in 1948, she could barely speak English. Whenever she went to a restaurant, she ordered the same thing: “give me soup, coffee, and doughnut.”96 Wary that the widespread backlash confronting the large numbers of Puerto Rican migrants might hinder Operation

Bootstrap, the government took steps to manage the transition.

“Understanding and Love for All” Camden’s Migration Division

In 1948, the Puerto Rican government created a bureau that would eventually be known as the Migration Division. The Migration Division had its national headquarters in New York City and regional offices in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts,

New Jersey, New York state, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Migration Division served as an official intermediary between Puerto Rican workers and United States employers as the Puerto Rican government formalized and regulated the labor contract process. It also provided employment referral services for workers in the United States. Recruiters registered with the division in order to hire Puerto Rican workers for work on farms and in factories. The contracts stipulated minimum benefits and working conditions.

95 Giles R. Wright. Looking Back: Eleven Life Histories (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1986), 63-65.

96 “Hispanics Celebrate Past, Future,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ) Jun. 17, 1994.

The Camden office of the Migration Division opened in 1950. Camden was chosen to serve the Delaware Valley area because Migration Division officials saw the rate at which the Puerto Rican population was growing there and hoped to encourage

“permanent and growing communities” in Camden.97 The office served Puerto Ricans travelling back and forth between city and farm as well as Puerto Ricans settling permanently in the city. According to Gabriel Coll, a community organizer for Camden branch of the Migration Division:

Basically, we had two programs—one dealt with the enforcement of contract

labor, so actually the Puerto Rican Department of Labor became a Labor

representative and that was the first program, the most important program—to

make sure the workers were protected…The other program was community

organization. Basically because people were staying over here and they were

being abused. And there was not much the government of Puerto Rico could do;

they could do things like write letters or make phone calls so the idea was to

organize the Puerto Ricans.98

Ishmael Garcia-Colón argues that the Migration Division worked as both a civil rights organization and a labor union. It simultaneously, and somewhat contradictorily, fought to protect Puerto Ricans’ rights as U.S. citizens and to integrate them into what

Garcia-Colón calls “ethnic identity politics.”99 According to Gabriel Coll, “The idea—we

97 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 80; Meeting Minutes, Migration Division Staff Meeting, November 10, 1949 (OGPRUS)

98 Garbriel Coll, interview by Deborah Vélez, March 3, 1990. CCHS

99 Ishmael Garcia-Colón, “Prisons of Hope: A Historical Anthropology of Puerto Rican Farm Labor in the U.S.” Unpublished paper presented at Rutgers University Symposium on Puerto Rican history, May 14, 2010, 4.

used to say in those days it took the Italians three generations to be incorporated into the

American mainstream and we were going to do it in two…”100 Coll made a documentary entitled Beyond the Valley, which was a common Migration Division strategy, to raise awareness about Puerto Rican migration and screened the film for various groups, including non-Puerto Ricans. He also gave speeches about the role of the Puerto Rican migrant worker in the United States, the position of women in Puerto Rico, and the effects of Puerto Rican migration to the mainland.101 Migration Division offices provided several programs to help Puerto Ricans become Americanized, including English classes, vocational training, instruction on how to take care of the home or balance a budget and manage family finances.102

Thus, the organization sought both to “Americanize” and protect Puerto Ricans on the mainland. As Lorrin Thomas points out, this invasive, paternalistic presence rallied an odd alliance of Puerto Rican Democratic Party (PPD) members—those believing

Puerto Rico had a right to sovereignty and self-determination—and xenophobic

Americans. Both groups believed the Migration Division was encouraging even more

Puerto Rican migration to the mainland. The organization emphatically denied these allegations.103

100 Garbriel Coll, interviewed by Deborah Vélez, March 3, 1990. CCHS

101 “U. Darby BPW to Hear about Puerto Rico,” newspaper clipping, March 2, 1960, OGPRUS 857-8 F8. For more on Migration Division films, see Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (University of Chicago, 2010), 207.

102 Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island & in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 171- 172.

103 Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen, 170.

The Migration Division swiftly identified the potential for hometown clubs, the most common Puerto Rican associations, which typically comprised people from the same island towns. These self-help groups, which Puerto Ricans used to adjust to life on the mainland, were a means for the Migration Division to access Puerto Ricans. The clubs, which largely focused on recreation or religion, included: Asociación de Padres,

Club Pro-Arte, Organización del Club de Jóvenes Hispanos en Camden, Fraternidad

Boricua, Club Deportivo, Hijos del Encanto, Hijos de San Sebastian, Comite Hispano de

Accion Comunal, Camden Spanish Social Bowling League, Ladies of Fatima,

Associación Hijos de Santa Isabel, Aliansa Ministerial Evangélica, Juvenil Musical Band,

Puerto Rican Ladies Committee, Associación Hijos de Vieques, Spanish Civil Club,

Spanish Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima.104 The Migration Division sent representatives to the social clubs to help create unity in Camden and “bring about understanding and love for all.”105 These associations were important resources for migrants seeking jobs, housing, and community support. The Migration Division was supportive of these organizations because it believed they could help Puerto Ricans assimilate.106

104 “Informe Annual Año Fiscal, 1963-1964,”Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ. The Puerto Rican Experience, 1948-1993. OGPRUS, Administrative (Reel 53), Box 2753, Folder 1, 102-103; Gabriel Coll, Memorandum to Eulalio Torres, January 29, 1960. OGPRUS, 2F; Paul J. Rivers, Letter to Joseph Morales, February 19, 1963., OGPRUS, 2F.

105 Gabriel Coll, Memorandum to Eulalio Torres, February 9, 1960. OGPRUS 2F10; Anthony Vega, Memorandum to Joseph Monserrat, May 9, 1963. OGPRUS, “Out of the Barrio,” 2539 F3; Gabriel Coll, Memorandum to Eulalio Torres, January 29, 1960. OGPRUS, 2F.

106 An internal report stated: “The major objective of the Migration Division is to speed up and smooth out the temporary problems of adjustment which occur when any group migrates to a new environment with a [sic] different customs,” Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 174-175.

In 1958, Camden’s most significant social club was founded by Joseph

Rodriguez, whose family had been in the city since the 1930s. Rodriguez had just become

Camden’s first Puerto Rican attorney and, in 1975, would be sworn in as a U.S. District

Judge. The club was called Club Civico Hispano. Rodriguez recalls Camden’s the growing Puerto Rican community:

When we first started to see the growth of the Hispanic community in the 1940s,

my family was called upon to act as interpreters and problem solvers because we

were “established” in the community and that’s one thing my parents instilled in

me—that I should do what I could to help others in the community, not distance

myself from them—to become committed.107

Rodriguez notes that Puerto Ricans became more active in Camden in the 1950s as they settled and began to form a community:

It was predominantly younger members of the community who became active.

The laborers that came in the 1940s were less likely to join the social clubs that

began to emerge in the late 1950s. But the migrants arriving from Puerto Rico,

and local farms in the 1950s were interested…Maybe Camden was an exception.

We got involved early here and we certainly dominated. At this time, the

community needed a presence in order to get anything done; the politicians

needed to see numbers. So at some gatherings among friends, we decided to form

a social club and incorporate it. We needed a place, name, and a structure to

make it a legitimate, visible organization… It was a group of well-intentioned

107 Joseph H. Rodriguez, interview by Deborah A. Velez, July16, 1989. CCHS

people who wanted to form a group, a “community voice” within the system…

We got involved early here and it, and we, certainly dominated. 108

According to Rodriguez, when politicians learned about the organization, they communicated with its leaders to better reach the Puerto Rican community.109 Club

Civico Hispano operated exactly as the Migration Division had hoped. Joseph Rodriguez was exactly the kind of success story the Migration Division promoted in its internal correspondence and throughout the community. The club mixed veteran Camden Puerto

Ricans with newer migrants, undoubtedly smoothing the assimilation process.

The Puerto Rican “community” in Camden centered on family, friends, work, and church. In his 1957 study of Jersey City Puerto Ricans, Charles W. Kriedler reported that

Puerto Ricans were not “joiners,” meaning they were not politically active and not particularly socially active in any organized fashion. Yet Kriedler found one striking exception: most Puerto Ricans belonged to a church that they attended regularly. 110 As such, the Migration Division also enlisted local churches in organizing the population.

Through his work with the social clubs, Gabriel Coll met with Rosalina Acevedo, one respected community leader. Acevedo worked for the Bureau of Identification and

Records and told Coll she was concerned about a “tremendous rise” in juvenile delinquency among Puerto Rican youth in Camden. The Migration Division contacted the presidents of local Puerto Rican organizations to work out a solution. Acevedo proposed to provide the youth with activities at her church, Camden Methodist Church on

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid.

110 Kriedler, A Study of the Influence of English on the Spanish of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City New Jersey, 46.

100

Berkeley and Broadway Streets. The church, which was open to the entire community, had a skating rink, a theater, Ping-Pong tables, and other recreational activities for children. Puerto Rican youth responded better to invitations from other Boricuas than the pastor of the church, who was not Puerto Rican and did not speak Spanish.111

Camden Methodist Church was mostly abandoned by 1960 because so many white families relocated to the suburbs. The Methodist Church was conscious of the large numbers of Puerto Ricans moving in to Camden while whites moved out, commenting on it in a 1960 report, “The pastors must feel that they are ministering to a passing parade. Despite more than four thousand accessions the total Methodist membership has decreased almost 40%.”112 On Sundays at 2:30p.m. Rev. James Fontain, from Columbia, conducted a service at Camden Methodist in Spanish.

The Migration Division also worked with the Catholic Church, the church most

Puerto Ricans attended, in Puerto Rican community outreach. In response to the growing

Puerto Rican community, Camden diocese bishop Bartholomew Eustace appointed the

Spanish-speaking priest, Roque Longo, to Our Lady of Fatima Church in South Camden in 1953. Our Lady of Fatima had been an Italian-American church, but was becoming increasingly populated by Puerto Rican migrants. Longo remembers the Puerto Rican community at the time “needed everything,” and faced “a lot of discrimination.”113 He

111 Gabriel Coll, Memorandum to Anthony Vega, March 30, 1960. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ, The Puerto Rican Experience, 1948-1993, Regional and Field Office Farm Labor Files, Box 2, F10.

112 Robert L. Wilson, “A Comparison of Methodism in Camden, 1944-1959,” (Philadelphia, PA: Department of Research and Survey, Division of National Missions of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church), 1960, 1,15.

113 Kevin Riordan, “Community Honors its Founders: Puerto Rican Families Recall Lure of Jobs,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun. 20, 1992.

101

was joined by Fr. Leonard Carrieri in 1954, an Italian immigrant, who also spoke

Spanish.114

In many ways, Longo and Carrieri were an extension of the Migration Division’s project to encourage pride among Puerto Ricans. The priests urged Puerto Ricans to finish school and learn English. They also tried to encourage relationships among Puerto

Ricans and African Americans, who were moving into South Camden. Although there is no mention of how successful this endeavor was.115 The benevolent, though seemingly paternalistic, relationship Longo and Carrieri cultivated with their parishioners was typical of clergy members ministering to Puerto Ricans. Catholic priests were encouraged by the Migration Division as well as the Catholic Church to assist Puerto

Rican assimilation and to help Americans understand Puerto Ricans.116

Both the Church and the Migration Division were concerned about Puerto Rican migrants establishing a community. In a 1960 letter to Catholic Priest, Monsignor Joseph

Dougherty, the Migration Division’s Camden Regional Director Anthony Vega cited

“one general conclusion” of Migration Division officials, priests, and sociologists about

Puerto Ricans settling on the mainland:

people exist within a reference group…While earlier groups attempted

to recreate their homelands in the U.S., the Puerto Rican is coming at a later time,

when many institutions are ready for him. It is to be noted that he does not bring

114 “San Juan Bautista Commemorative Mass” Pamphlet, June 6, 2010, courtesy of Juan Gonzales.

115 Fr. Leonard Carrieri, “Report Pointed to City Changes,” Catholic Star Herald, (Camden, NJ), Aug. 21, 1970; Ken Shuttleworth, “‘Walking Saint’ Retires: Camden’s Hispanics Lost a Friend as Priest Retires,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ); Fr. Leonard Carrieri, Letter to Howard Gillette, June 11, 1998.

116 Anthony Vega, “Field Report,” March 31, 1960. OGPRUS 2F10, 1.

102

his priest with him. It is not unique, farther [sic], that the Puerto Rican has found

himself, less and less as time passes by, in a condition of “anomie.”117

Shortly after, the Migration Division established a Bishop’s Committee to oversee work with Puerto Ricans in South Jersey, both on the farms and in the cities, with a priest dedicated full-time to the task.118

A poignant example of Migration Division and Catholic Church collaboration rests in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, a Puerto Rican cultural celebration, mirroring island commemorations of Puerto Rico’s patron saint, John the Baptist, on his feast day.

In the 1950s, cities throughout the urban North hosted Puerto Rican Day parades, which included traditional Puerto Rican foods and music. In 1957 Fr. Leonard Carrieri established the parade in Camden. In other cities the parade was (and is) called the

“Puerto Rican Day Parade,” however Camden has always promoted the Spanish and

Catholic roots of the day, opting for “Parada San Juan Bautista.” It is unclear how this tradition began; although there is record of a debate surrounding the initial celebration.

Carrieri initially called the parade the “Spanish Parade,” because the goal of the celebration was “to show Hispanics to the Americans.” Carrieri did not want the parade to have a religious name because he wanted everyone—meaning non-Catholics and non-

Puerto Ricans, to feel welcome. Carrieri’s reasoning is in line with promoting Puerto

Rican assimilation and positive community relations.

117 Anthony Vega, Memorandum to Eulalio Torres, July 8, 1960; Anthony Vega, Letter to Monsignor Joseph Dougherty, July 7, 1960.

118 Ibid.

103

The Parada San Juan was sponsored and promoted by both the Church and the

Migration Division, who shared similar goals.119 According to the official history of the

Parada San Juan Bautista, Inc.:

In 1957, a group of parishioners from Our Lady of Mount Carmel/Fatima Church

marched under the leadership of its founder, Father Leonardo Carrieri. These

parishioners gave witness to their and Puerto Rican heritage, culture and

traditions, thus forming the Parada San Juan Bautista, Inc. also known as St. John

the Baptist Parade, Inc. It epitomized the aspirations of a community in search of

recognition and equal opportunities. One of the main objectives of the first

parade was to present a positive image of the Puerto Rican community.120

This “positive image” was further developed through partnerships the Parada San Juan

Bautisa forged through the years with organizations it boasted as “respectable,” such as such as the Latin American Economic Development Association, Camden County

Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the Hispanic Family Center of Southern New

Jersey. 121

The Parada was successful in helping to forge relationships among Puerto Ricans in Camden and in promoting Puerto Rican respectability in the community. For example,

Ramona Gonzales, who in 1957 was speaking English very well, was deeply involved with the Our Lady of Fatima Church and planning the parade each year. Gonzales had an enormous impact on Camden through her work with the church and in organizing the

119 Fr. Leonard Carrieri, Letter to Howard Gillette, June 11, 1998. CCHS.

120 “Parada San Juan Bautista,” “History,” http://www.sjbp.org/history.html accessed: January 18, 2013.

121 Ibid.

104

month-long celebration that the Parada San Juan Bautista eventually became. When she died in 1997, the city renamed Division Street, Ramona Gonzalez Boulevard. 122

“Politics of Respectability”: The Limitations of the NAACP and Migration Division in Working-Class Social Organizing

In 1957 Carmen Martinez moved from New York, after a brief stay with Ramona and Juan Gonzales, to 350 Sycamore Street. Her family was the first Puerto Rican household on the block in the predominantly Italian Bergen Square neighborhood. The stores in her neighborhood posted signs, which read “No dogs or Puerto Ricans allowed.”

Her neighbors referred to her family as “gypsies.” When she hung her clothes out to dry, the neighbors burned their trash. Her children were not allowed into other children’s homes and were teased at school. At a town meeting Martinez attended, someone asked if blacks were moving in to people’s neighborhoods, another person replied “no, but

Puerto Ricans are, and they’re worse.” When the woman realized Martinez was Puerto

Rican, she apologized for her comment.123

This anecdote raises several important questions about postwar social organizing in Camden. First, where did Puerto Ricans fit within Camden’s racial hierarchy?

Presumably, considering her apology, the woman at the town meeting thought Martinez was “white.” Did this ability to “pass” impact Martinez’s social position in Camden?

Did Puerto Ricans try to associate themselves with whiteness? Did everyone think

Puerto Ricans were “worse” than African Americans; if so, in what ways? Second, if both

African Americans and Puerto Ricans were shunned by the white community, in addition to the myriad other fronts of discrimination they encountered, why did they not join

122 Juan Gonzalez, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 2, 2010; Juan Gonzales, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 26, 2010.

123 Carmen L. Martinez, interview by Howard Gillette, March 9, 1998.

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together in protest? Finally, in what ways did the Migration Division fail Martinez?

Considering her attendance at a town meeting, it is likely she was attempting to become a part of the community, to “assimilate” as Migration Division officials were so fond of saying. If neither she, nor her children, could befriend non-Puerto Rican Camden residents, the Migration Division’s project had failed. An extension of this question is, given the meeting participant’s concern about African Americans infiltrating white neighborhoods, how had the NAACP failed blacks?

Camden’s racial hierarchy is difficult to assess because, aside from one person’s comment that Puerto Ricans were “worse,” there is not much concrete evidence. It is apparent that both blacks and Puerto Ricans faced challenges finding affordable housing or moving into previously all-white neighborhoods. Both groups faced discrimination in employment, most notably in access to white-collar positions and, in the 1960s, joining labor unions. In terms of how Puerto Ricans attempted to position themselves, some evidence suggests they were wary of being associated with being “black,” as many confronted the American racial binary for the first time. That no Puerto Rican social club used the term “Puerto Rican,” despite the common use of Puertorriqueño, could be read as a rejection of blackness. It was typical of Puerto Rican social clubs in the 1950s to claim “Hispanic” rather than “Puerto Rican” because it was more closely associated with immigrants from Spain than people from Latin America; thus more closely associated with “whiteness.”124

124 Ande Diaz and Sonia S. Lee, “‘I Was the One Percenter’: Many Diaz and the Beginnings of a Black-Puerto Rican Coalition,” Journal of American Ethnic History. 26, no. 3 (Spring, 2007): 52-80.

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Outside of Camden, there is more evidence of interracial tension. Articles in the widely read Puerto Rican newspaper La Prensa and the NAACP’s publication the Crisis hint at Puerto Rican anxiety about being identified as “black.” Beginning in the 1930s letters printed in La Prensa, Puerto Ricans responded to mainstream depictions of them as dark-skinned, or of African descent. Historian Lorrin Thomas cites as a typical example of this rhetoric, a Puerto Rican physician’s response, in 1934, to widely circulated photographs associated with an article about Puerto Rico in the Literary

Digest: “the publication of such photographs in this country…has led the majority of

Americans to believe that our island is populated entirely by Negros.”125

In the 1950s, several books, articles, and studies emerged in the postwar period considering how Puerto Ricans engaged blackness.126 The Crisis sympathetically reviewed many of these books. In an article entitled, “The Puerto Rican Migrants,” published in The Crisis in 1959, Irene Diggs uses Dan Wakefield’s book Island in the

City: The World of Spanish Harlem to discuss how the darkest skinned Puerto Ricans were often reluctant to learn English because they did not want to be mistaken for

African Americans, who were the “lowest on the scale in American life.”127 One expert noted that: migration transforms the darker Puerto Rican into an American Negro—even

125 Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen, 64.

126 Dan Wakefield, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959); Elena Padilla, Up From Puerto Rico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Isham B. Jones, “The Puerto Rican in New Jersey: His Present Status,” Report commissioned by the NJ State Department of Education, Division Against Discrimination (Newark, July 1955), 43; Charles Abrams, “How to Remedy Our Puerto Rican Problem,” Commentary (February 1955): 122; “Festival Puertorriqueño,” The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ, The Puerto Rican Experience, 1948-1993, Regional and Field Office Farm Labor Files, Box 858, F12. 127 Irene Diggs, “Puerto Rican Migrants,” The Crisis 66, no.7 (August-September 1959): 449.

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among his own lighter skinned countrymen, who soon learn the difference in color means difference in status. The colored migrants have fewer opportunities and less incentive to become part of the mainland culture. Their only chance is to look and act conspicuously different from the native Negro.128

Another article published in The Crisis earlier in 1959, reviewing Elena Padilla’s,

Up From Puerto Rico, argues Puerto Ricans’ identification with whiteness was a conscious choice: “Puerto Ricans are aware of their Negro ancestry as this popular saying attests: ‘If he’s not Negro, he has a tinge of Negro blood’—‘El que no tiene dinga, tiene mandinga.’ Or ‘You may be white, but what kind of white?’ ‘Blanco de qué?’”129 In his

1957 study of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City, doctoral student Charles W. Kriedler found a similar situation, claiming: “the Puerto Rican either feels inferior because he is dark- skinned or feels superior because he is light.”130 Harry Ashmore observed how this tension between the African Americans and Puerto Ricans manifested itself in inter- group relations: “[Puerto Ricans] are often still so regarded by many whites who tend to think of them as somewhat eccentric Negros… [even though] probably less than 30 percent of them are dark enough to pass unnoticed in a Negro bar.” 131 Ashmore argued that blacks were particularly resentful of light-skinned Puerto Ricans’ upward mobility, quoting an African-American reporter from Harlem:

128 Isham B. Jones, “The Puerto Rican in New Jersey: His Present Status,” 43; Abrams, “How to Remedy Our Puerto Rican Problem,” 122; “Festival Puertorriqueño.”

129 J.W.I., “Book Reviews,” The Crisis 66, no. 3 (March 1959): 182.

130 Kriedler, A Study of the Influence of English on the Spanish of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City New Jersey, 33.

131 Ashmore, “The Negro in the Deep North: Puerto Rican Migration Creates New Tensions,” 7.

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How do you expect me to feel?...If I am arrested I go on police records as a Negro

or a nonwhite. A Puerto Rican as black as I am is listed as white. And don’t

think it doesn’t make a difference—at least as long as they’re not looking at you.

Ashmore deduced, “The Puerto Rican is still below the Negro in the social

pecking order of newcomers, and in political influence. But he might not be there

that much longer to peck at.132

Still, these accounts are almost entirely New York City-based. Perhaps it is difficult to find a model for African American –Puerto Rican relations in Camden because the studies that exist are by and large focused on major cities like Chicago and, especially, New York. Most Camden Puerto Ricans would have spent time working closely with African Americans on nearby farms before they settled in Camden.

Moreover, unlike large cities like New York or Chicago, Camden Puerto Ricans typically occupied the same neighborhoods as African Americans, never developing a separate colonia within the city. While proximity does not guarantee friendship, if Camden

African Americans and Puerto Ricans strongly disliked one another, one might expect to find evidence in the local paper of interracial violence or editorial commentary. Neither the NAACP or Migration Division records reveal any such animosity either.

Why did these groups not come together, then? Several scholars of interracial social protest have considered the same question. In his study of interracial labor protest in Hawaii, Moon-kie Jung finds that workers failed to organize in class-based protest for decades because they did not believe their interests were common across racial lines. In

Hawaii, Japanese, Portuguese, and Filipino workers had varying access to housing, jobs,

132 Ibid.

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and pay, based on their race. The Portuguese workers in this story are potentially comparable with mainland Puerto Ricans, because they hoped to be identified as white and distanced themselves from the other workers. Jung argues that when interracial cooperation finally happened in Hawaii in the 1940s, it was not because workers shed their racial identities, but because they were able to attach new meanings to these identities. As mentioned, in Camden, there was no appreciable difference in each group’s access to housing, jobs, or pay—both groups were similarly denied. Perhaps Puerto

Ricans’ belief that they could access whiteness impacted their perception of blacks but, again, there is no clear evidence of this.133

Mark Brilliant, in his study of California civil rights activists, similarly finds that different racial groups faced different forms of discrimination and, therefore, formulated various, intraracial responses. In California, these assorted “movement streams” never coalesced.134 To some extent this was also the case in Camden in the 1940s and 1950s.

Migration Division records reveal several social issues Puerto Ricans faced that African

Americans did not, especially language and cultural differences. Still, the number of problems African Americans and Puerto Ricans had in common far outweighed those they did not share.

While Puerto Ricans were potentially holding out for whiteness and facing some separate social issues, these factors do not adequately explain the absence of interracial organizing. It is most likely that the reasons Camden’s African Americans and Puerto

Ricans did not join together in this period, in a working-class revolt, are rooted in

Camden’s particular circumstances. An important point for consideration is that in

133 Jung, Reworking Race.

134 Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed.

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Camden, in the 1950s, there was no working-class organizing happening at all, even separately. In the 1950s the NAACP and the Migration Division were firmly entrenched, nationally supported organizations that dominated social justice politics in Camden. The reason working-class, grassroots organizing did not happen, intra or interracially, is the same reason the NAACP and Migration Division failed African Americans and Puerto

Ricans: through promoting a distinctly middle-class “politics of respectability,” in a community that was predominantly working-class.

By the mid-1960s, Camden’s NAACP had only had one leader. When Ulysses

Wiggins died in April 1966, he had been president of the Camden NAACP for twenty- five years, president of the NJ State Conference of branches for six years, and of the national NAACP board of directors for many years, where served as vice-chairman.135 In

Camden, Wiggins was undoubtedly the best known and most well respected community leader of his time. A 1963 report on public schools in the North and West, commissioned by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, found that Wiggins was “revered by the community” and had “ been at the forefront of every local battle against racial discrimination” since 1941: “Although not infallible, whatever errors he makes are due to his militant position against every kind of segregation.” 136

However, Wiggins’s passing was both literal and symbolic. Wiggins represented the NAACP’s comparatively conservative, predominately middle-class vision. As H.

Viscount Nelson has noted, as early as the 1930s, Philadelphia NAACP correspondence revealed an organizational goal to “make the Negro middle class socially free from the

135 “Camden School Renamed for U.S. Wiggins,” The Crisis 76, no. 10 (1969): 419-420.

136 Blaustein, “Civil Rights U.S.A.,” 10.

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disrepute of the black masses.”137 Similarly, in 1943, just two years after Wiggins and

Walter Gordon revivified the Camden’s NAACP chapter, Office of Strategic Services agent H.L. Parrish noted a divide between the NAACP and the community in Camden.

Parrish reported Camden’s citizens were “an amorphous mass without much civic pride and with little or no effective progressive leadership.”138 The Camden NAACP’s unwillingness to develop more radical tactics is consistent NAACP branches throughout the urban North at this time. As Thomas Sugrue argues

By the early 1950s the NAACP had lost much of its activist edge in the North.

Many northern branches became “tax bases” for the NAACP’s southern litigation

campaign. The purge of leftists and the shift to litigation support meant that in

many cities, once militant NAACP chapters became havens of middle-class

respectability whose members put most of their energy into fund-raising.139

From its inception, Camden’s NAACP had been a predominantly middle-class organization, with doctors, teachers, clergy, and other professionals serving as both leadership and rank-and-file. As Camden’s class composition came to include a larger percentage of poor and working-class, the NAACP became less credible with the community. 140 By the mid-1960s, Wiggins exposed his growing discontinuity with the community when he claimed the 1964 Rochester, NY riot was “started by a drunk”’ and

137 H. Viscount Nelson, “The Philadelphia NAACP: Race Versus Class Consciousness During the Thirties,” Journal of Black Studies 5, no. 3 (March 1975): 255.

138 H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives).

139 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 107.

140 Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43.”

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that the 1964 “Philadelphia riot did not involve civil rights.” Wiggins argued,

“Hoodlums and lawbreakers should be caught and punished.”141

Similarly, Laura Briggs situates the Migration Division among a group of Puerto

Rican institutions, which were located in New York but not in Camden, which focused on promoting a “politics of respectability”; that is, advertising Puerto Rican migrants as respectable and hardworking throughout the community. Meanwhile, the Migration

Division actively encouraged Puerto Ricans to avoid any behavior—drinking alcohol, fighting, not bathing, not working, et cetera—that might reflect badly on the entire group.142

Migration Division planners and organizers hoped aiding Puerto Ricans adjustment to the mainland would lead to upward mobility. Director of the Migration

Division, Clarence Senior took particular pride that “a group of Puerto Rican second generation young adults composed of college graduates, professionals and people of many other walks of life” in New Jersey.143 Senior’s successor Joseph Monserrat defined the organization’s goal as helping Puerto Ricans “integrate” through “the most rapid adjustment possible.”144

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Migration Division continued to pursue its own agenda, which grew less and less in line with the issues mainland Puerto Ricans faced. As mainland Puerto Ricans developed political agendas unique from the Commonwealth, they became more skeptical of the Migration Division’s capacity to serve them. As

141 “What the Branches are Doing,” The Crisis 66, no. 10 (1964): 687.

142 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 172.

143 Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 175.

144 Ibid.

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anthropologist Jorge Duany argues, the Migration Division was increasingly perceived as a paternalistic agent of the Puerto Rican government; its “loss of hegemony was largely due to the incapacity of the nationalist discourse adopted by the Puerto Rican government to capture the cultural identity of the diaspora.”145

As Puerto Ricans began to develop their own communities on the mainland, they became resentful of the Migration Division’s intrusive role. For example, in New York, the Migration Division office recruited Puerto Ricans from the island to negotiate disagreements between New York Puerto Ricans and city officials. Yet, before the mid-

1960s, there were no significant mainland-Puerto Rican grassroots organizations, so the

Migration Division retained its power. Eventually, the Migration Division was shut out of community organizing and focused its efforts on promoting Puerto Rican culture.

Still the Division’s rhetoric was not without paternalism: “The Migration Division has considered it necessary to promote activities of a cultural character to help Puerto Ricans adapt to [new] sociocultural circumstances, unknown to many, and feel proud of their cultural heritage, at the same time that they contribute to the development of American culture.”146

As Camden entered the 1960s, its material situation continued to worsen and

Puerto Ricans and African Americans were disproportionately affected by the slowing

145 Jorge Duany, “Following Migrant Citizens: Puerto Rico’s Public Policies Toward its Diasporic Communities in the United States, 1947-1993,” A Paper Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 7-9, 2004, 3, 10; Michael Lapp, "Managing Migration: The Migration Division of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1948-1968,"Ph.D. diss. The Johns Hopkins University, 1991; Judith F. Herbstein, "Rituals and Politics of the Puerto Rican "Community" in New York City," Ph.D. diss. City University of New York, 1978.

146 Duany, “Following Migrant Citizens: Puerto Rico’s Public Policies Toward its Diasporic Communities in the United States, 1947-1993,” 3.

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economy and city planners poor management of urban renewal projects. The Migration

Division and the NAACP were less relevant than ever. Camden’s minorities lacked what they needed most, indigenous leadership.

Conclusion: “Save Our City”

When Democrat Mayor George Brunner, who had been in office since 1936, decided to retire in 1959, Alfred Pierce ran a “Save Our City” campaign. Pierce, a Democrat and

World War II veteran, won the election by pledging to revitalize businesses and fight crime, while his “Home Rule for Progress” opponent touted Camden’s wartime achievements.

Pierce also won the next election and took on the additional role as Director of Public

Safety.

Pierce soon found himself in an unfavorable position in many of the ethnic enclaves, where he had cracked down on gambling--a major source of income for the city since the

Depression era. The Mayor further alienated citizens when he took to wearing a gun everywhere he went, insisting it was in the interest of the public’s safety. To ameliorate this situation, Pierce assembled a more inclusive ticket for his second mayoral campaign, adding an African American, Elijah Perry and a Puerto Rican, Mario Rodriguez, as candidates for city council. The strategy worked; Pierce was elected, yet again.147

In 1961 Pierce proposed a complex plan, like many period-urban renewal projects, that required razing slums.148 Under this umbrella, he hoped to build a massive,

280 acre “City within a City” in North Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood.

147 For more on Pierce’s campaigns, see Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 66-68.

148 For more on urban renewal projects, see: Thomas J. Sugrue “Crabgrass- Roots Politics; Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940- 1964”; Thomas J. Sugrue The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; Thomas J. Sugrue Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

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Additionally, Pierce devised a complex highway system, which one architect acerbically compared to “an octopus eating spaghetti.”149 Because the proposed highway system would further alienate Camden ghettos, another architect deemed the plan “the legalized rape of a city.”150 To champion the projects, Pierce reinvigorated a cadre of industry and business members, called the Greater Camden Movement, which was devised initially in the 19th century by the Anglo-Protestant establishment in response to the changing cultural and religious flavor of the city ushered in by industrialization.151

Pierce’s plan coincided with urban renewal underway in South Camden’s

Centerville and Liberty Park neighborhoods. During the years 1960-1968, the

Centerville-Liberty Park Renewal Project cleared sixty-six acres of slums in the

Centerville and Liberty Park neighborhoods in South Camden, displacing over one thousand African Americans and Puerto Ricans. In 1958 and 1959 black and Puerto

Rican leaders supported these projects, and Pierce’s mayoral campaign, because they were told it would make way for homes and businesses. The city promised residents five hundred town houses, at least three shopping centers, and a park on the cleared land.152

This promise, like many more to come, remained unfulfilled.

149 Barry Rosenberg, “Fasten Your Seatbelts: You Are Now Entering Camden,” Philadelphia Magazine, October, 1968, 75.

150 Ibid, 132.

151 Dorwart, 7-8.

152 Donald Griesmann testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 301; “Centerville Area in Need of Redevelopment Study,” Division of Planning, Department of Development and Planning, Hopeworks, Inc. (Camden, NJ), 2003.

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CHAPTER 3

“TOO MUCH SINGING”: CHRISTIANITY AND THE LIMITATIONS OF NONVIOLENCE IN THE GHETTO

not a breath of air in the crowded cathedral: the sermon on Hell 1

The air was thick that June night in 1963 when Malcolm X came to Camden

Convention Hall. The audience of 1000, which included boxing star Cassius Clay, went

“bezerk,” when Malcolm began with the declaration, “I understand there are white people in here, but I can’t see them!”2 The spectators sat, mesmerized, for the next ninety minutes as Malcolm lashed out at the NAACP, the Supreme Court, the government, and

Christianity.3 Those who could not get a seat listened to the loudspeakers outside, which reverberated for blocks as Malcolm blasted the crowd for its complacency:

Anytime you’re living in the 20th century walking around singing “We Shall

Overcome,” the government has failed you. This is part of what’s wrong with

you; you do too much singing! Today it is time to stop singing and start

swinging! 4

1 Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 58.

2 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

3 Ibid, United States Government Memorandum United States Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Newark, NJ July 17, 1963; “Separation of Races Urged by Malcolm X,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), July 1, 1963, 17.

4 Malcolm X, Audio Clip, (Camden, NJ June 30, 1963), taped by James De Francesco, Hog Penny Studios, Ship Bottom, NJ.; Donna Weaver, “Shipbottom Man Covered a Malcolm X Speech in 1963,” The Press of Atlantic City (Atlantic City, NJ), February 26, 2011.

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That evening Malcolm X focused on three major themes: the separation of the races; the inevitability of a violent revolution; and Christianity’s inefficacy as an institutional or philosophical platform for either.

In charting shifting community organization during the classical phase of the civil rights movement, this chapter considers how Christianity did, in fact, become an improbable facilitator of Malcolm’s message in Camden. In this period, while the ghetto emerged as a conflicted site of revolutionary activity and material demolition, incipient interracial cooperation between African Americans and white clergy developed by virtue of a common language about poverty, which simultaneously politicized Puerto Ricans.

Chapter 3 situates the rise of ecumenical Protestant leadership in Camden within substantial ideological transitions in the city’s growing minority population. This chapter considers how, while Camden activists lamented the lack of community involvement in social protest during the first half of the 1960s, these years were significant as tenuous relationships, galvanized by the racially ambiguous War on Poverty, formed between community leaders and religious organizations.

Christianity and Community Activism

In the months leading up to the Malcolm X’s visit, Brother George X of

Muhammad’s Mosque #20 often made the short walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church to visit with Reverend Donald Griesmann. George would bring his Koran, protected by a black cover, to discuss the problems he and Griesmann shared in South Camden, where they both preached. As he planned Malcolm X’s visit, George, an African American, petitioned Griesmann, who was white, for his support. Griesmann, already engaged in the affairs of the black and Puerto Rican community, backed the rally and was one of the

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few whites in attendance.5 While Malcolm’s sermon took the crowd through the ups and downs of the black community and blamed the Christian churches for being unable to achieve social justice, the circumstances surrounding the rally belied a growing separation between rhetoric and practice that would punctuate the next decade of activism in Camden.

Although Brother George X was responsible for Malcolm’s visit, he fades from the historical record after the mid-1960s.6 Perhaps this is because, while Malcolm’s visit resonated with the community, it did not produce any sustained indigenous organization.

However, Donald Griesmann, who would spend much of the 1960s and 1970s cultivating community activism, viewed Malcolm X’s visit as “one of the sparks” that led to Camden citizens’ activism: “It was a great, great, great beginning unifying people…that produced some sparks that began to fly in Camden.”7

The mid-1960s witnessed a shifting tide toward radicalism in Camden consistent with activism throughout the urban North. Peniel Joseph points to several key events that coalesced into a perceptible change in the attitudes of inner-city minorities by 1966:

First, the August 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles had come to signify

the end of the civil rights era, punctuated by Martin Luther King being heckled by

inner-city residents immune to his eloquent pleas for nonviolence. Second, King's

efforts in Chicago, where his advocacy of open housing and slum clearance produced

limited results, were interpreted as a harbinger of both the coming wave of black

5 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

6 United States Government Memorandum United States Department of Justice.. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Newark, NJ July 17, 1963; Autobiography of Malcolm X, 272.

7 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

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militancy and the purported shift to the north of the civil rights struggle. Finally,

Stokely Carmichael's election as SNCC chairman, barely a month before his signature

moment during the Meredith march, came to be regarded as the unofficial prelude to

black power's national rise. These three events have come to constitute the genesis of

the black power era.8

Michael Friedland also highlights 1965 as an important turning point for Christians, especially white Christians, involved with the civil rights movement, calling it a

“watershed year,” almost as “tragic as 1968.”9 Friedland points to Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam in July followed by the Watts riots a month later as the moment when the “liberal comity” the movement was built on began to fade. Some liberal whites began to argue blacks were becoming too aggressive and financial contributions to civil rights organizations grew smaller and less frequent. When white suburban mobs attacked civil rights activists, including clergy and nuns, in Chicago in the summer of 1966, the intensity of the growing “white backlash” was very clear.10

Important shifts took place in the “black church,” as well, which were influenced by the growing militancy of the movement in pockets of the urban North.11 Maurice Stevens

8 Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 760.

9 Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954-1973 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 140-41.

10 Ibid.

11 The blanket term “black church” obfuscates the diversity of African-American religious practices, particularly in the post-Great Migration North. Traditionally, African Americans have been affiliated most often with the Baptist and Methodist traditions. However, in Camden, as in many places in the North, African Americans joined Episcopalian, Catholic Churches, and probably Presbyterian churches as well.

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argues that as early as 1966 less conservative members of the Southern Christian

Leadership Council (SCLC) believed black religious leaders had to address the numbers of parishioners they were losing because the black church could not support them socially, politically, or economically as well as Black Power activism promised.12 From this context grew the foundation of Black Liberation Theology, a radically liberating philosophy that echoed the demands of the black power movement, but found its source of inspiration in the Bible.

Yet, Black Liberation Theology did not resonate with Camden’s black churches, which stood firmly in line with traditional, nonviolent tactics best represented by the

NAACP. While some black ministers, such as Baptist Amos Johnson who ran the

Christian Center on Line St. in North Camden, ignored their churches’ directives, most ministers in Camden remained apolitical.13 Malik Chaka, director of the Millennium

Challenge Corporation, a U.S. foreign aid agency dedicated to global poverty, and former

Camden activist formerly known as Michael Edwards, argues:

You couldn’t find a black minister who had a church that participated… [there was a]

total absence of the black clergy in these activities…When people talk about the role

of the church in the civil rights movement, they’re talking about the South… or, if

they’re talking about the North they’re clearly weren’t talking about all the ministers.

For every Adam Clayton Powell, for every Paul Washington in Philadelphia, for

12 Maurice E. Stevens, Troubling Beginnings: Trans(Per)Forming African- American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 55.

13 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010. The Christian center was founded in the 19th century to help immigrants adjust to life in the United States, offering, among other services, English language and American citizenship courses. By the time Reverend Johnson arrived, the community was mostly black and Puerto Rican, with some elderly Polish and Italians.

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every King or, Abernathy there were people who were accommodationists. And I

think this was clearly the case in Camden. They didn’t want to get on the wrong side

of the power structure.14

Camden’s black churches were actually quite typical. Despite the deeply intertwined and popularly remembered relationships of some black churches with the civil rights movement, particularly in the South, many black churches were not involved. C. Eric

Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya ascribe the black church’s politically ambiguous stance to its role as an “institutional supporter of double consciousness,” the Du Boisian dialectical tension of being both African and American.

This argument is consistent with Chaka’s assessment that black ministers had more to lose socially and politically. In aspiring to be both “African” and “American,” black churches have sought a more mainstream position.15 Another reason black churches may have remained outside the campaigns for social justice in Camden, is their historic struggle between “other-worldliness” and “this-worldliness,” meaning these traditions often interpreted the Bible as instructing them to look beyond this world. According to

Amos Johnson, in the 1950s and the early 1960s, black churches in Camden were more focused on the “other” world: “there was hardly any organization going on. There were beginnings of organizations, but nothing substantial.”16

14 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

15 C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 228.

16 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

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Ecumenical Protestantism in Camden

In the early-1960s two white ministers insinuated themselves into the increasingly apparent leadership void. In addition to Donald Griesmann, Presbyterian minister Sam

Appel would help forge a movement for social justice that included Camden’s working class and impoverished. Malik Chaka recalls that while it was “not unheard of for black ministers to take a radical approach [in the 1950s and 1960s] … in Camden, it was two white ministers.”17 Amos Johnson confirms that Griesmann and Appel, stood at the center of interracial activism in Camden:

[for black ministers] to take up the cause like Don Griesmann or Sam Appel,

or to be there at the center with me, it wasn’t happening. A lot of the guys were

older and had put up with it for so long, they felt like it was the natural thing to

do.”18

Samuel Appel’s church was located in East Camden, which was still predominately blue-collar and white in the mid-1960s. Sam married his wife, Jane, two days after

Christmas in 1948 in New York. She was a nurse and he repaired cars. They moved to

Philadelphia in the 1950s, where Sam went to college and, later, the seminary. When

Sam graduated, he ran a small church and worked nights as a punch press operator.

Then, in 1962 he was offered a position as chaplain at Rutgers University in Camden.19

17 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

18 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

19 “Jane Appel Obituary,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia PA), Aug. 10, 2010.

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The following year, Appel helped found the Camden Metropolitan Ministry with the goal of involving the Presbyterian Church more deeply in the community.20 Appel, along with suburban ministers Larry Black and Dick Whitman, engaged in what came to be called a “mission to structures,” meaning they would “meddle” in the structures that restricted minorities: education, housing, and the police department. Most importantly, they saw it as their mission to help the city’s poor organize. The group was headquartered in a three-story building in North Camden, facing the Delaware River, on the edge of the ghetto, where many African Americans and Puerto Ricans were relocated as the city tore down slums.21 The building had previously been a saloon and a brothel. Sam named the building “The Point,” after the Thomas Carlyle poem and because it was located on Point

Street.22

According to activist Gwen Simon Gain, who would come to work closely with

Appel as a fair housing field representative for South Jersey, “The Point” also indicated

Appel’s critique of the Presbyterian status quo. Simon Gain claims Appel was attracted to Carlyle’s poem because it aptly described his own assessment of Christianity:

if I grasped it correctly when Sam explained it, Carlyle’s contention that the English

religious community had become too distracted by arguing over inconsequential

matters like theology. That the truly devout ought to concentrate instead on the only

20 Deborah Yaffee, Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools (New Brunswick, NJ: 2007), 113.

21 Gwen Simon Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator: How the Hahas Came to South Jersey (Xlibris: 2011), Kindle Locations 1963-1966. Kindle Edition.

22 James A. Gittings. Bread, Meat, and Raisins After the Dance. (Palos Verdes, CA: Morgan Press, 1977), 88-89. Samuel E. Appel, Finding the Point Again!: A Report and Reflections on 25 Years of Urban Ministry in Camden, New Jersey, November, 1988, 2. CCHS.

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essential goals and values in life: that is, actively taking care of one another, and

especially of the less fortunate, as Jesus said we should do. That was the “point” of

living a truly committed existence.23

Appel proudly described himself as a liberal Presbyterian. In 1964 he walked in a picket line in Greenwood, Mississippi to protest segregation and spent a night in jail. He recalled, “I saw Jesus Christ on that Mississippi picket line, and it reaffirmed my faith.”24

Sam Appel would play an instrumental role in driving activism in Camden.

Three years before Appel’s arrival, on April Fools’ Day, 1959, twenty-six year old Donald Griesmann came to the city to serve as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

He had nearly lost his last job at Grace Church in Plainfield, NJ the previous year for a sermon he gave while his boss was on vacation, which asked the question of why there were two Episcopal Churches in the small community of Plainfield, one white, one black, and how they could begin to worship together.25 Griesmann referred to his new neighborhood in South Camden as “the white hole of a donut of black and Puerto Rican residents,” and immediately became involved in community outreach.26 By 1963, in addition to his work at St. John’s, Griesmann served as chaplain to the Episcopal faculty and students at Rutgers College of South Jersey, as a probation officer at the Camden

23 Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator, Kindle Locations 1963-1966.

24 Ibid.

25 Donald Griesmann, “November 12, 2008: U.S. Election Night 2008 - Flashes of My Life Came Before Me,” Don Griesmann’s Nonprofit Blog (blog), August 25, 2011 (9:15pm) http://dongriesmannsnonprofitblog.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html , November 12, 2008.

26 Barry Rosenberg, “Fasten Your Seatbelts: You Are Now Entering Camden,” 132; Howard Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 73; Griesmann, “November 12, 2008: U.S. Election Night 2008 - Flashes of My Life Came Before Me.”

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County Juvenile Court, and as a member of the Board of Planned Parenthood Association of Camden County.27

Griesmann’s first attempts at organizing began by giving hot chocolate to local kids through a program he called “Project Kids,” which consisted of him walking the streets alone, ringing a bell to gather the kids. Several hundred kids showed up. When he had their attention, he talked to them about the issues they faced living in Camden.

Beginning in 1962, Griesmann regularly organized children from St. John’s vacation bible school—which offered classes in African American and Puerto Rican history—to march the eight blocks to City Hall in protest of various racial and class-based inequities.

The children, predominately black and Puerto Rican, ages five through fourteen, marched against slum housing, lack of recreational facilities, and decaying neighborhoods.28

Eventually Griesmann turned an abandoned building into the St. John’s Episcopal

Community Center, which served the neighborhood with tutorial programs, recreation, camping trips, youth employment, Head Start, and other activities, seven days a week.

Over three hundred children used the center every day.29 While the black and Puerto

Rican kids did not always get along with each other, Griesmann promoted friendships through basketball, football, and baseball teams, as well as by encouraging them “to know one another, respect one another.”30 Additionally, he convinced local bakeries to

27 “St. Paul’s Women’s Day Branch to Hear Guest,” The Westfield Leader (Westfield, NJ) Mar. 28, 1963.

28 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011; “Pierce Blasts the Use of Child Marchers,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ) Aug. 25, 1966.

29 Donald Griesmann, “Hi, I’m Don Griesmann,” Techsoup.org Community Forum, accessed on August 20, 2011, http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/f/19/p/129/25486.aspx

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donate leftover food, which, for some children, was the only meal they could count on each day. For example, one day a boy named Billy stole a box of donuts from the center.

When Griesmann caught him, he said: “I don’t want you to ever say you stole donuts from here; I’m giving them to you.” He told Billy to take as much as he wanted each day.31

Once the community center was well established, African American and Puerto

Rican families began to attend St. John’s Church. Griesmann started a new custom of having parishioners greet each other by folding their hands over one another’s in the form of a cross: “White, black, Hispanic touched each other.”32 He also held “jazz masses” in which black jazz musicians performed religious music. In 1968 a reporter for

Philadelphia Magazine argued that while people described Donald Griesmann as

Camden’s Father Groppi, the well known white Catholic civil rights activist who worked with Black Militants in Milwaukee, “it would be more correct to call Rev. James Groppi

Milwaukee’s Father Griesmann, [because] Griesmann has been at this civil rights business longer and has done considerably more.”33

The willingness of white, liberal Protestants--and to a lesser extent, Catholic priests-- to take up radical political positions on race is not isolated to Camden, even if the particular coalitions that emerged there are very unusual. Griesmann’s and Appel’s work in Camden can be contextualized within a broader shift in Protestantism in the postwar

30 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

31 Ibid.

32 Don Griesmann, “November 12, 2008: U.S. Election Night 2008 - Flashes of My Life Came Before Me.”

33 Barry Rosenberg, “Fasten Your Seatbelts: You Are Now Entering Camden,” 132; For more on Fr. James Groppi, see: Jones, The Selma of the North.

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years. In his 2011 Organization of American Historians presidential address, David A.

Hollinger elucidated how ecumenical Protestant churches like Griesmann’s and Appel’s began to congregate around the idea that “the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.”34 Thus, according to Hollinger, Protestants such as Griesmann and Appel are responsible for developing “a more multicultural America.”35

Michael Friedland, who explores the ways in which various Protestant and

Catholic groups enacted this shifting ideology in his study of white clergymen’s contribution to the civil rights movement, argues that 1963 marked an important turning point in religious actors’ efforts in the civil rights movement. A major reason for this shift was that the widely televised police violence enacted on nonviolent protesters in

Birmingham, Alabama caused many religious activists to realize a stronger institutional stance against racial discrimination was necessary. Friedland points to several examples of interfaith cooperation such as Catholic and Protestant calls for denominational unity, a fourteen month vigil at the Lincoln Memorial held by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as pressure from religious institutions on

Congress to make legislative progress.36 According to Friedman, "these ecumenical

34 David Hollinger, “‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire’: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (July 2011).

35 Ibid.

36 Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet, 70.

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efforts showed that growing numbers of white clergymen, nuns, and lay persons, saw civil rights as a moral issue."37

This liberal spirit was probably best embodied by the principal white ecumenical organization, the National Council of Churches (NCC), a consortium of mainline

Protestant churches, that established the Commission on Religion and Race in 1963 to initiate a place for mainstream Protestant churches in racial conflicts. Through this commission, mainline Protestant churches played an important role in the civil rights movement, by promoting the Social Gospel with a focus on race. For example, one of the many projects the NCC promoted was the “Delta Ministry,” in which NCC volunteers served the Mississippi Delta through promoting black voting, educational projects, and expanded welfare programs.38

Still, while many mainline Protestants were moved to participate in civil rights activism, there was extensive internal conflict about what official stance each church should take. Many churches, including the Episcopal Church, which Griesmann represented and the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), which Appel represented, saw significant clashes, especially geographically, about how to respond.

Prior to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, white Episcopalians took a largely paternalistic approach to their African-American brethren. While the Episcopal Church officially endorsed the Brown decision, many southern practitioners were openly hostile

37 Ibid, 76-77.

38 James F. Findlay, Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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to integration and many who supported it lacked the backing of their leaders and were often ostracized from their church communities.

By the late 1950s many Episcopalian theologians began stressing the importance of engaging with the world- a philosophy that culminated in the 1959 formation of the

Episcopal Society of Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Pressure from white church leaders in the South prevented the National Council of the

Episcopal Church from taking a definitive stand on the civil rights movement prior to

1963. Many southern Episcopalians who supported civil rights faced violence. Northern

Episcopalians were more willing to engage in the struggle, but, according to Gardiner H.

Shattuck Jr., they tended to be too obtrusive and unwilling to place African Americans in the limelight. 39

Similarly, the PCUS reacted favorably to the civil rights cause in 1954, but faced internal friction, particularly from southern congregations. Throughout the 1960s, the

PCUS promoted a variety of community development programs that were not necessarily specific to the civil rights movement, but did address many of the same goals. Joel L.

Alvis, Jr. argues that while “Concern for and identification with civil rights issues were not absent from local churches or individuals, but these cases were the exception rather than the rule.”40

Yet, even as some ecumenical Protestant churches disseminated liberal ideas, many ministers were hesitant to immerse themselves fully in the ghetto. In his memoir,

39 Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr. Episcopalians & Race: Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 2003); David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., The Episcopalians, Denominations in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 132- 133.

40 Joel L. Alvis, Jr., Religion & Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946-1983 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 130-31.

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Finding the Point Again!, Sam Appel recalls the acceleration in Christian activism that

Hollinger and Friedland unpack. However, Appel argues that while church-supported inner-city programs were founded with great enthusiasm, the problems were often too complex and the cities’ political systems too difficult to renegotiate. Often those engaged in urban ministry felt “intense feeling of aloneness, of isolation, a feeling of foresakeness.” When Appel was assigned his position in Camden, he remembers “Many of my fellow clergy came to me after the meeting and said sadly, ‘God bless you in

Camden, Sam.’ I interpreted their words and their body language as meaning it’s all yours; go to it; see you around; don’t call me, I’ll call you!” 41 William Sloane Coffin, the

Presbyterian turned United Church of Christ minister, who Warren Goldstein calls “the preeminent white voice of the changing times in mainline Protestantism,” for his part in reviving the social gospel in the 1960s, is an important example of the tension many ministers experienced:

From time to time Coffin felt guilty about his failure to take up ministry in the

slums. As a result, he loved telling-and retelling-the story of his old East Harlem

supervisor Don Benedict confirming that he really belonged at Yale. 42

For all the rhetoric, marching, and protesting, it is difficult to find examples of white

Protestants who stood at the center of the War on Poverty, in the ghetto, where it burned hottest.

The Catholic Church in Camden

It is also difficult to find Catholics, of any race or ethnicity, who participated in social protest in Camden in in the 1950s or early-1960s. It is curious that the Catholic

41 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 35.

42 Warren Goldstein, William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience, 328.

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Church did not take part, as it was growing rapidly in the Camden diocese in this period.

Additionally it was an important center for Puerto Rican socializing, an “incubator” for the community, as activist Carmen Martinez described it. It is even more surprising, perhaps, that it would be Protestant ministers who would make changes in Camden, as

Catholic priests actively encouraged parishioners to buy homes in their parishes, while, many Protestants lived outside the city.43

While there is no record of how many people in Camden identified with Catholicism in this period, we do know the Camden diocese was in the midst of remarkable growth.

Between 1938 and 1956 the Catholic population in the six counties that comprised the

Camden diocese increased by one-hundred percent, from 100,000 to 200,000. The number of priests increased from 86 to 195. The fifty churches, thirty rectories, twenty convents, twenty-two elementary schools, and four high schools that were built during this period demonstrate how notable this growth was.44

When the United States entered the Second World War, the Catholic population was largely urban and working class.45 In Camden there were at least six Catholic churches, each with an ethnic affiliation.46 According to historian Charles Giglio, Bartholomew

43 John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19.

44 Building God’s Kingdom: History of the Camden Diocese (South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall Press, 1987).

45 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 130.

46 The Church of the Holy Name was located at North 5th and Vine streets in North Camden and attempted to recruit African Americans, although it is unclear how successful this endeavor was. The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, located on the southeast corner of Broadway and Market in downtown Camden was founded as the Irish parish, St. Mary’s. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, was located at 4th and Division

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Eustace, the bishop who oversaw this shift, was aware of Camden’s growing black and

Puerto Rican populations, which is why he appointed Spanish-speaking priests in

Camden in the 1950s to minister to this growing Catholic population. If Camden’s

Catholic churches were able to attract African-American parishioners, they may not have been particularly active, as 80% of African-American Catholics in the urban North, most of whom converted during the Great Migration, were not active in churches.47

One reason for this may be that the Catholic Church was widely perceived by African

Americans as racist, prompting Martin Luther King, Jr. to claim he supported John F.

Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race despite Kennedy’s Catholicism. 48 In his exploration of the “Catholic encounter with race,” John T. McGreevy explores the rift that emerged among American Catholics in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In the 1940s Catholics were divided between those who believed the church should take a

“separate-but-equal” approach to organizing parishes, meaning minorities could have their own churches, and, largely due to the work of Jesuit priest John LaFarge, that the church should be integrated. Evidence suggests that before white Catholics made their

Streets and was founded as an Italian church, but eventually merged with Our Lady of Fatima and became Puerto Rican. St Joseph’s Pro-Cathedral was located on Federal Street. The Church of the Sacred Heart on the southwest corner of Broadway and Ferry Avenue was mostly Irish. Another St. Joseph’s church was located on 10th and Mechanic Streets and was known as the “Polish church.”

47 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 59.

48 Ibid, 61.

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way out of the cities, many first moved to another city parish that was similar to what theirs had been before minorities began moving in.49

By the 1950s, the Church’s official stance was integration. However because urban

Catholics had cultivated a unique relationship with their neighborhoods, which they conflated with their parish, often times the “people in the pews” resisted this policy in both the Church and in their living spaces. Urban, northern Catholics were especially worried about their property values dropping and their traditional parish-oriented communities dissolving. 50

Essentially, the Church had created neighborhoods via the parish system. Now that same institution threated to “disintegrate” the neighborhood through integration.

McGreevy argues that “between 1964 and 1967 two distinctly Catholic visions of church, community, and authority clashed in the streets, parishes, and Catholic schools of northern cities.”51 More traditional Catholics—resisted the “threat” to their communities, which had been created by the church and were now threatened by that same institution.

Liberal Catholics—questioned the parochial structures and became involved in civil rights coalitions.52

A salient example of this divisiveness is the presence of Catholics in Selma, during the 1965 voter registration drives. Priests, nuns, and lay Catholics from fifty dioceses went to Selma in 1965, even though a Montgomery bishop tried to dissuade the

49 John T. McGreevy, “Racial Justice and the People of God: The Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights Movement, and American Catholics,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 2, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 232-33.

50 Ibid, 229.

51 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 205.

52 Ibid.

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participation of northern Catholics. People divided over priests and nuns participation at

Selma. The Catholics at Selma were mostly from big east cities.53 Amy Koehlinger argues that Catholics did not have a significant impact on the civil rights movement, as they generally did not become involved until after the conclusion of the Second Vatican

Council in 1965, which allowed for priests and nuns to take a more active stance in social issues. However, the presence of these religious leaders, especially the white, female nuns, marching in Selma and throughout the north in sympathy protests, further highlighted the importance of racial justice for northern whites.54 While it is possible the presence of these nuns in the South and in cities throughout the North impacted Camden- area Catholics, there is no example in Camden of Catholic priests or nuns engaging in any social protest. White, Catholic priest Michael Doyle, who would become involved in social justice when he arrived in Camden in 1969, explains that the Catholic Churches in

Camden during the 1950s and early-1960s were much more concerned with efficiency than charity.55

By the early 1960s, Carmen Martinez had made at least one close, non-Puerto

Rican friend: African American Baptist minister Amos Johnson. Johnson came to

Camden in 1963 to run the Christian Center, soon to be renamed the Martin Luther King

Christian Center, on Line Street in North Camden. Johnson, who would be an important part of the late-1960s Black Power activism that infused Camden, remembers how difficult it was in the early days to involve Puerto Ricans in social protest: “It was my

53 McGreevy, “Racial Justice and the People of God,” 221, 228, 230.

54 Amy L. Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

55 Michael Doyle, “It’s a Terrible Day…Thanks be to God” (Camden, NJ: The Heart of Camden, Inc., 2003), 119.

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impression that they really did not want to identify with the black community.”56

Martinez recalls she and other Puerto Ricans began meeting in their church’s basement to discuss social and political concerns in Camden, yet no formal organization coalesced, so she spent more time with Johnson. By the mid-1960s, Johnson would pick her up regularly to join in protest marches that were beginning in the city. She recalls that she and Johnson, who wore an afro in those days, “made quite a pair.”57

The War on Poverty Galvanizes Community Action

While there is no record of how many, if any Camden Puerto Ricans attended

Malcolm X’s rally in 1963, it is likely that younger Camden Puerto Ricans would have identified with his discourse. Despite Malcolm’s solidly pro-black message, evidence suggests he did not alienate Puerto Ricans. As Jeffery Ogbar notes, while the Nation of

Islam’s (NOI) “language, symbolism, and general cosmology,” were centered on African

Americans, the organization welcomed all people of color; therefore, “the Black Power movement demonstrated that ethnic nationalism had incredible potential for political mobilization and resistance to the oppression [non-African Americans] experienced.”58

For example, Roberto P. Rodríguez-Morazzani points out that while older Puerto Ricans discounted Malcolm, his condemnation of white racism and advocacy of black pride resonated with young Puerto Ricans, motivating many of them to read his

56 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

57 Carmen Martinez, interview by Howard Gillette, March 9, 1998; Carmen Martinez, interview by Howard Gillette, April 17, 2002.

58 Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of Radical Ethnic Nationalism,” Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, Ed. Peniel E. Joseph, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 193-194.

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Autobiography.59 In the 1960s Puerto Ricans and African Americans were finding they had more in common, at the same time sociologists, politicians, and other outsiders increasingly grouped them together.

When the president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP), Pedro Albizu

Campos died in April of 1965, just two months after Malcolm’s assassination, he was not well known among young Puerto Ricans who were not old enough to remember when the

PRNP attempted assassination of President Truman in 1950 or when Nationalists opened- fire on members of Congress in the Capitol building in 1954. However, in the late-1960s and 1970s, when Puerto Rican youth activists rediscovered Campos and lauded his resistance to U.S. colonialism, he became the “Puerto Rican Malcolm X.”60 For example, in a February 1970 article published in the Young Lords’ newspaper, Palante, entitled

“Malcolm Spoke for Puerto Ricans,” the author appropriates Malcolm’s messages of cultural pride and that “Power comes from the barrel of a gun” for Puerto Ricans:

“Brothers and sisters, look at the awareness of our Afro-American compañeros. Our own

Albizu Campos also taught us to be Boriqueño is a good thing.”61

In their study of black-Puerto Rican coalition building in New York City, Andy

Diaz and Sonia Lee argue “When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his ‘War on

Poverty’ agenda in the summer of 1964, he inadvertently opened up the civil rights

59 Roberto P. Rodríguez-Morazzani, “Political Cultures of the Puerto Rican Left in the United States,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, Eds. Andrés Torres and Jose Velazquez, (Philadelphia, PA: 1998), 38.

60 Ibid.

61 Palante, 2 no. 1 (February 1970).

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agenda to Puerto Ricans.”62 Johnson’s call for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor themselves in an “unconditional war to defeat poverty,” embodied the nature of blacks’ and Puerto Ricans’ shared problems, based in poverty. The War on Poverty was notably racially ambiguous, focusing on “poor people.”

The War on Poverty came together just as “poor” congealed as a social scientific classification. Previously, socioeconomic categories included lower-class, middle-class, or upper-class; there was also the working-class or “paupers” and the “criminal element.”

According to Laura Briggs, in the 1960s “poor” encompassed both African Americans and Puerto Ricans, unconsciously conflating race with class.63 In some ways, such as through the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the rhetoric of War on

“Poverty” encouraged a common bond among minorities, although they rarely were represented adequately.64

Following Johnson’s announcement of his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, more than half of Camden’s Puerto Rican social clubs joined together to form el Concilio de Organizaciones Hispanas de Camden (the Camden Spanish Council), with three main goals: 1. The inclusion of three leaders of the Hispanic community in the War on Poverty in Camden, 2. Provide guidance to community leaders on programs related to the War on

Poverty, 3. Obtaining an Orientation Center for Hispanics in the southern part of the

62 Ande Diaz and Sonia S. Lee, “‘I Was the One Percenter’” 71.

63 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 177-78.

64 Noel Cazenave. Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Matthew Countryman, Up South; Ande Diaz and Sonia S. Lee, “‘I Was the One Percenter,’” 52-80; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

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city.65 This strategy was consistent with many Puerto Rican communities within reach of the

Donald Griesmann also saw opportunity in the War on Poverty. He embraced the newly created government programs so expeditiously that people began to call him the

“one man War on Poverty.” However, a year after the initiatives were approved by

Congress, Griesmann was critical of their implementation.66 In testimony provided to the

U.S. Congress in July 1965, Griesmann made his commitment to serving the poor clear when he situated the War on Poverty firmly within his Christian worldview:

In St. Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 19, Verse 21, Jesus said, "For you always have

the poor with you." For many people this text is regarded as a prophecy by Jesus

that there will always be poor people. While the definitions of "poor" and

"poverty" may be historically relative… Jesus was speaking of the financially

poor, the low man on the totem pole, the underdog, the persons caught in the

philosophy of poverty. Pointedly, Jesus was saying that the opportunity to

overcome poverty is always with us. Finally a conscientious effort is being made.

Yet, Griesmann was dismayed by how superficially Camden’s power structure included the city’s poor in this “conscientious effort” to eradicate poverty, arguing that in the year following the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, “the dialog between the poor

65 Informe Annual Año Fiscal, 1964-1965,”Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ. The Puerto Rican Experience, 1948-1993. OGPRUS, Administrative (Reel 53), Box 2735, Folder 3, 146.

66 Donald Griesmann Testimony, “The War on Poverty as it Affects Older Americans.” Hearings Before the Special Committee on Aging. United States Senate. Eighty-Ninth Congress. First Session Part 2, Newark, NJ. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), July 10, 1965, 461-462.

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and the planners in the local situation is extremely limited.”67 Griesmann claimed the poor were afraid of the existing power structure and would not organize to challenge it.

Griesmann explained that the War on Poverty did not reach the entire community:

The gaps in the War on Poverty will become more obvious in time; many are

now obvious… Some of the most socially chaotic and poor families I know in

Camden are untouched by the several programs initiated here, including the Job

Corps, Youth Corps, Head Start, Upgrade, and so forth. The older children are

either on parole or do not desire to enter the Job Corps; they are not eligible for

the limited program of the Youth Corps. The younger children are not of an age

for Head Start this year and while many have failed courses in school (1 has 13

failures out of 24 marks) they are not eligible for Upgrade because they were

promoted in June. The parents are tired, weary, and beaten--they are poor. And

the war goes on around them. 68

Griesmann worried that if the poor did not stand up to the local government, “the War on

Poverty [would] be a monologue, rather than a dialogue.”69

Still in 1965 Griesmann continued to support Mayor Alfred Pierce, despite his dissatisfaction with local government. Griesmann told Congress, “The city of Camden has a long way to go but it is making tremendous strides under the leadership of Mayor

Alfred Pierce.” However, the next year Griesmann’s support for the Mayor was muffled by stalled progress. The cleared land in the Centerville and Liberty Park neighborhoods

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

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in South Camden continued to be undeveloped--leaving many African Americans and

Puerto Ricans with nowhere to go.70 The Camden Housing Authority relocated the poorest families to the overcrowded, rundown slums, while newly constructed luxury apartment complexes, such as Northgate One and Two in North Camden, were occupied by high-income residents, and only half full.71 Because the Federal Housing Authority

(FHA) refused to grant mortgages for many of the homes in Camden, and because of the

“white noose” the suburban realtors used to keep middle-income blacks in Camden, an area of high risk and poverty emerged.72 As the minority population rose, urban renewal grew less promising. Business owners refused to buy property in Camden and jobs grew scarcer. From 1960 onward the value of property steadily decreased and by the mid- sixties, the city housing authority deemed that over half of all the housing in Camden was unfit for habitation. 73

“As Segregated as Georgia”: 1966 Housing Protests

The Camden Migration Division informed Puerto Ricans about the housing problem, but offered them little assistance.74 In 1966, the only official liaison between the

70 “Centerville Area in Need of Redevelopment Study,” Division of Planning, Department of Development and Planning, Hopeworks, Inc. (Camden, NJ), 2003.

71 Charles Sharp testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967,” 307; Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 24.

72 Gwen Simon Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator: How the Hahas Came to South Jersey. Xlibris, 2011. Kindle Edition. Gwen Simon Gain, a fair housing field representative for South Jersey, indicates that many fair-housing advocates used the term “white noose” to describe the virtually all-white Camden suburbs.

73 Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 51.

74 “Monthly Activities Report of the Migration Division.” The Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Migrant Farm Labor in NY and NJ, OGPRUS (Reel 60), Box 2748, Folder 29, November, 1966.

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community and the city on housing matters was the Camden branch of the Housing

Information Service (HIS). The HIS was located in a run-down, one-room building, staffed by one person, Julia Robinson. Robinson was a young African American woman, who believed the office was utterly inadequate and should be phased out, rather than expanded. Even though discrimination was practiced openly, Robinson claimed most families did not file complaints with the state because they were reluctant to go “where they are not wanted.”75 According to Robinson no one had made progress in ameliorating the housing crisis; however she was aware that white ministers in Camden were trying. 76

Although Griesmann was critical of how War on Poverty programs were funded and executed, he took advantage of the newly created Volunteers in Service to America

(VISTA) program. The VISTA program was a domestic version of the Peace Corps, created by President Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. As part of the War on Poverty, volunteers supplemented efforts to fight poverty in low-income communities through a year of full-time service.77 Yet, the VISTA program, like so many War on

Poverty initiatives was underfunded and, therefore, did not fulfill its potential.

War on Poverty “architect,” Sargent Shriver expected more than 25,000 VISTA applications by July 1, 1965, and to have about 2,000 volunteers in service. Yet, Glenn

Ferguson, who was drafted from the Peace Corps staff to direct VISTA, had fewer than

75 Barbara S. Williams, “Groups Hit Camden Renewal in Detailed Letter to Johnson,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ) Feb. 16, 1967, 4.

76 Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator, (Xlibris: 2011), Kindle Location 611. Kindle Edition.

77 According to the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973, the three main objectives of VISTA were: 1. encouraging volunteer service at the local level, 2. generating the commitment of private sector resources, and 3. strengthening local agencies and organizations that serve low-income communities

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150 volunteers at work in twenty-two states only a few weeks in advance of the July 1 date, with only fifty-two in training. 78 Griesmann complained to Congress, “A comparison of allotments that emerged from Congress makes VISTA look like a stepchild.” The community action projects were given $235 million and the Job Corps was granted $190.2 million, while VISTA's allotment was $4.5 million. Griesmann concluded, "Perhaps some bright Washington reporter will come up with a background story on the slighting of VISTA and answer the question of whether this idealistic project is being quietly doomed."79

Griesmann was not alone in his skeptical embrace of VISTA. According to Annelise

Orleck:

some veteran community activists also bought into the program. Though they did not

trust LBJ, they gambled that the rhetoric of maximal feasible participation could

further a genuinely radical version of community control. In this, they drew on the

work of veteran organizer Saul Alinsky, who in Reveille for Radicals (1946) had

offered a model for building local ‘people’s organizations’ that would ‘precipitate the

social crisis by action—by using power.80

Griesmann, who read Saul Alinsky’s work faithfully, opined with uncharacteristic optimism, “The War on Poverty holds for my neighbors and friends a hope, a desire, a

78 Donald Griesmann Testimony, “The War on Poverty as it Affects Older Americans.” Hearings Before the Special Committee on Aging. United States Senate. Eighty-Ninth Congress. First Session Part 2, Newark, NJ. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), July 10, 1965, 461-462.

79 Ibid.

80 Annelise Orleck, “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up,” Eds. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, The War on Poverty: A New Grass Roots History, 1964-1980 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 12.

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way of life that is markedly different than we see daily.” Despite his critique, Griesmann welcomed several young volunteers to Camden in 1966. Their presence in the city invigorated his efforts.

When VISTA Carolyn Burton came to Camden in the mid-1960s, upon graduating from Columbia University with a master’s degree in urban planning, her impression of the city was that it was “a horrible place” and that all the white people who were not too old had escaped.81 When Burton signed up for VISTA, her options were to work in the South, or in Camden. Burton, who earned her undergraduate degree at

Cornell, was raised in Dallas, TX, in a conservative, Republican family, found herself roommates with a “wild” black woman in a decaying row home on Broadway, shoveling coal into a furnace to stay warm in the winter. In a few years, she would be Don

Griesmann’s wife.82

The VISTAs reported to Griesmann at St. John’s Episcopal Community Center, where they planned marches and other forms of protest. On a daily basis, the group of five or six would go door to door throughout Camden to collect information about housing. The VISTAs also changed light bulbs in tenement homes, so they would be brighter and more secure.83 The presence of these political organizers added “ferment” to the city.84 According to a Malik Chaka: “for the people in power in Camden, Donald

Griesmann [became] the devil incarnate.”85

81 Carolyn Burton, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 21, 2010.

82 Ibid.

83 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011. 84 Malik Chaka Interview by Laurie Lahey, 10 August 2010.

85 Ibid.

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With the assistance the VISTAs, Griesmann, who developed into an adept strategist, began a series of protests against unfair housing practices in the city. In 1966, no new public housing had been built in Camden in over ten years, despite the increasing numbers of impoverished blacks and Puerto Ricans. Mayor Pierce believed the best strategy was to relocate the poor to the suburbs, where, he argued, there would be more opportunities to find housing. Meanwhile, suburban realtors continued to turn away

African American buyers.86

Additionally, the housing projects that did exist were subject to de facto segregation, relegating blacks the most rundown buildings. Puerto Ricans were rarely admitted into public housing. In June 1966, Lionel Jiménez, an official at the Camden’s

Office on Puerto Rico, reported that only forty-two Puerto Rican families lived in public housing – forty of these families were in the same ramshackle building. Jiménez reported that roughly 780 Puerto Rican families were eligible for low-income housing but were not able to obtain it.87 Reverend Herman Watts, a NAACP member, called the housing projects in Camden “as segregated as Georgia.”88 In June, civil rights leaders and the

Camden Housing Authority failed to reach an agreement about how to remedy this situation. Griesmann and the VISTAs organized approximately five hundred

86 Rosenberg, “Fasten Your Seatbelts,” 132, 135; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; John P. Dwyer et al, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996); Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator, (Xlibris: 2011), Kindle Locations 1963-1966. Kindle Edition.

87 Donald Griesmann testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 301; “51 Pickets March in Protest on Housing,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun.18, 1966. 88 “Camden Segregation: A Matter of Choice?” Courier-Post. June 8, 1966.

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demonstrators at City Hall, who carried signs with statements such as “Integrate Public

Housing,” and “We Don’t Want Tokenism.”89

In the summer of 1966, Griesmann educated the children at the Episcopal Center about the segregated housing situation and organized over two hundred of them in a march against it. Mayor Pierce censured Griesmann, claiming “It’s a shame and a tragedy that any adult, whether he wears a collar or not, has to seek the use of small children to fight his own battle.”90 However, low-income housing remained rundown and scarce. And those most deeply affected by the problem remained uninspired to join

Griesmann’s protests or challenge City Hall in any fashion. The city made the minimum effort to ensure the projects were technically integrated. For most of the city’s poor, the situation did not change. In August, Mayor Pierce gave his first address on civil rights since the housing protests when he spoke at a Greater South Camden Lions Club function. Pierce disregarded Griesmann and the other activists, calling them “so-called leaders.” Pierce argued the housing problem was the result of the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public housing and that people segregate themselves along ethnic lines,” and emphasized that “the courts are the place to resolve rights, not the streets.”91

Griesmann grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress in the Camden housing situation. Moreover, despite some success in organizing Camden’s citizens,

Griesmann, who never wanted to be the face of the movement, wanted to involve more of

89 “51 Pickets March in Housing Protest,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun. 18, 1966.

90 “Pierce Blasts the Use of Child Marchers,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 25, 1966.

91 Barbara S. Williams, “Civil Rights Tactics Hit by Pierce,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), August 3, 1966, 1.

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the city’s poor in the protests. Thus, sensing the need for a more concerted approach to community organizing, Griesmann formed the Camden Civil Rights Ministerium

(CCRM), an interracial coalition of clergy, CORE, and NAACP members with the goal of involving the community more deeply in the quest for social justice. Specifically, the group sought to, “incite, arouse, stir up, fire up an apathetic people who are poor and oppressed and deprived of their place in the sun.”92

During the summer of 1966 the CCRM developed a better understanding of why the community was disinterested in protesting. That fall, Griesmann and Reverend

William King, a state NAACP representative, warned the City Council that the movement might turn violent Griesmann argued that “civil rights leaders abhor the use of violence, but the indications are that…There are people willing to follow a violent leader.” King followed this comment by adding that throughout the summer he had met people in Camden who no longer wanted to participate in peaceful demonstrations: “If we’d thrown bricks and bottles, they’d help us.” Griesmann recommended that the

Housing Authority make some swift changes, such as adding black and Puerto Rican members to their committee, because violence was imminent.93

Conclusion

Malcolm X concluded his speech on that June 1963 night in Camden by reminding the audience that peaceful protest would not bring about the change they desired:

92 Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!

93 “Councilmen and Rights Chiefs Clash,” Courier-Post. September 23, 1966.

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Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh, yes they are. We have never had a

bloodless revolution or a non-violent revolution. You don’t have a revolution in

which you love your enemy. You don’t have a revolution in which you are

begging the systems of exploitation to let you into them…. Revolutions destroy

systems… you’ve got a new generation of black people in this country who do not

care anything what so ever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle

Tom handkerchief heads talking about odds, no.94

Yet, four years later in 1967, despite Malcolm’s rhetoric and the enthusiasm that greeted him, there was still no revolution in Camden. When activist Gwen Simon Gain attended a Camden NAACP rally, her observations confirmed that not much had changed:

As usual with gatherings of this type, the meeting started late—at 4 p.m. instead

of 3:30, and it ran until almost six. They led off with all of us standing to join in

that stately NAACP anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing.” The words were

provided on a program insert and I already knew the tune, so I was able to sing as

loudly as anyone there, and I did. “Lift ev’ry voice and sing, “Til earth and

heaven ring, “Ring with the harmonies of liberty…” A black man named Gloster

Current came [to speak]…from the NAACP’s head office in New York. Toward

the end of his address, Mr. Current was careful to mention the need for whites to

be accepted as working partners with Negroes… He also stressed the fact that a

lack of communication between blacks and whites was our main problem today in

our attempts to solve America’s racial crisis. And based upon my own limited

94 Malcolm X, Audio Clip, (Camden, NJ June 30, 1963).

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experiences gathered over my thirty-eight years, I could not agree with him

more.95

While the Camden chapter of the NAACP continued to meet during the 1960s and 1970s, it did not alter its pro-integration, non-violence ideology as the community grew restless.

As these organizations failed to keep pace with the ghetto, the War on Poverty provided a framework for the community’s shared problems. In this vacuum, two Protestant ministers sketched the unlikely path to Camden’s revolution. Beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, as much of the white public embraced the diversity-resisting ideas, Donald Griesmann and Sam Appel’s interracial and increasingly radical activism demonstrates vital intersections of religion and politics that undergird so much of the twentieth century.

95 Gain, Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator, (Xlibris: 2011), Kindle Locations 2402-2409). Kindle Edition.

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CHAPTER 4

“HIS-STORY”: THE BLACK PEOPLES UNITY MOVEMENT AND INTERRACIAL COOPERATION, 1968

hot summer field: a killdeer’s cry awakens the child 1

On an afternoon, much like any other since he had arrived a decade earlier, Donald

Griesmann was organizing African American and Puerto Rican children into basketball teams at St. John’s Episcopal Center.2 On this particular day, Griesmann was not startled when former gang member, ex-con, heroin addict Charles “Poppy” Sharp walked though the door, clenching a knife. Sharp, the founder of the all-black, militant, Black Peoples

Unity Movement (BPUM) had become “an enormously close friend” to the priest in the past year.3 Throughout 1968, the BPUM, their white suburban allies, the Friends of the

Black Peoples Unity Movement (FBPUM), black and white clergy, and Puerto Rican

Camdenites had kept City Hall’s attention by forcing the city to close the Ben Franklin

Bridge during a stand-off with police, by burning effigies of Mayor Alfred Pierce and

Chief of Police Harold Melleby on City Hall’s steps, and by inviting notoriety at a national level through Congressional testimony about Camden’s urgent housing conditions. Beginning that summer, and for a few bright years after, blacks, whites, and

Puerto Ricans generated a synthesis of Black Power militancy and Christian nonviolence

1 Nick Virgilio, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 5.

3 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

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so unique the Courier-Post reported that Camden was the only place in the country where this kind of politically motivated, interracial harmony was viable.4

While that summer did not resolve Camden’s problems, it did delineate, acutely, the battle lines between the city’s leadership and its citizens. In the next three years brutality, murder, material and moral destruction ransacked Camden’s streets, until the final implosion of the 1971 riot quieted the city indefinitely. But on this day, the only blood shed was between friends. In a flash of stillness as the disaster of things falling apart swirled around them, Poppy Sharp took Donald Griesmann’s finger and sliced into it. Sharp grasped Griesmann’s hand with his own bloody fingers, enclosing their shared wounds. The blood that flowed between them cemented their bond. Alarmed onlookers were aghast at the priest exchanging blood with a “drug addict”; Griesmann corrected them: “no, I’m sharing blood with my brother.”5

…

While militant protests had become familiar in the urban North by 1968, they began only that summer in Camden. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, battles for social justice had been waged in the more traditional, nonviolent manner best represented in civil rights movement historiography: under the auspices of a mix of clergy and National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) members, marching and sitting down for equality. Yet, despite Camden’s lack of adequate housing, or schools, or jobs, despite speculation in the media that something would happen, despite leaders’

4 Leon Benson, “McCarthy Praises Area Backers Who Work With BPUM,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun. 28, 1968.

5 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

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strategies to motivate community involvement, the vast majority of Camden’s working class was virtually absent from these years of protest.

That all changed in 1967, when H. Rap Brown, then Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC) chairman, headlined a rally in Camden, where he encouraged the several thousand in attendance to fight the establishment with violence. It was this Black

Power-infused assemblage, devised by an interracial coalition that included Black Baptist minister Amos Johnson, white Presbyterian minister Samuel Appel, and white

Episcopalian priest, Donald Griesmann, which finally ignited the indigenous leadership that captured the shifting attitudes of the community. Thirteen years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, two years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed,

Camden’s citizens finally organized.

This chapter asks how that was possible. How, when interracial cooperation was virtually nonexistent following the widespread dissemination of Black Power politics, could cooperation be possible in Camden? 6 In Camden, in the midst of the Black Power

Movement, we find a coalition unprecedented in scholarly literature: black and white ministers, suburban whites, Puerto Ricans, and an organization of African Americans created and run by men and women from the city.

This chapter examines the shift from a strictly nonviolent movement devoid of the underclass, to a radical, racially integrated movement via the BPUM’s formation and three events that solidified interracial cooperation in Camden: “The Shields family incident,” in which the BPUM and supporters obtained fair housing for an African

American family of twelve; the formation of the FBPUM; and the founding of the BPUM

6 Interracial cooperation dissolved even in nearby cities Philadelphia and Newark. Matthew Countryman, Up South; Kevin Mumford, Newark.

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Economic Development Corporation, an arm of the BPUM that created black-owned businesses in Camden. While Black Power rhetoric and practices were necessary and organic to the movement in Camden, the leadership recognized that non-militant, non- black support was essential for success and embraced this support sometimes publically and sometimes clandestinely. Despite the militant rhetoric that pervaded the movement in

Camden, due to its economy and demographics, activists organized across race and despite ideology.

“What Have You People Been Doing?”: The CCRM Invites H. Rap Brown to Camden

A 1967 study entitled “Documentation of the Need for Community

Organization,” assessed community organizing in Camden and argued that the Camden

Civil Rights Ministerium (CCRM), founded three years earlier by a coalition of religious and community leaders, was “not very effective.” The report noted that the CCRM was responsible for some victories, but was incapable of inspiring the community: “The coalition speaks and acts but not really for the ghettoed poor and they know it.”7 The study depicted a critical need for effective organization:

Camden suffers from a loss of confidence. There is ample indication that it simply

does not believe it has a future, that nothing really good can happen in Camden,

and that the only sensible response a person can make is to isolate himself in his

7 “Documentation of the Need for Community Organization in Camden, NJ” October 1967 Camden Metropolitan Ministry Notes. Gillette Collection. Camden County Historical Society. This report is included among a file of Camden Metropolitan Ministry’s records Howard Gillette has deposited at the Camden County Historical Society. There is no explanation of who authored the report or how it came about. However, because it was included among the organization’s records, it must have been of some significance to the CMM, a subset of the CCRM.

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own cynicism or hopelessness or to escape the city to seek a highly mortgaged

peace elsewhere.8

Those left behind faced disastrous consequences. The report concluded bleakly: “In brief, Camden is where you live when you can’t possibly arrange to live somewhere else.

Those who cannot make this geographical escape are those generally who are too old or too young, too poor or too black to take up the bright, white suburban option.”9

Perhaps sensing the need for a new approach, that summer, the CCRM departed markedly from its earlier methods by voting to invite Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael to Camden, hoping that he could motivate the community.10 But the CCRM faced a dilemma when Carmichael left SNCC for the Black Panthers and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. The decision to invite

Carmichael had been somewhat of a compromise between conservative and radical factions of the CCRM, since the group considered his brand of militancy nuanced and reflective. Indeed, historian Peniel Joseph has argued that Carmichael’s activism challenges the conventional narrative of Black Power because of his “complex interaction with civil rights activists, maverick attempts to forge international alliances, and

8 CMM Notes, “Documentation of the Need for Community Organization in Camden, NJ” October 1967, Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society, Camden, New Jersey.

9 Ibid.

10 Malik Chaka, interview by Author, August 10, 2010; Donald Griesmann, interview by Author, February 2, 2011. CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” February 23, 1967, box 1, Presbytery of West Jersey, Camden Metropolitan Ministry, Records, 1964- 1979, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter CMM Records).

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thoughtful antiwar activism.”11 Carmichael, thus, represented the charismatic, thoughtful leadership the CCRM believed Camden blacks and Puerto Ricans needed.

H. Rap Brown, conversely, had developed a reputation for promoting violent retaliation. Earlier that summer Brown infamously proclaimed, “If America doesn't come around, then black people are going to burn it down." In July, 1967 when sections of

Cambridge, Maryland did burn down following a speech he gave, even other militants became wary of him.12 Stokely Carmichael told reporters, “You’ll be happy to have me back when you hear from him… He’s a bad man.”13

Despite some CCRM members’ concerns, Appel convinced the group to go ahead with the rally, arguing the benefits of “creative tension.”14 Twenty-two year old Rutgers student Michael Edwards, who met Appel in 1965 through the University’s Protestant

Fellowship, told the press that Brown’s appearance would “mark the start of a massive move to eradicate the misadministration and squalid conditions affecting Camden’s black ghettos.”15 Mayor Pierce strongly opposed Brown’s visit and issued a statement through local hero, African American boxing celebrity and Deputy Director of Public Safety,

Jersey Joe Walcott, refusing to grant a permit. Privately, Griesmann offered his church

11 Howard Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 75; Peniel Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field.”

12 “CRIME: Cherry Pie,” Time, October 25, 1971.

13 Ibid.

14 Malik Chaka, interview by Howard Gillette, April 11, 2002. Fostering “creative tension” was a strategy used by many civil rights activists, including Fr. Groppi. The concept was made popular among activists by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma in 1965. Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 115.

15 “Rap Brown In Camden Tonight,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 30, 1967; “Who Wants Rap Brown?,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Sept. 6, 1967.

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but, publically, the CCRM threatened to hold the rally in the streets. Finally, Judge

Norman Heine forced the city to relent when he denied its injunction, citing the First

Amendment.16 Still, the internal bickering over Brown’s appearance effectively disintegrated the CCRM. Camden’s NAACP “Doc” John Robinson opposed Brown’s visit, telling reporters, the NAACP sees “no purpose in having him come to Camden.

Not all nuts grow on trees.” Robinson said the NAACP would have to “reassess” its collaboration with the CCRM going forward.17 Only the group’s more radical members, like Amos Johnson, Donald Griesmann, and Samuel Appel, would have a place in the movement going forward.18

H. Rap Brown came to Camden on August 30, 1967. Anticipating his arrival, the five thousand people packed into Camden’s Convention Hall worked themselves into frenzy. The chanting could be heard down Mickle Street and up Haddon Avenue:

“Vietnam, Hell No; LBJ; Hell No; Whitney Young, Hell No: Luther King, Hell No;

Uncle Tom, Hell No; Black Power, Hell Yes!” When the 6’4,” twenty-three year old

Brown appeared an hour later, wearing brown corduroys and sunglasses, he further agitated the crowd by ordering all the “hunkie cameramen” to leave.19 Brown’s entourage

16 Malik Chaka, interview by Howard Gillette, April 11, 2002. Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; William Latham, interview by Kevin Walker, November 21, 2006.

17 “Brown's Camden Visit Gets Mixed Reactions,” Chicago Daily Defender (Chicago, IL), Aug 31, 1967.

18 CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” September 28, 1967, 3, box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” October 26, 1967, 2 box 1 (CMM Records).

19 While the word is typically spelled “honkie,” the Courier-Post used the spelling “hunkie,” which the paper later confirmed with Carmichael as his preferred spelling. Carmichael claimed the word was derived from a derisive epithet for Hungarian Americans.

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ousted the white television crews and photographers, destroying one reporter’s tape recorder and tearing up another’s notes.20 Brown demanded that someone lower the

American flags on the stage. NAACP representative William King complied by removing them altogether.21 Before Brown was able to further accost the crowd, however, African

American Baptist minister Amos Johnson took the stage and offered a prayer.22 Finally

Brown confronted the audience with an accusation, “What have you people been doing to the past five years?”23 The message that evening was clear: Camden had to organize. The strategy was even clearer. Quoting Mao Tse-tung, Brown declared: “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”24

When H. Rap Brown’s speech concluded, Deputy Director of Public Safety Jersey

Joe and CCRM member Michael Edwards escorted Brown to exit 4 on the New Jersey

Turnpike.25 As they made their way out of South Camden, they would have seen Camden police and the National Guard stationed on Broadway, equipped with riot gear and shot

20 “Brown Rattles Sabres At Convention Hall Rally,” Courier- Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), August 31, 1967.

21 King was the Pennsylvania state secretary for the NAACP. Malik Chaka describes him as a radical minister, completely unlike any black religious leader in Camden. Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

22 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

23 “‘Poppy’ Sharp, Civil Rights Leader, Dies,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Apr. 6, 1999.

24 “Brown Rattles Sabres At Convention Hall Rally”; Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!: A Report and Reflections on 25 Years of Urban Ministry in Camden, New Jersey, November, 1988; “H. Rap Brown Says Whites Better at Preaching Hate,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 3, 1967; “One Observer’s Views On Rap Brown’s Visit,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Sept. 7, 1967; Malik Chaka, interview by Howard Gillette, April 11, 2002.

25 “Birts Just an Observer at Rap Brown Meeting,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Sept. 12, 1967; Malika Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

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guns, which they purchased that week at a New York City surplus store for the occasion.26 One police officer recalled, derisively, how the “iron pot” helmets made the cops look like “a bunch of Beetle Baileys.”27 The police were under the command of the recently appointed, openly racist ex-marine Chief of Police, Harold Melleby.28 Melleby had just hired an almost entirely new force; seventy percent of the police had only a few years experience.29 Initially, Melleby wanted to storm the stage to arrest Brown in front of the audience. Instead, he took the advice of Philadelphia’s notorious mayor, Frank

Rizzo and flanked the streets with four busloads of cops and National Guardsmen, in what Sam Appel called a “Bull Connor-reaction, northern style.”30 While Jersey Joe and

Edwards were making sure Brown left town without causing trouble, the audience stormed the streets of South Camden. By the end of the night, dozens of windows were broken and a white-owned store was burned down.31

“Black Power, Hell Yes!”: Poppy Sharp and the Black Peoples Unity Movement

Charles “Poppy” Sharp sat in the audience at Convention Hall that evening, but did not take part in the chaos that followed. Instead, he went to the Quick, his

26 Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again, 23; William Latham, interview by Kevin Walker, November 21, 2006.

27 William Latham, interview by Kevin Walker, November 21, 2006.

28 Howard Gillette, Camden After the Fall; Melleby Names Four BPUM Friends as Reds,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 1, 1969; “Melleby May Never Substantiate Claim 4 City Activists Are Communists,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 4, 1969; Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!.

29 Rosenberg, “Fasten Your Seatbelts: You Are Now Entering Camden,” 136.

30 Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 23.

31 “Once-Radical Group Now Is The System,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Jun. 23, 1985.

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neighborhood bar on 2nd and Chestnut, where his cousin was an emcee.32 Sharp took the microphone and “harangu[ed] the people in the bar,” telling them “you don’t have any power… the situation is bad, and the politicians have betrayed you.”33 Poppy Sharp had not been involved in the movement, but Brown moved him. That night, there in the bar, he formed his own militant organization: the Black Believers of Knowledge (BBK).

Twenty-five people joined immediately.34

Poppy Sharp had spent his entire life in Camden, the product of parents whose story was similar to so many African Americans who came to the North during the Great

Migration. Sharp’s father, Barto was from Texas and his mother, Julia May, was from

Kentucky. The couple married in 1926 when Julia was just sixteen and Barto was thirty- five. By the time their fifth child, Charles Rome, was born on October 8, 1930, they had made their way to a rental home at 1472 S. 4th St. in Camden. 35 In racially mixed South

Camden, the Sharp family was subjected to segregation. They had to sit on the back of the bus and in the upper balcony at the movie theater. They could not receive service at white restaurants.36 Barto and Julia’s dream of owning a home was further deferred in

32 Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 23; “‘Poppy’ Sharp,’ Civil Rights Leader, Dies”; Poppy Sharp, interview by Howard Gillette, August 18, 1998; Malik Chaka, interview by Howard Gillette, April 11, 2002; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

33 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

34 “‘Poppy’ Sharp,’ Civil Rights Leader, Dies.”

35 Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.

36 James Troutman, interview by Howard Gillette, November 6, 1997; See also: Walter D. Greason, The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010); Davison Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North.

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1934 with the passage of the National Housing Act, which ushered in the nearly insurmountable policy of “redlining.”37

Barto became involved in the growing black community by working as a minister in the Holy Trinity Baptist church on the corner of Mechanic and Locust streets, which could explain why Amos Johnson described Poppy Sharp as a man with “a great deal of respect for religion, for religious people.”38 To help make ends meet, Barto also worked as a cement finisher when jobs were available. In the wake of the stock market crash, as those jobs grew scarcer, Barto helped form the Laborers' International Union Local 222, one of the first unions in the city.39

By the mid-1940s, Charles Sharp, now known as “Poppy,”—a nickname he claims came from an uncle, but others say stemmed from his heroin abuse—was an eighth-grade dropout. At age fourteen, Sharp already considered himself “a tough guy.”

He formed a gang called the Monarchs, which fought Irish kids and black kids from other

37 Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 51; Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 207- 233; The Relation Between Housing and Delinquency in New Jersey (Trenton, NJ: Division of Statistics and Research, New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies, 1936); H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 2/19/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives); H.L. Parrish, “Camden Weekly Summary 3/6/43” Office of Government Reports/ Bureau of Intelligence Reports and Special Memoranda: File: Camden Box 1839 (College Park, MD: The National Archives); “No Homes for Negro Workers,” (Philadelphia: Youth Committee for Democracy, 1945); Bernard J. Newman, “Philadelphia’s Program for Negro Migration Problems,” The American Missionary 78, no.4 (April 1924), 8.

38 Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.

39 Barry Rosenberg, “The Troublemaker,” Philadelphia Magazine, September 1970.

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areas, “for prestige and bragging rights.”40 His official criminal record began when he was seventeen.41 Sharp spent the next dozen or so years in and out of reformatories and state prison.42

Poppy Sharp’s Camden was a “hustling” town, where the mob controlled everything, including the black clubs. These clubs, such as the Ebony Club on Broadway, were an important aspect of the African American social scene since blacks were barred from every major restaurant in town. Moreover, the clubs were gambling sites. Beginning during the Depression, games would move from house to house each night; many people hoped the winnings would supplement their meager incomes. “Numbers” was more than a game to many people in Camden; it became a promise of survival.43

40 Ibid.

41 “‘Poppy’ Sharp, Civil Rights Leader, Dies.”

42 In 1949, Sharp was sentenced to Annendale Reformatory for breaking and entering and larceny. He was released six months later on indefinite parole. In 1951, he was arrested on robbery charge. He spent six months in Bordentown Reformatory before sent to a maximum-security prison where he spent three more years of a five-year sentence. In 1955, he was convicted on two armed robbery counts. He spent five years in NJ state prison. In 1960 Sharp was convicted on a concealed weapons charge, for which he served three years. In 1964, after he had been out for only five months, Sharp was arrested for sale of heroin in Essex County. This is the only charge for which he maintained his innocence. He was sentenced to a two to three year suspended sentence. In 1967, he was arrested and charged with robbery and threat to kill with a gun; however, he was released when complaint withdrawn.

43 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011; Gulaberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010; Poppy Sharp, interview by Howard Gillette, August 18, 1998; “Raid in Philadelphia Bares Camden Numbers Mob,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun. 7, 1939; “Five Convictions Upset Under Disorderly Act,” Trenton Times (Trenton, NJ), July 7, 1937; “Huge Gambling Joint Raided by State Police,” Maple Shade Progress (Maple Shade, NJ), Jul. 28, 1949; “Wiretap Evidence is Studied in a Case Against Reginelli,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Oct. 27, 1955; “Top Hoodlum Dies in Baltimore Hospital,” The News (Frederick, MD), May 26, 1956; “Funeral for a Racketeer,” Morning News (Dallas, TX), May 30, 1956.

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Sharp never had a “real” job, but often did errands for the mafia when he was young, such as running for coffee or a paper, which would earn him ten dollars. When he was older, he graduated to more substantial favors. He never really understood why, but the mob protected him. He speculated that it could have been their mutual enemies: the police and Mayor Al Pierce.44 In the 1960s, Sharp managed a club on the second floor of

Brownie’s Green Goose Bar at the intersection of Kaighn Avenue and Locust Street, where he ran a craps game. The cops would come by for a ten-dollar take and let the game continue.45 In his pre-activist days, Sharp was better known as a “craps shooter and a snazzy dresser.”46 If you asked him his occupation, he would have told you he was a hustler.47

Robin D.G. Kelley has examined the cultural politics of the ostentatious zoot suit worn by many black southern men (among others) during World War II. Kelley appropriates James C. Scott’s theory of the “hidden transcript,” that is, the ideological resistance of subordinate groups via discourse that takes place beyond the dominant group’s purview, to argue that the zoot suit was a retaliation of African American’s limited options under Jim Crow. Instead of accepting the “slave labor” afforded by limited education and training, these men cultivated alternative identities as “hustlers” or

“gangsters.” Reading Poppy Sharp through this lens highlights the similarity of his experience with southern blacks and provides an added layer of meaning to his criminal

44 Ibid.

45 Barry Rosenberg, “The Troublemaker.”

46 “Honoring Faces, Voices of Camden,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 12, 2002.

47 Malik Chaka, interview by Author, August 10, 2010; Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

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behavior. Sharp’s criminality and violence as a “hustler,” as a “gangster,” and later as a

Black Power activist, function as acts of resistance.48

In many ways, Poppy Sharp exemplifies the late-1960s Black Power leader: he grew up in a tough neighborhood, spent time in jail, and experienced a conversion to leadership. In Camden he developed his own style. Former-BPUM member Sharif

Abdullah, born James Sanders, recalls: “He wasn’t fiery like H. Rap Brown. He was not part of the black intelligentsia like Stokely Carmichael. He kind of had his own niche.”49

Sharp’s approach to leadership embodied the shifting attitudes of ghetto communities throughout the urban North and, thus, was able to energize the people. According to

Malik Chaka, the name Michael Edwards took when he fled Camden for Africa in 1970,

“He had street credibility. He exemplified…the anger that was present in the streets not only in Camden but throughout the country…He exemplified the underclass becoming politicized.” Because Sharp “wasn’t on anybody’s payroll” he was able to “change the whole dynamic between the community and the power structure.”50 Yet, unlike most

Black Power leaders throughout the urban North, Sharp was able to work closely with white clergy, Puerto Ricans, and white suburbanites.

By early spring 1968, the Black Believers of Knowledge (BBK) had morphed into the powerful, militant BPUM. Edwards, who joined the BBK the night Sharp formed it, convinced him to share the name of a similar group in Philadelphia. Walter Palmer, a gang member and member of the Freedom Library, a center for black empowerment and

48 Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, NY: Free Press, 1994).

49 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14, 2010.

50 Ibid.

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organization, co-founded the Black People’s Unity Movement in Philadelphia with his brother Dave Richardson. Following Brown’s Camden visit, Palmer talked with Sharp about creating his own organization in Camden.51 Aside from the common name, it seems the Camden BPUM had little interaction with the Philadelphia BPUM.52

The BPUM became highly organized and goal-oriented.53 In their manifesto, which was highly inclusive of the entire Camden community, not just the black community, the BPUM identified itself as “an organization dedicated to the ideal of participatory democracy… [which] believe[d] people should have a say in determining their destinies.” The BPUM argued, “The schools, welfare institutions, and other agencies within the community should be controlled by the maximum amount of people for the maximum amount of people.”54 The group set seven goals. The first was that the entire community should participate in changing Camden to alleviate “the misery of poverty and oppression for all.” Second, the BPUM focused on structural social change,

“so that everyone has political, social, and economic freedom.” An example offered was to allow everyone access to higher education. Third, the group argued “every man should have access to suitable housing, a decent salary, and self respect.” Fourth, it sought to

51 Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 23; Matthew Countryman, Up South, 191; Poppy Sharp, interview by Howard Gillette, August 18, 1998; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; Sharif Abdulla, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14, 2010.

52 Poppy Sharp, interview by Howard Gillette, August 18, 1998. For more on the Philadelphia BPUM, see Matthew Countryman’s Up South.

53 CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” October 17, 1968, 1, box 1 (CMM Records)

54 “Black People’s Unity Movement” Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society, Camden, NJ. The document is not addressed to the CMM, which indicates it was distributed to other organizations or individuals as well, although there is no indication about how widely it was shared.

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end to racism and discrimination. A fifth goal was to promote “Black Awareness” by teaching the community about black history and heroes. Sixth, the BPUM dedicated itself to accomplishing political, economic, and social control of the black community, which it claimed was “now a colony.” Finally, the group intended to cultivate equal rights and privileges for all.55

The organization was divided into four groups. The first two groups were geared toward children and young adults: The Black Spears, a youth group comprised of children and young adults, ages 7-17 and the Black Youth Awareness, for young African

Americans, ages 14-20, formed to create “awareness of the problems facing Black

Americans and to develop constructive approaches to these problems.” According to Jim

Sanders, a member of the Black Spears who later changed his name to Sharif Abdullah, the youth arm of the organization was a vital component because it was “unencumbered by some of the considerations that were true for the adult folks [because] it was really, really hard to get young people arrested.”56 The BPUM leadership was savvy about keeping its members out of jail by using children in potentially illegal activities.

Overall, the BPUM was essentially a youth organization. There were fewer than ten members over the age of thirty, which is particularly interesting given Sharp’s

“advanced” age of almost thirty-seven when he formed the Black Believers of

Knowledge.57 The youth were treated equally with the adults--just “because [the men and

55 Ibid.

56 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14 2010.

57 Ibid; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; Harvey Johnson, interview by Howard Gillette, October 21,1997. Malik Chaka, interview by Howard Gillette, April 11, 2002. There are estimates that the group contained up to 1000

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women] were older, that didn’t make them more influential.”58 Additionally, the children and teens were extremely focused. The Black Spears “read anything [they] could get

[their] hands on that had anything to do with being black,” and especially enjoyed Frantz

Fanon, “because [being black] was almost like a foreign concept.”59 "The third BPUM subgroup was the Women of the BPUM, which was comprised of women, ages 16-30, who focused on problems with welfare, consumer fraud, child care and development, and other topics concerning family stability.

The final group was the men’s division. This division was considered “the political activist arm” of the movement. Its purpose was to “politically educate the entire

Black community and to revamp the outmoded social structures in the ghetto.” 60 The

BPUM was further enhanced by “technical advisors,” which consisted of middle class professionals “from the ranks of accountants, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and trainers.”

The group considered itself “one of the few militant-activist groups in the country with the technical resources and imput [sic] needed to constructively alleviate the ghetto’s problems.”61 For the most part, these advisors were white.

While the BPUM would eventually take the stance that anyone could share their philosophy, despite the color of his or her skin, according to former BPUM-member

members, but the organization did not keep a membership list, so it is impossible to verify this information.

58 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

59 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14 2010.

60 “Black People’s Unity Movement” Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society.

61 Ibid.

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Sharif Abdullah, there was resistance to working with non-blacks.62 Ideologically, the group was mixed. Hayward Smith was a former Black Muslim and remained deeply influenced by the Nation of Islam. Luther Wallace and Michael Edwards identified more closely with the Black Power current coming out of SNCC.63 There were cultural nationalists, who championed the Back to Africa movement. There were separatists, like

Abdullah, who did not want anything to do with whites. Then, there were people like

Poppy, who had not read a book until he picked up Invisible Man during his most recent stretch in prison. Sharp did not identify with a particular ideology, but did believe there was room for everyone regardless of race. 64

The varied and sometimes discordant philosophies represented in the BPUM’s ideological gamut are indicative Black Power’s complexity. William Van Deburg argues that in the 1965-1975 period a precise delineation of Black Power never emerged as militants focused on clarifying misconceptions about Black Power rather than defining its ideological contours.65 As historian Simon Hall has shown, two years after the BPUM’s formation, scholars John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick observed

“that ideological and programmatical elements of Black Power and integrationism often existed side by side within both individuals and organizations.”66 Distinctions

62 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14, 2010.

63 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

64 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14 2010; Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

65 William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992): 11- 28.

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withstanding, Hall broadly classifies mid-to-late-1960s Black Power organizations as either pluralists or nationalists:

For pluralists, the black struggle was a version of interest-group politics. So long

as equal opportunities and respect were offered to all groups, amicable

coexistence was possible, with a cohesive black community able to enjoy a

“representative share of both local and national decision-making power.”

Nationalists, on the other hand, thought that one group would always come to

“dominate and oppress” the others and that, to avoid “assimilation by fiat,” some

form of separatism (whether in urban enclaves, a separate nation-state, or the

“realm of the psyche”) was necessary.67

Ultimately Sharp persuaded the group to promote a pluralist perspective, allowing alliances with whites and later Puerto Ricans. While no whites were official BPUM members, they became welcomed supporters. As Matthew Countryman’s study of Black

Power in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Kevin Mumford’s study of Newark, New Jersey have demonstrated, this Black Power-era cooperation with whites was an anomaly, even for the region. While there was a moment when progressive white youths and African

Americans joined together in these cities, alliances were eventually usurped by Black

Power politics after 1966.68 Perhaps even more unusual was that a major reason more

66 Simon Hall, “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966-1969,” The Historian 69, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 53.

67 Ibid.

68 Matthew Countryman, Up South; Mumford, Newark.

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resistant BPUM members would come to work with whites was their admiration for

Donald Griesmann.69

“Overlapping Values”: Christianity and Militancy

Initially the BPUM held its meetings at Griesmann’s St. John’s Episcopal Center.

Because of Donald Griesmann’s work with black and Puerto Rican youths, several neighborhood kids attended a BPUM meeting at the community center following H. Rap

Brown’s talk; yet, while Griesmann had been promoting grassroots organizing, he was conflicted about the children’s involvement. James Sanders, who would change his name to Sharif Abdullah when Griesmann encouraged him to pursue Islam, was twelve years old and had been a member of St. John’s Episcopal Church for four years. Griesmann stopped him on the way into the meeting and said, “I’m not going to tell you not to go in there, but I want you to recognize that there are consequences to going in there. You will be followed by police agents and your phone will be tapped.” As Griesmann predicted, after the meeting, police, who had been lined up outside, followed each person home.70

Years later, when Sanders was arrested for BPUM- related activities, Griesmann served as a character witness. The prosecutor, asked Griesmann, sneeringly: “are you trying to say this kid is some kind of saint?” Griesmann paused for a long time before he answered, “it’s too soon to tell.”71

In 1968 the BPUM moved from meeting at St. John’s Episcopal Center to the

Christian Center, soon to be renamed the Martin Luther King Christian Center, on Line

69 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14, 2010.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

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St. Amos Johnson, who had given the invocation during the H. Rap Brown rally, had run the center since he came to Camden in 1963. Johnson thought very highly of Sharp, calling him “a great guy” with “a lot of charisma” who was “wonderful to work with,” and gave Sharp an apartment in the building, rent-free 72 The Baptist church was wary of

Johnson’s relationship with the BPUM, asking repeatedly for him to explain his interactions with the group and to describe what activities took place at the center.73

While the Baptist Church worried Johnson was becoming too secular and too militant through his involvement with the BPUM, he felt a responsibility to serve as the group’s chaplain:

Our values overlapped a lot. The militants were concerned with improving the

community… We were all trying to bring some pressure on the city… We tried

to encourage folks to build rather than burn. The relationship that we had with the

militant groups at that time was to encourage them to look for other alternatives.

We always had a higher purpose in mind.74

Although Johnson did not participate outright in the BPUM’s militant actions, he did know his building was being used to plan potentially violent activities, like the preparation of Molotov cocktails. While Johnson did not openly support militancy, knew the BPUM “had to do their thing.”75

72 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; CMM Ad Council “Minutes, Special Meeting” December 18, 1969, 1, box 1 (CMM Records).

73 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

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The Camden Metropolitan Ministry (CMM), a subset of the CCRM led by Sam

Appel, survived the fallout that followed Brown’s visit, and watched closely as Poppy

Sharp grew the BPUM.76 As early as September 1967 the CMM was aware of the BBK, which it considered an “amorphous group.”77 However, by March 1968, the CMM was impressed by the now-BPUM’s development and decided to lend support to the “positive and progressive group.” 78 The CMM was particularly interested in the BPUM’s plan to establish a cultural center to educate the public about black heritage. Even though the organization had not existed for very long, the CMM agreed that “They are a very dedicated group and several men who are leaders in the group have given up their jobs to direct the movement.” The administrative council voted to donate $500 to the BPUM.79

Yet, while Sharp may have been willing to give up his job, some argue that he was not able to abandon his old life entirely. According to Sharif Abdullah, Sharp was an

“amazingly charismatic figure in an energetically dark way. He was a difficult figure,” who continued to abuse heroin and remained involved in the heroin trade during his tenure with the BPUM.80

Despite Sharp’s past, he rose to power quickly and definitively. From 1967-

76 The CMM records indicate that the organization discussed the BPUM at virtually every monthly meeting in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

77 “Camden Metropolitan Ministry Meeting Minutes,” September 28, 1967. Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14 2010. Abdullah changed his name from James Sanders after he left Camden. Malik Chaka and others have said Sharp had kicked his heroin habit by the time he formed the BPUM. Still accusations abounded while he was leading the group.

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1971, the BPUM was “the gang in town,” according to Malik Chaka. 81

“Post-Rap my argument is that NAACP continued to meet but, as a force in the

city, they were finished, with the formation of the BPUM, at least for a period of

time. From ‘67-‘68 through ‘71, you had a situation where the BPUM exercised

hegemony. 82

Certainly as a former BPUM member, Chaka’s memories of this period may be biased in favor of the BPUM. Still, in these years the BPUM dominated the local newspapers while the NAACP and CORE were rarely mentioned, except when they collaborated with the

CCRM. As Sam Appel recalled in his memoir, Finding the Point Again!, the BPUM

“was not community organization as some of us had envisioned or discussed it.

However, it was the beginning of a grassroots community organization.”83 Three key events during the summer of 1968 solidified the interracial cooperation between white

Christians and black militants in Camden.

1. “The Monster is Gonna Turn”: The Shields Family Incident

By 1968, the BPUM was becoming known throughout the city. In a January interview with the Courier-Post, Sharp, along with BPUM associates Naphia Hamilton,

Winston Monk, and Marie Jennings, claimed that before the BPUM was founded, the people of Camden “weren’t ready…They weren’t organized…But they’re ready now, they’re organized now.”84 Sharp warned that that Camden’s white power structure was

81 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

82 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

83 Appel. Finding the Point Again!, 1-10.

84 “‘Last Warning of Revolt’: Negro Group See Trouble Inevitable in Camden,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jan. 11, 1968.

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clueless about the coming rebellion, explaining, theatrically, how whites in power had created a social system that suppressed minorities: “The white power structure has been

Dr. Frankenstein creating the monster, the system. And now the monster is gonna turn and crush him.”85 Later that month, Sharp demonstrated what the “monster” was capable of when the BPUM, armed with chains and blocking the exits, held audience and Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) members captive at a local meeting until they could be heard. As the BPUM became more of a presence in the city, the Democratic Party began losing faith in Mayor Pierce. Local Democrats implored him to resign for the good of the party.86

The BPUM’s first major test came on April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. While inner-city populations throughout the North reacted violently,

Amos Johnson convinced Sharp that there should not be “any people burning down their own houses” or rioting.87 Sharp and Johnson called Reverend J. Allen Nimmo, a politically connected pastor of the 10th Avenue Baptist Church, and told him they did not support a riot and did not want a police presence. The BPUM went around and told people to “cool it.”88 Camden’s streets remained calm.

In the wake of King’s death, the CMM hired the BPUM to “tell it like it is” to audiences of approximately 250 whites in the suburbs for several weeks in April and May

85 Ibid.

86 “Democrats Try to Get Pierce to Quit as Mayor,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jan. 19, 1968.

87 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

88 Ibid.

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1968.89 Sharp and his associates delivered candid, charged speeches, shouting that “either the suburbs has to do something to help the cities out of its dilemma or else it will be burned to the ground.”90 When the city’s housing problems reached a boiling point on

May 2, when the fourth session between the BPUM and the suburbanites was scheduled,

Poppy cancelled the meeting and told everyone to come to Camden for a real lesson.

Twenty-five whites came to City Hall that night.91

Clarence Shields, a black construction worker, had been forced to move his wife and children due to the highway construction in Camden. The growing family moved from one rundown home to the next. Shields was frequently unemployed because many of the jobs his union offered him required a car, which he could not afford.92 When the family’s home burned down in 1967, the city provided the Shields with a rundown house on North Seventh Street, where the luxury apartment complex, Northgate II was scheduled to be built. All ten children shared one room. The gas and electric did not work. Rats and roaches crawled over every surface.93

The family’s situation was discussed at a meeting at Griesmann’s Episcopal

Center, at which the CMM and the BPUM were present. The CMM wanted to conduct a letter-writing campaign to persuade the city to provide the Shields family with better

89 West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” 76.

90 Ibid, 77.

91 Ibid.

92 “Poor Family in Hotel as Challenge to City,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ). May 2, 1968.

93 Charles Sharp testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 307.

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housing. BPUM representatives were outraged and argued writing letters would not result in any considerable action. The BPUM members left the meeting in search of the family with the intention of publicizing the incident.94 Sharp convinced the family, who was reluctant initially, to move into the historic, upscale Walt Whitman Hotel, at the intersection of Broadway and Federal Street in downtown Camden, in an effort to pressure the city further. BPUM members volunteered to supervise the children, aged five-weeks to twelve-years.95 The family’s home was then demolished at the order of

Joseph Heard, Director of Urban Renewal.96

For the next few days the BPUM held tense demonstrations, demanding that the city relocate the Shields family. On Friday, black, white, and Puerto Rican demonstrators swarmed the Walt Whitman Hotel lobby, holding an hours-long sit-in. On Saturday, people marched through the city and held a sit-in at the intersection of Camden’s two busiest streets: Broadway and Cooper Street. The largest, angriest crowd descended the

Northgate I apartment complex on Sunday. Sharp argued this posh, high-rise apartment complex, a companion structure to Northgate II, was “the most sensitive nerve center in the city,” because it was built on “urban renewal land,” on the “land of poor people,” who had been forced to move in the wake of its construction. 97

94 CMM Meeting Notes, April 30, 1968. Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society.

95 “Poor Family in Hotel as Challenge to City.”

96 “City Finds Home for Family of 12,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), May 5. 1968.

97 Charles Sharp testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967,” 307; Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 24.

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During the summer of 1968, Northgate I was only half full, occupied by whites, and would not admit blacks or Puerto Ricans. The BPUM and its supporters stormed the complex, triggering fire alarms and defacing the building. Police responded in riot gear.

The BPUM and its supporters did not back down. This faceoff proved how powerful confrontation could be. As the BPUM, whites, and Puerto Ricans linked arms to keep the

300 police and National Guard members out of Northgate I, the city closed the Ben

Franklin Bridge to protect civilians from an anticipated firestorm. The police withdrew shortly after. 98 While the protest ended with no injuries, Sharp recalled later, “We were ready to die. But, you know what? They were ready to kill us.”99

The Shields Family incident became a rallying point for city activists concerned with the plight of the poor in the midst of urban renewal. During the intense Thursday through Saturday period of sit-ins and demonstrations a series of “Black/ White

Confrontation seminars” were sponsored by four nearby suburban churches, which promoted additional white, suburban attention.100 Poppy Sharp invited fifty white supporters to join BPUM representatives at a meeting with the Camden Housing

Authority, so they could see, first-hand, what minorities in the city were battling.

According to Appel:

The…white commissioners of the Housing Authority didn’t know what hit them.

Leaders from the BPUM made eloquent assertions regarding the illegality,

immorality, and racist nature of relocating the Shield’s [sic] family and demanded

98 “City Finds Home for Family of 12.”

99 Dwight Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1993.

100 Haddonfield Friends Meeting, Cherry Hill Unitarian Church, Temple Beth Shalom, and Haddonfield Methodist Church.

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that the Housing Authority pick up the tab for the family at the Walt Whitman

Hotel and find immediately a safe and suitable house for them.101

The city did pay the hotel bill and Mayor Pierce promptly offered the Shields a choice of three homes on Sunday, May 5. At 3p.m. the family selected a house in an all-white East

Camden. By 9p.m., the house was destroyed by fire. The fire was declared arson, set by rags soaked in paint thinner.102 Sharp called the Shields family “sacrificial lambs.” He claimed the incident was a “test of wills” situation was responsible for the chain of events that would occur in the summer of 1968.103

Donald Griesmann argued the confrontational style employed by the BPUM successfully gained City Hall’s attention for the first time:

The only time we have seen coordination is when we raised “sand' in the city of

Camden over the past 3 weeks. When we picketed, when we marched, when we

moved a family out of an urban renewal development and put them in a hotel,

when a lobby of a luxury apartment was damaged, then man, we saw action. HUD

came in, started making recommendations, the Department of Transportation said

we will not move any more people. We will hold it up for a month.104

There were two immediate outcomes of the BPUM’s strategy of using the Shields family as an example. First, a group of white suburban supporters of the BPUM organized themselves into the Friends of the Black People’s Unity Movement (FBPUM), which

101 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 24.

102 “City Finds Home for Family of 12.”

103 Dwight Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1993; Charles Sharp testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967,” 307.

104 Donald Griesmann, testimony. 1968 Senate Hearings, n63, 304.

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would become an instrumental in supporting the BPUM.105 Second, the public housing problem became an issue people could no longer ignore. The day after the family’s new home was burned down, thousands of outraged residents from across the city came together in protest—allowing Sharp a larger audience, which came to include high school and college students.

The massive demonstrations following the Shields family incident included two hundred Camden High School students. Inspired by the CCRM’s protest of Camden’s poor housing conditions, the high school students organized their own demonstration at

City Hall. Mayor Pierce joined the students on City Hall’s steps to hear their complaints, which included the city’s use of Camden High School as a command center for police.

When students marched back down Broadway to the school, police used excessive force to push them off the street, wounding several students, who were taken to Cooper

Hospital. Six students were arrested. Police with shotguns were stationed throughout the city, while suburban police prevented African Americans and Puerto Ricans from travelling in or out of the city.106 A grand jury would later find this blockade egregious, arguing minorities could only construe such as action “as directed against them as a group and not against lawbreakers.”107

Camden High School students continued to protest throughout the week, intimidating many of the school’s 425 white students into staying home for four days.

105 “Resume of the Programs and Commitments of the Camden Metropolitan Ministry,” September 25, 1968 box 1 (CMM Records).

106 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 25; “Classes Resume in Camden School,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 11, 1968.

107 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 25; “Camden Protesters Clash with Police,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 7,1968; CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” May 22, 1969, 1 box 1 (CMM Records).

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While the students were coached and backed by the BPUM, two seniors, African

American Stuart Shelton and Puerto Rican Benjamin Ortiz, led the demonstrations.108

Shelton and Ortiz submitted a list of demands, which included an African-American principal and black history classes. The school’s principal, Stanley Koppenhaver, announced he would retire the next month when the school year ended.109 Camden Junior

School, which educated students with special needs, became involved in the protest as well when sixty of its two hundred students marched to City Hall. These students demanded: a black principal, black athletic coaches, as well as a new gymnasium, and water fountains for their two hundred-year old school. The Board of Education agreed to meet with students. By the beginning of the 1969-1970 school year, almost all of the white students from Camden High School had transferred.110

2. The Friends of the Black Peoples Unity Movement

Immediately following the protests, a group of white supporters gathered at the

Episcopal Community Center intending to draft a telegram for New Jersey’s Governor and Attorney General condemning the brutal way police had handled the protesters, especially the students. The group decided to sign the telegram “The Friends of the

BPUM.” Soon after the group organized officially, with the approval of BPUM

108 “100 Whites March on Camden Mayor’s Home,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 10, 1968.

109 “Classes Resume in Camden School,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 11, 1968; CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” May 23, 1968, 1 box 1 (CMM Records).

110 Kirp, Dwyer, and Rosenthal, Our Town, 31.

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members. They elected officers, including Samuel Appel’s wife, Jane, as chairman, and composed a mission statement.111 The FBPUM defined itself as:

an instrument for involvement of committed members of the white community in

working for the goals of social justice in the area of housing, education,

employment, poverty, youth law enforcement, urban renewal, and in matters

pertaining to good government throughout the Camden metropolitan area. We are

committed to supporting and assisting the BPUM in its struggle toward these

goals, particularly in Camden, and to confront the white community with the

crucial nature of the problems of urban life and the need for radical change.112

The organization was divided into several committees: Steering Committee, Finance

Committee, Research Committee, Economic Development, Interpretation Committee, and the Social Functions Committee.113 These committees were filled with professionals who offered invaluable guidance and support to the BPUM.

The white suburbanites who formed the FBPUM were largely members of CMM leaders Dick Whitman’s and Larry Black’s suburban Presbyterian churches, which had been involved with Camden’s impoverished communities since the early 1960s. Despite the compassion for the plight of inner-city minorities one might expect of those who identified with Christianity, the FBPUM’s formation was anomalous. Suburban churches, particularly white, suburban churches, rarely intervened in the ghetto in the late 1960s. In

111 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 25; West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” 77; CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” June 27, 1968, 1 box 1 (CMM Records).

112 “Black People’s Unity Movement” Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society; Sam Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 26.

113 “Black People’s Unity Movement” Gillette Collection, Camden County Historical Society.

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a nationally syndicated article published in the Courier-Post in September 1967, Louis

Cassels reported that from conversations with “a few persons familiar with the mood of the black ghetto,” “It is futile for a white suburban church to try to minister directly to ghetto residents,” and that while “a few charismatic white clergymen have been able to identify so completely with the Negro’s cause that they have won the ghetto’s confidence…they are too exceptional to constitute a basis for institutional strategy.”114

While white Protestant ministers’ ghetto-based cooperation with black militants was very unusual in the mid-1960s, especially after 1966, it was even less common to find white suburbanites forging such alliances. Several historians have demonstrated how white suburbanites in cities throughout the urban North fought viciously to keep minorities confined to the ghetto, or as Arnold Hirsch has famously theorized, the

“second ghetto,” a space sustained by a wide range of complicit factions, such as inner- city whites, real-estate agents, and discriminatory local policies and politics.115

Presumably, many Camden whites were hostile, or at least not sympathetic, to the

CCRM’s mission, given the number of white students that transferred following the

Camden High School demonstrations and the reaction of some East Camden residents to the Shields family’s home in their predominantly white neighborhood. Yet, historically, suburbanites have been more aggressively “protective” of their spaces than city dwellers.

James Loewen has shown how as the restrictive covenants that prevented minorities from moving into the suburbs of Chicago and Los Angeles, among other places, began to be

114 Louis Cassels, “What to Do…Church vs. Ghetto: Must Understand Why Negroes Riot,” United Press International.

115 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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lifted, “sundown suburbs” emerged as even more vicious places than interracial cities, in which whites engaged in threats and acts of violence against minorities.116

Both Arnold Hirsch and George Lipsitz have tied European-Americans’ developing sense of “whiteness” to residential segregation in the postwar years. Lipsitz suggests that suburban whites had more at stake in terms of preserving their racial status because access to suburban homeownership represented a very important kind of social privilege that was readily available to European Americans and largely denied to African

Americans and other racialized minorities. In this restricted milieu, European ethnics— once deprived as members of inferior races—became ever more invested in a racial identity as “white” people. 117

Clearly FBPUM members were not representative of all whites in Camden’s suburbs. The Courier-Post made note of suburbanites who resisted the BPUM and

FBPUM’s project, typically identifying their conservative politics, such as 25 year-old

Jerome Heineman of Audubon, NJ, who was a member of the Camden County

Conservative Club and Goldwater for President Club; or Richard McCullough, Jr., of

Kirkwood, NJ, who would serve as vice chairman of the Camden County Committee of the George Wallace Party and coordinator of the Volunteers for Wallace in the area in the fall of 1968.118 Not all suburban ministers could invigorate suburbanites’ interest in

116 James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 274.

117 George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White Problem’ in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995), 218-224.

118 Carolyn Zachary, “‘Rights’ Violence Cases Set for Grand Jury,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), May 19, 1969.

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inner-city social justice. For example, despite incessant prodding, white Presbyterian minister Stuart Wood of Mount Laurel, NJ could not interest locals in Camden’s housing problems; so he began volunteering in Camden on his own.119

A distinguishing characteristic of FBPUM membership is a high concentration of leftist radicals. Twenty-seven-year-old William Repsher, was a graduate student at the

Martin Luther King School for Social Change, a small school founded by radical Quakers that met at King’s alma mater, Crozer Theological Seminary, just outside of

Philadelphia.120 Fifty-seven-year-old Jack Gerswick was an electrician from Westmont,

NJ who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and was arrested for distributing anti-war literature. Norwegian immigrant George Willoughby was a teacher at Pendle Hill, a

Quaker school in Pennsylvania, and a member of Citizens for Peace in Vietnam. Ruth

Krause from Cherry Hill, NJ spent two weeks during the summer of 1967 touring North

Vietnam as a member of the Women’s Strike for Peace.121 Many campaigned for Eugene

McCarthy in his bid for the presidency. 122 At least some were associated with the Old

Left/ Communism, like John Tisa, former Campbell Soup employee, who was forced out

119 Kirp, et al. Our Town, 30.

120 Carolyn Zachary, “‘Rights’ Violence Cases Set for Grand Jury”; Susan Richards, “An Historical Footnote,” January 20, 2008: http://susanrichardsartist.blogspot.com/2008/01/historical-footnote.html, accessed January 5, 2013. Interestingly, according to Susan Richards, a graduate of the Martin Luther King School for Social Change, Crozer’s administration was unwilling to hang a portrait of King among its famous alumni when petitioned to do so by students from the School and the Crozer Black Caucus following King’s assassination. By 1970, the Martin Luther King School for Social Change closed and Crozer merged with Colgate Rochester, to become Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.

121 Carolyn Zachary, “‘Rights’ Violence Cases Set for Grand Jury”; “Rev. Appel Arrested on ‘Inciting’ Charge,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jul. 23, 1968.

122 Leon Benson, “McCarthy Praises Area Backers Who Work with the BPUM,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jun. 28, 1968.

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of labor organizing when he pleaded the fifth before the House Un-American Activities

Committee, irrevocably damaging his reputation.123 It is likely that others, like RCA engineer John Heizer of Haddonfield, NJ, were motivated by a desire to keep the pandemonium that claimed so many cities in the 1960s from encroaching on Camden.

As Heizer explained, “We are in this group to put a damper on violence in the city.”124

FBPUM membership was often dangerous. Even the most dedicated members’ questioned their participation. Jack Gerswick’s Westmont neighbors and Philadelphia co-workers sent him death threats and threw eggs at his house.125 Gwen Simon Gain, a fair housing field representative for South Jersey, and her husband Bill Gain, who had joined the FBPUM because its “avowed purpose was to lend moral support to the Black

People’s Unity Movement in Camden,” were overwhelmed by the inherent danger.126

For example, as mentioned in the Introduction, in June of 1968 FBPUM members set fire to effigies of Mayor Pierce and Chief of Police Melleby, when the BPUM insisted the murder charges brought against its members were racially motivated. Six teens in all had been arrested for 34-year-old, white milkman, Daniel Morrell’s murder. Morrell, a father of four from the nearby suburb West Deptford, had been stabbed to death while delivering milk to a grocery store on South 4th Street in South Camden, the same street on which Sharp had grown up.127 Three of the six defendants were acquitted and three were

123 Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 110; United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, “Communist Activities in the Philadelphia Area, Hearings,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print Office, 1952).

124 “Rev. Appel Arrested on ‘Inciting’ Charge.”

125 Carolyn Zachary, “‘Rights’ Violence Cases Set for Grand Jury.”

126 Gwen Simon Gain, Confessions of a Fair Housing Agitator, 315.

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sentenced to life in prison. It is unclear from the press coverage which defendants were affiliated with the BPUM. One of the teens found guilty, Curtis Miller, served as a witness for the prosecution and claimed the youths killed Morrell because they wanted money to go to the beach. The Gains found that the FBPUM was more than they had

“bargained for” due to “dangerous street demonstrations; confrontations with the City of

Camden police” and “in-fighting among the enraged black citizens of Camden.” They left the group.128

While the group of white suburbanites that constituted the FBPUM was unusual,

FBPUM organizational records note the group was aware of one similar organization with comparable goals, called Friends of FIGHT (Freedom, Independence, God, Honor,

Today).129 Friends of FIGHT organized in Rochester, New York during the early-1960s, when interracial cooperation was more prevalent, in support of the black, militant group,

FIGHT. While the BPUM and FIGHT shared similarities-- most significantly cooperation among liberal whites, religious leaders, and Black Power militants--there were important differences. Unlike the BPUM, FIGHT was the creation of black and white ministers who raised money to hire Saul Alinsky, a white, professional organizer and head of the

Industrial Areas Foundation. Even though Alinsky, and his lead organizer, a white former

Catholic seminarian named Edward Chambers, cultivated indigenous black leadership,

127 John Way Jennings, “Convicted Killer Charged With Parole Violation,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Jan. 27, 1988; John Way Jennings and Larry Lewis, “A Killer In '68 Is Himself Slain As A Youth, Curtis Miller Joined In Killing A Milkman. Yesterday, He Was Shot To Death Execution-style,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Dec. 18, 1993.

128 Ibid.

129 Vic Jameson to Lawrence Black, William McGregor, Kenneth G. Neigh, Lawrence McMaster, Charles Leber, memorandum, 1969, box 1 (CMM Records).

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their partnership could not survive the explosion of Black Power politics. In 1970 Time accused the duo of fostering a “new kind of racism”: “In Rochester, FIGHT became tainted with black racism and whites have been discouraged from joining.”130 In 1968, as the FBPUM organized, Alinsky was training middle-class whites to organize in protest of their deteriorating neighborhoods. Essentially, Saul Alinsky, who had been organizing black ghettos since the late-1930s, was convinced he could no longer do so successfully in the midst of the Black Power Movement. 131 Yet, under Appel, Whitman, and Black’s guidance, the FBPUM thrived into the 1970s. Immediately following its formation, the group began marching with the BPUM and raising money. It continued to do so throughout the organizations’ relationship. By the end of the summer of 1968, Poppy

Sharp was meeting with the FBPUM once a month; its membership had grown to 350.132

3. “A Ministry In Itself”: BPUM Economic Development Corporation

Throughout 1968, there were many tense interactions between the BPUM and

FBPUM as they negotiated their relationship.133 Ultimately, the relationship was successful, particularly from a financial standpoint. In its first twenty months, the

FBPUM collected over $25,000 for the BPUM. Additionally, the FBPUM supplied the

BPUM with its mailing list so the BPUM could draw on its members’ strengths to

130 “Radical Saul Alinsky: Prophet of Power To The People,” Time, March 2, 1970.

131 Vic Jameson to Lawrence Black, William McGregor, Kenneth G. Neigh, Lawrence McMaster, Charles Leber, memorandum, 1969, box 1 (CMM Records). “Radical Saul Alinsky: Prophet of Power to the People,” 56; CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” September 19, 1968, 1, box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” June 27, 1968, 1, box 1 (CMM Records).

132 CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” September 19, 1968, 1, box 1 (CMM Records).

133 West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” 77.

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develop the Black Peoples Unity Movement Economic Development Corporation

(BPUM-EDC), which had the goal of helping people in the inner-city achieve financial independence by creating black-owned businesses.134 Dick Whitman even sat on the

BPUM-EDC’s board of trustees.135

The BPUM-EDC had its beginnings in Amos Johnson’s community center, when

BPUM member Hayward Smith, who was a professional tailor, taught the BPUM members the trade to create a dashiki factory. Amos Johnson gave the BPUM space for the factory on the community center’s second floor, rent-free.136 When the factory officially opened in July 1968, it was “the first wholly owned and operated black manufacturing business in South Jersey.”137 Johnson got professional sewing machines donated, convinced Campbell Soup to donate money, and managed the thirty people that eventually worked there. 138 The BPUM became so skilled at producing the garments that they received orders from Sears and JC Penny for dashikis.139

134 West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” 77-78.

135 CMM Ad Council “Minutes” March 20, 1969, 1, Undated box 1 (CMM Records).

136 Amos Johnson, interview by Laure Lahey, August 10, 2010. CMM Ad Council “Minutes, Special Meeting” December 18, 1969, 1, box 1 (CMM Records).

137 “Police in Camden Warned by Chief,” New York Times (New York, NY), Jul. 9, 1968.

138 Malik Chaka, interview by Author, August 10, 2010; “Annual Report,” The Board (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1970), 24.

139 Ibid; Amos Johnson , interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010; Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011; CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” October 17, 1968, 2, box 1 (CMM Records); BPUM-EDC, “Press Release” Camden, New Jersey, August 5, 1971 box 1 (CMM Records); BPUM-EDC Untitled Document, box 1 (CMM Records).

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In the coming years the BPUM-EDC grew progressively more independent. The

FBPUM continued to raise funds and members served on the BPUM-EDC’s board of directors. The FBPUM assisted the BPUM-EDC in obtaining some significant grants, such as Federal grant of $119,000 in 1969 and a $150,000 grant through the United

Presbyterian “Self Development of People” Fund in 1971. By 1972 the BPUM-EDC controlled close to a million dollars in economic assets, including a gas station, a Burger

King, a day care, a corrugated box factory, a custom tailor and retail store, and the

B.P.U.M. Building Maintenance Service. FBPUM members continued to support the

BPUM by shopping in their stores and educating suburban whites about racial inequality.140

According to Harvey Johnson, longstanding executive director of the BPUM-

EDC, “Certainly, yes. There is no question that [from 1967-1971], the Friends provided some very solid support and some financial resources. I think without it that we would not have gotten where we are and I believe that there have been some solid friendships that have developed out of our relationships with each other.”141 The ministers’ commitment to the BPUM-EDC and likely the white suburbanites who also supported it,

140 “Administrative Council Meeting” February 20, 1969, box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes” September 11, 1969, 2. box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes” December 18, 1969, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes” November 20, 1969, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes, Special Meeting” December 18, 1969, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes” March 20, 1969, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” February 26, 1970, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); Larry Black, “Memo,” to Administrative Council CMM February 8, 1971, box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” November 18, 1971. box 1 (CMM Records); Camden Metropolitan Ministry, “Special Note” to the Synod of New Jersey, box 1 (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” April 22, 1971, 1. box 1 (CMM Records); “Information Sheet ‘D’” (no date) box 1 (CMM Records); “Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 3,” August 1971, box 1 (CMM Records); West, “Twin Track Coalitions in the Black Power Movement,” 78-79.

141 Appel, Finding the Point Again!, 28.

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was likely derived from a common sense of mission. The CMM explained its relationship with the BPUM-EDC to its council, the Synod of New Jersey, as such: “the

BPUM-EDC is also in its own way a ministry in itself, ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of men and women, providing not only jobs and training but also a sense of dignity and hope and worth.”142

“Free Himself, or Kill Himself”: Conclusion

The interracial alliances fostered by black and white clergy, the BPUM, and the

FBPUM, and Puerto Ricans, complicate our understanding of Black Power militancy and

Christian nonviolence by demonstrating points of intersection and cooperation in a secondary, post-war rustbelt city. In the wake of the urban renewal, a shifting economy, and lack of adequate homes and schools, militants and nonmilitant Christians alternately compromised and reconfigured their own values to promote the shared goal of equality for the poor in their community.

To some extent, this cooperation can be explained by their shared goals of helping the city’s poor. Decades later, Sharp summed up these years:

There was a purpose back then to the protesting that went on: to empower black

and poor people economically, politically and socially. I didn’t want to bring the

killing of people.143

The BPUM’s sometimes attorney, Carl Poplar confirms this:

They wanted community development in Camden, and they'd be screaming and

ranting but [the BPUM] really [was] very non-violent…It's just that their rhetoric

142 Camden Metropolitan Ministry, “Special Note” to the Synod of New Jersey, Undated, box 1 (CMM Records).

143 Carol Comegno, “‘69 Riots: Tragic Turning Point for Camden,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Sept. 10, 1989.

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was intense. People assumed they were militant and they exploited that to get

movement from the city. They didn't want violence. They wanted things to get

better.144

While the confrontational style Sharp cultivated during the summer of 1968, in which he went toe to toe with officials, berating and threatening them, was repeated time and again in the coming years, it seems this was largely theatrical. As Sharp argued, “The BPUM did not resort to bullets as often as some more militant groups such as the Black

Panthers.”145 Similarly, despite their collaborative relationship, both Sharp and

Griesmann were invested in making it clear to onlookers that Sharp was in charge. For example, Sharp threw Griesmann out of many meetings in 1968. According to

Griesmann:

In order to announce who was in charge, [the BPUM] made sure that they exited

me in public. I was not the leader and they should not be looking to me for

leadership and I was very comfortable with that. I was booted out of many

meetings and was not invited to many meetings. That was very important to the

community organizing…146

144 Renee Winkler, “Attorney Stepped into the Middle of Intense Situation,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 1, 2007.

145 Dwight Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Mar. 19, 1993. The gun was central to the Black Panthers identity; however it was much more of a political stance, an act of empowerment, than a weapon. For more see: Adam Winker, “The Secret History of Guns,” The Atlantic Magazine, September 2011.

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Griesmann’s claim is substantiated by BPUM member, Sharif Abdullah: Griesmann provided “a lot of background support. He never took a front up position; never wanted to be on the stage when people were doing a speech.”147

Accordingly, when Donald Griesmann was invited to testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing on the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act (ICA) in Washington,

DC, he brought Poppy Sharp with him. As a result of the attention Camden received due to the Shields family incident, Senators Muskie and Howard Baker were particularly interested Griesmann’s opinion the ICA’s Title VIII, which dealt with “the displacement and relocation of people and businesses and projects that are financed in whole or in part by Federal funds.” The ICA would better facilitate cooperation between federal, state, and local agencies; the purpose of Title VIII was to ensure housing would be available for those displaced by such projects and that relocation assistance would be provided.148

Griesmann had submitted a full report to Congress on the problems urban renewal was causing in Camden, but the Committee wanted Griesmann to testify at the hearing to further publicize Camden’s story at the national level.149 Mayor Pierce vehemently opposed their appearance.150

Griesmann and Sharp, who both supported the passage of the ICA, brought with them various members of citizens’ groups, members of the BPUM, and people involved with urban renewal projects. In the previous five years, five thousand families were

148 “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 297.

149 Senator Edward Muskie, “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 309.

150 “Pierce Assails Griesmann,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 27, 1968.

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displaced by the Centerville-Liberty renewal project and the construction of Highway 76, with no substantive assistance from the state of New Jersey. Under the present plans,

Griesmann anticipated that another three thousand families would need to relocate by

1973. In that time, only 101 new low-income homes had been built, which were reserved exclusively for the elderly.151 His assessment was confirmed by a 1968 Department of

Highway and Urban Development task force study the impact of highway building and urban renewal in Camden. The taskforce found that eighty-five percent of the families displaced by the North-South Freeway were minorities. Additionally the Civil Rights

Division of the New Jersey State Attorney General’s Office confirmed these results. The final report, “Camden, New Jersey: A City in Crisis,” argued:

It’s obvious from a glance at the renewal and transit plans that an attempt is being

made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by two different

methods. The first is building highways that benefit white suburbanites,

facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back; the second is by

means of urban renewal projects which produce middle and upper income

housing and civic centers without providing adequate, decent, safe, and sanitary

housing, as the law provides, at prices which the relocated can afford.”

The report’s central argument was that “the outcome was purposely planned and carried out.”152

151 Donald Griesmann testimony, “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 297-298.

152 Mark H. Rose and Raymond A. Mohl, Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy Since 1939 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 108.

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Griesmann made a series of recommendations during his testimony, which supported his general critique of urban renewal: the people affected by urban renewal in

Camden, as in Philadelphia, in Watts, in Bedford Stuyvesant and beyond, were not those making the decisions about it. People who lived outside of the city planned and benefitted from redevelopment.153 Of Camden, Griesmann explained, “The history that we have seen in Camden is a history of broken promises, of lies, of added disappointments, and frustrations to the black, to the poor, to the Puerto Ricans… In

Camden the blacks and Puerto Ricans have been denied the opportunity to participate in the formulation of the city’s redevelopment”154 Griesmann argued that the revitalization of Camden had been built on the backs of blacks and Puerto Ricans.155

Sharp elaborated on these points by offering his personal experience as a black man in Camden. He discussed the Shields family incident in detail and made clear that

African Americans and Puerto Ricans were ready to fight.156 Sharp told the Senators:

153 Griesmann’s recommendations: 1. Conserve low-income housing resources which are “decent, safe, and sanitary”; 2. Have grassroots representation in the planning stages, arguing that the people who are intimately affected by urban renewal should be included in the “planning, in the decision making, in execution, and in monitoring of programs which determine their destiny.”; 3. Develop a mechanism to coordinate the various federally assisted programs and their effects on housing.; 4. Have the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administer point 3.; 5. Offer relocation to properties adjacent to urban development projects; 6. Place responsibility for the displacement of housing resources on the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

154 Donald Griesmann testimony, “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 302.

155 Ibid.

156 Charles Sharp testimony, “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, 306-309.

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“you are forcing the black man to do the only thing that is left to do, and that is to go into the streets and fight. Either free himself, or kill himself.”157

Although the BPUM, FBPUM, and CCRM were not able to halt urban renewal that summer, or create any new homes for Camden’s poor, they established an important coalition that would eventually see progress. The groups continued to collect data on

Camden’s housing; they maintained a presence in the media; they maintained a presence in the streets. Mayor Pierce grew more unpopular with minorities and with his own party. He resigned in 1969 and was replaced by Republican Joseph Nardi, a thirty-eight year old former municipal judge who had grown up in downtown Camden above his

Italian immigrant parents’ shoe repair shop on Market Street. 158 When Nardi’s support for continued urban renewal produced the same consequences minorities experienced under Pierce’s tenure, the BPUM, FBPUM, and CCRM brought a suit against the city.

Represented by Camden Regional Legal Services (CRLS), a federally funded, non-profit law firm, the group, calling themselves the “Camden Coalition,” charged the city with failing to provide residents displaced by urban renewal low-income housing options, as it was legally required to do. In 1970, the trial court froze all urban renewal projects. For two years, no urban renewal took place in Camden. In 1972 a frustrated Mayor Nardi agreed, if building could resume, to provide several hundred new, low-income housing units. The local Building Trades Council, also named in the lawsuit, agreed to hire and

157 Ibid, 306.

158 Kevin Riordon, “Judge Joseph M. Nardi Jr. Dead at 71,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Nov. 25, 2003.

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train black and Puerto Rican workers from Camden, who had been unable to join unions.

The Camden Coalition dropped the suit.159

…

On the night of April 16, 1969 students packed into Rutgers University’s College

Center to see Poppy Sharp speak. Sharp stood before students and declared that a war was raging—not in Birmingham, not in Watts, not in Chicago, but in their city: Camden,

New Jersey. Sharp’s message was clear that night: students were either with him or against him and other militants in their quest to “destroy American institutions.” There was “no middle ground” in this crusade.160 Less than two years after H. Rap Brown’s visit, Poppy Sharp was Camden’s voice. As he reminded a newspaper reporter, some twenty years later, when discussing all that happened in 1968: “It’s not his-story. In

Camden, it is my story.” 161

159 Kirp, et al., 33; William Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods: Achievements, Opportunities, and Limits (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc), 55.

160 “Rutgers Students Hear Poppy Sharp,”) Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), April 11, 1969.

161 Poppy Sharp, Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Mar. 19, 1993.

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CHAPTER 5

“JUSTICE NOW!, ¡JUSTICIA AHORA!”: CAMDEN’S 1971 RIOT AND BLACK-PUERTO RICAN RADICALISM

city skyline in haze: the stench of the river-- August dog days1

No one knew how it began, but late in August, in that sweltering summer of 1971, red banners, in all forms, appeared in windows and on front doors throughout Camden.

In the weeks following a highly public and controversial confrontation between a Puerto

Rican motorist and two white Camden police officers, people draped their homes and businesses in red shirts, red towels, red dresses, red flags, and even red underwear to guard against the mayhem that engulfed the city. Signs reading “Puerto Rico Libre!” and

“Black P.R.,” annotated the displays. As North Camden resident, Ida Robinson explained to a Courier-Post reporter, “If you have something red in your window, they won’t touch your house…It’s a black power symbol.” 2

“They” were mostly young, mostly African American and Puerto Rican, mostly poor. “They” were angry. As the motorist, who came to be known as “Horatio Jiménez,” grew weaker from the blows his head and gut sustained, the marching and chanting gave way to violence and destruction. “They” burned down buildings, destroyed police cars, and drove around the city waving Puerto Rican flags and thrusting Black Power salutes.3

1 Nick Virgilio, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 64.

2 Barbara Irvin, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 23, 2010; James M. Markhams “Curfew is Continued in Quiet but Riot-Torn Camden,” New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 23, 1971; Kitty Caparella, “Blood-Red Flag to Stay the Blood,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 23, 1971.

3 “Camden: State of Emergency,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971.

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When “Horatio Jiménez” sank into a coma, residents began painting red crosses alongside the banners and signs. 4

In considering how black-Puerto Rican solidarity emerged in such an abrupt and forceful manner that summer, this chapter examines the circumstances surrounding what historian Daniel Sidorick and sociologist Gregg Lee Carter have each called the “most significant” Puerto Rican riot of the 1960s and 1970s.5 This chapter argues that a confluence of conditions that simultaneously weakened the Camden Civil Rights

Ministerium (CCRM) and further radicalized the Puerto Rican community—including arrests of several key CCRM members, nascent black/Puerto Rican cooperation during the 1969 Rutgers University protests, as well as an increasingly aggressive Camden police force--laid the groundwork for this interracial revolt.

“This is What Can Cause a Riot”: The “Horatio Jiménez” Incident

At 8:02p.m. on July 30, 1971 police officers Gerald Miller and Warren Worrell stopped a forty-year-old Puerto Rican man at the intersection West and Stevens Streets for driving his 1959 Ford station wagon in “an erratic manner.” According to the officers, the man “became abusive” and hit Miller, forcing Miller and Worrell to restrain him. Miller required medical attention for “punches to the face and the neck by someone resisting arrest” ; the motorist suffered cuts, bruises, and a ruptured small bowel. The man, who would come to be known in the media as Camden resident Horatio Jiménez from the driver’s license found in his pocket at the hospital, was charged with assaulting

4 Barbara Irvin, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 23, 2010; James M. Markhams “Curfew is Continued in Quiet but Riot-Torn Camden”; Caparella, “Blood- Red Flag to Stay the Blood.”

5 Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism, 165; Gregg Lee Carter, “Hispanic Rioting During the Civil Rights Era,” Sociological Forum 7, no. 2 (June 1992): 301-322.

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a police officer.6

Several bystanders, however, insisted it was the police who were abusive.

According to the witnesses, Miller and Worrell--both twenty-five-years old, 6 feet tall,

200lbs, and white--clubbed the man, who was actually Rafael Rodriguez Gonzales from nearby Penns Grove, New Jersey, with their nightsticks and dragged him by his feet to their patrol car. Carmen Villaneuva, a West Avenue resident, saw Rodriguez Gonzales coming down Benson Street as a man came up to the car to talk to him. Rodriguez

Gonzales slowed down, consequently stopping traffic: “Police were coming down West

Street and they blowed their horn for him to move. He went around the block and came by to talk to us.” 7 Police came back down the street and signaled for Jiménez to pull over. Miller asked for his license and when Rodriguez Gonzales hesitated, probably because of the active traffic warrant pending against him, Miller told him to get out of the car. As Miller began to pat him down, Rodriguez Gonzales turned around, demanding,

“What are you searching me for?”8

Villaneuva, who was close enough to the incident to get the officers’ badge numbers, said Miller responded by hitting Rodriguez Gonzales first with his fist, then with his nightstick; Rodriguez Gonzales’s face bled profusely. Worrell got out of the car as Rodriguez Gonzales fell to the ground. Both cops slammed into him with their nightsticks and boots.9 Twenty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Rodriguez remembered, “He was bleeding from his nose, his mouth, the blood was just dripping right out…He had no

6 Markhams “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.”

7 Ibid

8 Ibid. 9 Markhams “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.”

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chance… no chance at all, with the two police officers.”10 Villaneuva “thought he was dead at the time.”11

Rodriguez Gonzales had been driving around and drinking that day with white seventeen-year-old, Leslie Alan Whitesall from Penns Grove, New Jersey. Whitesall later admitted that Rodriguez Gonzales had consumed eighteen beers in nine hours, noting

“He could drink a case, easy.”12 As Miller and Worrell assailed Rodriguez Gonzales,

Whitesall got out of the car and threatened to call the police. When he asked for pencil and paper to write down the officers’ badge and car numbers, Miller and Worrell cuffed him. 13 By this time, fifty people had gathered to watch. Ominously, a man shouted:

“You shouldn’t have done that…this is what can cause a riot.”14 It began to rain and the crowd, though very angry, dispersed.15

Several witnesses went to the police station to complain, but were told to come back.16 Four days later, the Courier-Post published the first public account of the incident, “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Motorist”17 “Horatio

10 Statement of Elizabeth Rodriguez, August 17, 1971, City of Camden, Detective Division, contained in Prosecutor’s File.

11 Grand Jury Testimony of Carmen D. Villanueva, February 17, 1972, contained in Court File.

12 “3 Say They Saw Police Beating Man Who Died,” Courier-Post, (Cherry Hill, NJ), Jan, 31, 1973; “3 Testify to Seeing 2 Policemen Beat Gonzales on Camden Street,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Jan. 31, 1973.

13 Markhams, “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.”

14 Statement of Elizabeth Rodriguez, Prosecutor’s File.

15 Ibid.

16 Markhams, “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.” 17 Markhams, “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.”

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Jiménez,” as most people continued to call Rodriguez Gonzales in the coming weeks, underwent several operations to repair his intestines. On August 19 the infection that seeped through Rodriguez Gonzales’s body shocked him into cardiac arrest, propelling him into a coma. Less than one month later, Rafael Rodriguez Gonzales was dead.18

Camden Civil Rights Ministerium, 1969-1971

As word spread about the “Jiménez” incident, Black Peoples Unity Movement

(BPUM) chairman Charles “Poppy” Sharp offered his support to the Puerto Rican community privately as well as publically in the media. Sharp interpreted the event as yet another affront not just against Puerto Ricans, but all Camden’s minorities. Taking the opportunity to rally the community Sharp declared, “We have an awful lot in common. Blacks and Puerto Ricans must unite now under one cause—freedom.”19 Sharp was no stranger to the spotlight. While he attracted vast media attention when he formed the BPUM in 1967 and, especially, during the CCRM’s explosive activism in 1968, since

1969 most of the media attention focused on the arrests and trials of Sharp and his allies.

The charges, all of which would prove unsubstantiated, were the city’s attempts to stall the activists’ work, especially as it became clear the coalition was building a legal case against the city for its unfair housing practices, which the activists dropped in 1972, when

Mayor Nardi acceded to their demands. From 1969 through 1971 the Camden

Metropolitan Ministry (CMM), Friends of the Black Peoples Unity Movement (FBPUM), and Black Peoples Unity Movement (BPUM) did continue to collaborate, especially

18 Craig R. Waters, “Jiménez Reported ‘In a Coma,’” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

19 “Two Patrolmen Charged in Beating of Motorist,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 13, 1971.

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financially; however, the militant activism that drove the group’s success in 1968, faded substantially.

In September 1969, a grand jury indicted CMM and FBPUM leader Samuel Appel and FBPUM members William Repsher and Jack Gerswick on “conspiracy to commit violence” charges, based on a series of seminars Appel held in 1968, designed to prepare white, suburban FBPUM members for police confrontation in Camden.20 While the jury eventually failed to convict Appel, Repsher, and Gerswick, the trial was a time consuming and costly undertaking. The same day the FBPUM members were indicted, an African American teenage girl and a white police officer were killed in a black section of South Camden when police tried arrest a man on a fugitive warrant. The deaths resulted in allegations of police brutality, which sparked a riot that killed two policemen, injured scores of black and Puerto Rican citizens, and burned dozens of buildings.21 In the midst of the chaos, Chief of Police Harold Melleby ordered police to raid BPUM headquarters, located in the Martin Luther King Center, run by Baptist minster Amos

Johnson. Police arrested Poppy Sharp, claiming they found forty-three packets of heroin as well as guns. At Sharp’s trial in 1970, the police would admit to planting the evidence.22 Three months after Sharp’s arrest, police broke into BPUM leader Michael

Edwards’s apartment in the middle of the night and shot him in the ankle and leg.

Edwards was charged with firing a gun in city limits and possession of marijuana.

20 Vic Jameson to Lawrence Black, William McGregor, Kenneth G. Neigh, Lawrence McMaster, Charles Leber, memorandum, 1969, box 1 (CMM Records).

21 Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 83.

22 Ibid.

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Because he did not feel a fair trial was possible in Camden, Edwards escaped to Africa and changed his name to Malik Chaka.23

Also in September 1969, the Baptist Church learned that Amos Johnson had filed for divorce. As Baptists generally interpret the New Testament as prohibiting divorce, with very few exceptions, the church leaders could have terminated Johnson’s position for this infraction alone.24 But, leaders had been concerned about Johnson’s involvement with the BPUM for some time. Johnson’s superiors had been watching him since he allowed the BPUM to establish its headquarters on church property, often sending letters expressing their anxiety regarding Johnson’s “secular” activities. Finally, the Baptist

Church asked Johnson to resign.25 In 1970 Amos Johnson left Camden; the BPUM no longer had a rent-free space.

Donald Griesmann, who had been a fearless and invaluable supporter of militant activism, was also arrested in 1969 for his involvement with BPUM protests.26

Following his legal ordeal, Griesmann believed he could more effectively support

Camden’s minorities as an attorney. In 1970, he entered Rutgers Law School. While

Griesmann maintained his relationship with the BPUM throughout his time in school, from 1971-1973, he spent most of his time working with CRLS. While the work

23 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

24 For more on Baptist views on divorce, see: William Vance Trollinger, Jr., “Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church,” Journal of Church and State 47, no. 4 (2005); David L. Akin, A Theology for the Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2007), 264-265.

25 Amos Johnson, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 20, 2010.

26 “An Addendum for the ‘70s” December 1969, box 1, Presbytery of West Jersey, Camden Metropolitan Ministry, Records, 1964-1979, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter CMM Records).

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Griesmann contributed to at Camden Regional Legal Services would have a long-lasting impact on the community, he no longer maintained the same street presence in Camden for which he had become infamous in the previous decade.27

As the CCRM was fading in Camden, the Catholic Left was growing in conjunction with the escalating war in Vietnam. Michael Doyle, a white Catholic priest from Ireland, was transferred in 1969 to Sacred Heart Church in Camden from well-to-do Holy Spirit high school in Atlantic County, New Jersey, where he had been a teacher. Doyle commented publically that it was “outrageous” that the school’s marching band was going to attend a “Victory-in-Vietnam” rally, because of the war’s inherent immorality.

When Doyle arrived in Camden, his parish’s bank account had $4.68. Doyle was moved by Camden’s poverty, particularly when he considered the government’s financial commitment to the war.28

As Doyle became move vocal about his opposition to Vietnam, particularly in light of the disproportionate numbers of Puerto Ricans and African Americans being drafted, he was approached by a group of priests and liberal, white Christians who were planning to break into Camden’s draft board to destroy draft cards. For Doyle, Camden was the ideal place to comment on the war: “Camden was the perfect place to make the statement that the monies spent on bombs could be spent on buildings; that was our big point we were trying to make.”29

This view held by the group that would be known as the “Camden 28” was consistent with a larger shift in the way liberal Christians began to evaluate the war. Before 1967,

27 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

28 Kirp, et al, 184.

29 Anthony Giacchino, The Camden 28 [DVD], 2007.

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most Americans supported U.S. efforts in Vietnam and few clergy protested, with the exception of those from the historic “peace churches,” such as the Society of Friends, the

Brethren, and the Mennonites. Ministers generally came to protest the war for three reasons: 1. the disproportionately high number of minorities being sent into combat, particularly before college students were no long exempt from fighting; 2. the inability of the government to fund both the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam; and 3. the inhumanity of U.S. tactics, including napalm, carpet bombing, and chemical defoliants.30

Generally, white ministers protested the war before black ministers, who were afraid of losing federal funding for civil rights programs, and fewer ministers were active in

Vietnam War protest than civil rights movement protest. For Michael Doyle, destroying draft cards was both a protest against the war, and an act of support for the civil rights movement. During the summer of 1971, the Camden 28 cased the Camden’s draft office, located on the fifth floor of the Federal Building.31

“A Common Struggle”: Rutgers South Jersey Protest

While the CCRM was substantially weakened following the city’s retaliation in

1969, its 1968 activism produced an important legacy in the form of interracial student uprisings. These student protests are significant to the history of interracial organizing in

Camden because they represent the first instances of black and Puerto Rican students coming together. These protests, which took place at Camden High School, as discussed in Chapter 4, and Rutgers University, were the direct result of the CCRM’s Shields

Family protests, which drew hundreds of high school and college students. The Rutgers

30 Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice like a Trumpet, 144-48.

31 Giacchino, "The Camden 28"; Edward McGowan, Peace Warriors: The Story of the Camden 28 (New York, NY: Circumstantial Productions Publishing, 2002).

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University protests are particularly significant to the larger 1971 riot because they were central to the formation of Black Power-Puerto Rican militancy in Camden.

The most organized and effective group of students to emerge from the Shields family protests was the Black Students Unity Movement (BSUM) at Rutgers South

Jersey (RSJ), the University’s Camden campus. Throughout the nation, college campuses were important sites of black radicalism in the 1960s. The most legendary example is the formation of the Black Panther Party in California. Donna Murch argues that the early-

1960s battles over curriculum and hiring at Merritt College and the University of

California, Berkeley were “integral” to the genesis of Black Power in the San Francisco

Bay Area.32 Black Panther Party founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were both students at Merrit College when they founded the organization and, while exceptional in many ways, shared backgrounds similar to RSJ’s minority students. Newton was the son of migrants from Louisiana; Seale had come to California from Texas. Both were raised in poverty. Both were inspired by Malcolm X. In the mid-1960s, as part of the Black

Student Union, Newton and Seale’s “most sustained campaign” was getting the school to hire more African-American faculty and staff and having black history classes added to the curriculum. Newton and Seale soon moved their activism beyond the academic world, creating the nation-wide Black Panther Party.33

32 Donna Murch, “A Campus Where Black Power Won: Merritt College and the Hidden History of the Oakland’s Black Panther Party,” Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level Ed. Peniel E. Joseph, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 92.

33 Donna Murch, “The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics, and Society 9, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 333-345.

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While the RSJ student protest was just one of dozens that occurred throughout the country in 1969, it played a significant role in radical, interracial organization Camden thereafter. Like Merritt College in Oakland, but unlike universities such as Columbia

University, Harvard University, or Boston College, to name just a few schools with more geographically diverse populations, most of the students at RSJ lived nearby and the protest extended to the community and the role Rutgers played in Camden. In 1966

Rutgers University expanded deeper into Camden, displacing hundreds of Puerto Rican families in the process.

In September 1968 Rutgers South Jersey welcomed twelve hundred undergraduate students; seventeen were African American; none was Puerto Rican. RSJ employed one hundred faculty members; three were African American; none was Puerto

Rican. Donald Griesmann and Poppy Sharp were critical of the University because, by not accepting many minority students, it demonstrated how Camden’s educational system did not prepare Puerto Ricans or African Americans for higher education. Moreover,

Rutgers was uninvolved with the community.34 Following the Shields family incident,

Sharp encouraged black and Puerto Rican Rutgers students who had been involved in the community protests to form a student union. By the time the 1968-1969 school year commenced, The Black Students Unity Movement (BSUM) was organized, if not very large. BPUM member Michael Edwards, who was also a Rutgers student, led the BSUM and encouraged members to recruit any student who shared the group’s beliefs.

34 Donald Griesmann testimony. “Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1967 and Related Legislation Hearings,” 306.

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Jeffrey Ogbar locates the black student union as an important incubator for what he terms “radical ethnic nationalism,” a Black Power philosophy, practiced by the Black

Panthers but not shared by all Black Power organizations, which

unlike typical ethnic nationalism… does not limit its nationalist agenda

exclusively to its own group. Indeed, its national consciousness is central to its

politics; however, it can work intimately with members from other ethnic groups

in various contexts in symbiotic struggle.35

The BPUM can be characterized as a pluralist group, in that it practiced amicable coexistence with other racial and ethnic groups, as evidenced through the BPUM’s relationship with the FBPUM. The BSUM’s radical ethnic nationalism was slightly more progressive, in that it went beyond developing relations with outsiders, and, instead accepted Puerto Ricans into the group. Among the Puerto Rican students who joined the

BSUM were Benny Galaf, Gualberto Medina, and Angelo Carillon, who were all

Camden residents that would work with the BPUM during the riot. Thus the BSUM’s formation became a key turning point for African American/ Puerto Rican relations in

Camden, developing relationships that would be thrive during the riot.

On February 10, 1969 the BSUM distributed a list of twenty-four demands to students on campus and to the University’s President, Macon Gross. These demands included: “an Urban Education Department be established,” “an Afro-American be made

Dean of Black Students,” “the new library addition be named after Brother Paul

Robeson,” who was Rutgers University’s most famous alum. The demands also included some non-racially specific requests such as: “class loads are to be reduced for

35 Jeffrey Ogbar, “Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón: The Young Lords, Black Power, and Puerto Rican Nationalism in the U.S., 1966-1972,” Centro Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 152.

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professors,” and “the community be granted access to existing University facilities.” 36

Administrators assured BSUM leaders that they would consider the requests and offer three progress reports over the span of three months. The first report, issued February 17, was rejected by the BSUM and burned the document publically. On February 26,

President Gross met with the leaders of the BSUM and agreed to many of their demands.

Yet, the same evening, Gross was vague about his commitment during a speech to the

RSJ community. Black and Puerto Rican students left in the middle of his talk, angered and frustrated.37

Around 10:00 p.m. that night the BSUM alerted the Camden police that they had taken over the RSJ Student Center with a telephone call. An unidentified BSUM member claimed: “We are in possession of the building and will remain until the administration makes an about face on its racist stands on the students’ demands.”38 Armed with chains the BSUM remained in the student center until the following day. Poppy Sharp was there also, though he, uncharacteristically, would not speak to the media. The University suspended classes and President Gross agreed to meet with the students, yet again.39

36 “Pamphlet from the Black Student Unity Movement, February 10, 1969.” Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives; “Demands of the Black Student Unity Movement (Camden) February 10, 1969,” in Richard P. McCormick’s Black Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 127- 130.

37 McCormick, Black Protest Movement at Rutgers, 62.

38 “Students Stage Sit-In at Rutgers Camden Campus,” Woodbury Daily Times (Woodbury, NJ), Feb. 27, 1969; “25 Students End Sit-In At Student Center On Camden Campus,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 12, 1969.

39 “Classes Are Resumed at Rutgers University.” Courier Post, 5 March 1969.; “Rutgers Student Parleys Halt Classes Here 3 Days” Courier Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 28, 1969.

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The following day President Gross—once described by a student as “a man so secure in his position that he did not seem interested in [discussing racism]”—agreed to most of the

BSUM’s demands.40 However, he did so with great caution, making each request contingent on financial resources or further approval. While classes were halted, the

University held workshops and meetings to address the issues in the demands. The

BSUM received a great deal of attention.41

RSJ eventually acceded to eighteen of the BSUM’s twenty-four demands, including allowing Poppy Sharp to speak at RSJ, although without pay and only once.42

In her study of the origins of African American Studies in California, Martha Biondi argues “the desegregation and democratization of American higher education was arguably the most significant breakthrough of the era.”43 Like many important breakthroughs of this era, the progress made at RSJ that winter was met with strong dissention. Patricia Doyle, a white student at Rutgers lamented that she did not “want to learn how to be a social worker and help poor black people…”44 Others were concerned about potential credit allotted to blacks for life experience. Still more could not

40 Gregory P. Simms. “Student Backer Criticizes Gross” Courier-Post ((Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 28,1969; “Rutgers Faculty OKs 2 Points” Courier Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 1, 1969.

41 McCormick, 63.

42 “RCSJ Meets Some Negro Demands” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 18, 1969; “Rutgers Acts on Demands Submitted by Black Students” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 27, 1969; “Text of Gross’ Letter Agreeing to Demands” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 28,1969.

43 Martha Biondi, “Student Protest, ‘Law and Order,’ and the Origins of African American Studies in California,” Contested Democracy, Ed. Eric Foner (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), 259.

44 Patricia Doyle “Rutgers Officials Gave in too Fast,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 5,1969.

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understand why the BSUM would demand to have anything named after Paul Robeson because he was affiliated with Communism.45 Most irate of all, seemed to be a number of white professors at RSJ, who remained anonymous. They believed they were the victims of “reverse bigotry.”46

The BSUM’s multiethnic cooperation had significant implications for activism in

Camden. During the summer of 1968, Sharp attempted to incorporate Puerto Ricans and whites into the movement by highlighting how issues that affected blacks affected everyone who was poor—a sizable percentage of the city. While Sharp managed to entice suburban whites to join CCRM’s protests, he was less effective with Puerto

Ricans. The BSUM was much more successful: even though most of its demands involved African American issues, Puerto Rican students were equally involved in the protest. Gualberto “Gil” Medina, a Puerto Rican member of the BSUM, recalls that he did not see the struggle between the BSUM and Rutgers University as a “black issue”:

“the administration was oppressing minority students. We viewed it as a common struggle.”47

Gualberto Medina and Radical Puerto Rican Politics

Immediately following Rafael Rodriguez Gonzales’s encounter with Officers Miller and Worrell, concerned citizens began calling Joseph Rodriguez. Members of the

Rodriguez family had been community leaders since the1930s. In 1971, Joe Rodriguez, a successful medical malpractice attorney at Brown & Connery law firm and known for

45 Frank Galey “Some Black Demands Seem Pretty Far Out” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 21, 1969.

46 “Rutgers Faculty Upset Over ‘Reverse Bigotry’,” Woodbury Daily Times (Woodbury, NJ), Mar. 4, 1969.

47 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

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taking on pro bono cases, was Camden’s only Puerto Rican lawyer; his brother, Mario

Jr., was a member of the State Commission on Civil Rights. Mario had been a councilman in Camden, but left politics when he lost the bid for Mayor in 1969 to Joseph

Nardi, who had been friends with the brothers since grade school. The Rodriguezes were such good friends with Nardi that Joe was godfather to one of his children. So, when the brothers became convinced the police had acted unethically, they were shocked the

Mayor refused to take their calls. The longer the Mayor ignored the community, the more restless it became.

On August 12 Camden citizens gathered their children to march through Camden, waving the Puerto Rican flag and the Puerto Rican Liberation Front’s flag in protest of police brutality. The protest was somewhat successful: Chief of Police Melleby charged

Miller and Worrell with atrocious assault and battery. However, the community sensed the move was insincere. Despite the new charge, the police department announced that the officers would not be suspended due to lack of evidence.48

Later that day, Puerto Rican leaders, including the Rodriguez brothers and Gil

Medina, presented a list of demands to the city’s business administrator, Joseph Dorris, as

Mayor Nardi still refused to meet with them. The group requested:

1. suspensions of Miller and Worrell; 2. a grand jury to review the officers’ conduct;

3. an end to police brutality against Puerto Ricans; 4. the creation of a supervisory

panel to mediate differences between the police and the community; 5. more Puerto

Ricans on the police force; 6. interpreters and competent legal representation for

Puerto Ricans charged with municipal offenses; 7. inclusion of representatives from

48 “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

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the Puerto Rican community in any discussions on the course of the “Jiménez” case;

8. a complete report from Cooper Hospital on Rodriguez Gonzales’s condition; 9.

censure of Public Safety Director Yeager for exercising “autocratic” control over the

police department.

Dorris rejected many of the requests immediately and definitively. Medina, recapped the meeting: “They answered most of our questions negatively. We are determined to prevent further assaults on Puerto Ricans”49

While witnesses turned to the Rodriguez brothers in the immediate aftermath of the

“Horatio Jiménez” incident, their leadership style would prove insufficient. In the coming weeks Gil Medina, working under the tutelage of Poppy Sharp and protection of

BPUM bodyguards, emerged as the face of the youth rebellion. While the Rodriguez brothers tried repeatedly, with no success, to speak with the Mayor, Medina organized a march to the Mayor’s office, where he planned to stay until he got Nardi’s attention.

According to Medina, the Rodriguez brothers shared his goals, but sought a different means. Joe and Mario Rodriguez believed in the political process, in working within the system to urge reform; Medina believed in confrontation. Throughout the negotiation process they urged Medina to channel his energies in another direction, while Medina pointed the flaws in the political process.50

The philosophical chasm between the Rodriguez brothers and Gil Medina is representative of late-1960s/ early-1970s shifts in Puerto Rican social organization.

While the Rodriguez brothers were born in Camden in the 1930s and raised by a proudly

“American” father, who studied the Constitution each night, Medina migrated to Camden

49 Markhams, “Five Charge Police Brutality in Arrest of Camden Man.”

50 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 11, 2012.

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from Puerto Rico as an infant in 1954 and was raised by ardently pro-independence father. In Camden, Gil’s father, Armando Medina, was an active member of the Puerto

Rican Nationalist Party and worked to “indoctrinate” his children to be “nationalist, pro- independence,” to the dismay of much of Camden’s Puerto Rican population in the

1950s.51

By the time he became a teenager, Gil Medina was a self-described “fire-breathing, pro-independence radical,” who fiercely admired Malcolm X, calling him a “John the

Baptist” of social justice.52 For Medina, Poppy Sharp, whom he describes as “one of the most profoundly decent people [he has] ever known,” was Camden’s Malcolm X .53 In

1971, Medina was a member of several leftist organizations which were all either interracial, or had friendly relationships with other racial and ethnic groups.

Perhaps the most militant organization Media joined was the Young Lords Party

(YLP). The YLP was active from 1969 through 1972 and was most active in New York,

Chicago, and Philadelphia. Similar to the Black Panther Party’s formation in Oakland, the YLP has roots in university organization. In 1969 a group of New York City college students formed the Sociedad de Albizu Campos (SAC), in honor of Pedro Albizu

Campos, with the goal of increasing the presence of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican culture in the city’s higher education institutes. SAC members also cultivated relationships with street youth, believing they had revolutionary potential because they were disenfranchised. The SAC merged with the Young Lords Organization in Chicago,

51 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid; Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 11, 2012.

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--a street gang that had become politicized --based on their similar goals of developing community programs for the impoverished and defending minorities from police brutality. The Chicago YLO was founded by gang leader José Cha Cha Jiménez, who was inspired by Black Panther Fred Hampton during their 1967 incarceration. When

Jiménez and Hampton returned to Chicago’s streets, they brokered peace between their gangs and focused, instead, on community organizing.54

Eventually, due to disagreements between the Chicago and New York factions, the east coast YLO became the Young Lords Party (YLP) and advocated Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination. The YLP promoted direct action and militancy. In its short existence the YLP moved further to the political left as it encountered resistance from police and city officials. Remarkably, thirty percent of this organization was African

American, white, and non-Puerto Rican Latino.55

Juan Gonzales, a New York YLP activist, had moved to Philadelphia in 1970 to organize the Young Lords chapter that Medina joined.56 Medina found like-minded young people there:

We were all somewhat naïve…maybe too idealistic, too radical sometimes, too

prone to embrace confrontation… They were espousing community control of our

institutions…a form of democracy that would give Puerto Ricans, in communities

54 Daniel Berger, "‘We Are the Revolutionaries’: Visibility, Protest, and Racial Formation in 1970s Prison Radicalism.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2010, 336-337; Johanna Fernandez, “Radicals in the late 1960s: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1969-1974.” Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 2004.

55 F. Arturo Rosales, Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (Houston, TX: Arte Publico, 2006), 447; María E. Pérez Y Gonzìlez, Puerto Ricans in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 50.

56 Whalen, 231.

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where they lived, control of the key institutions that impacted their lives. It’s a

funny thing, because we were too prone to confrontation, but if you look at the

agenda it wasn’t that extraordinary or radical. It was the means that made them

into a radical group. The Young Lords Party was largely not a violent group,

although sometimes the group came off that way. It was largely a group that was

into confrontation for the sake of raising issues and raising consciousness. At the

same time we had really good relationships with the Black Panthers Party.57

Medina also was a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), which was particularly open to working with the black community: “A lot of the young students in

New Jersey aligned ourselves with the PSP…the PSP wanted black community and the

Puerto Ricans community to work together.”58 The PSP, which would become the largest arm of the Puerto Rican left, situated the cities to which Puerto Ricans had been forced to migrate as theaters in the war for Puerto Rican independence. The organization’s goal was to free Puerto Rico from its colonial ties to the United States, but also to transform

North American society:

[The PSP’s] primary role in the U.S. is to unleash the national liberation struggle,

in all its fury, in the very hearts of North American cities to which a significant

portion of our colonized population was forced, and to link that struggle to the

struggle for revolutionary transformation of North American society.59

57 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

58 Ibid.

59 José E. Velázquez, "Coming Full Circle," in The Puerto Rican Movement, ed. Torres and Velázquez, 52.

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The PSP was mostly twenty-something Puerto Ricans, who had been born on the mainland, spoke English, and were working class. According to PSP activist and scholar

José E. Velázquez, most members joined because they were attracted to the organization’s Marxist ideology, and were committed to the project of building a working-class movement.60

Finally, although raised Protestant, Medina was a member of the Catholic Left, and worked closely with the Camden 28. Similar to the conflict many Christians who aided the BPUM faced, Medina notes that many radical youths embraced competing ideologies: “It’s strange, because at the same time, a lot of us were involved in the largely

white peace movement; most of whom were middle class; most of whom were not

socialists, were not radicals.” 61

Medina was deeply invested the Camden 28’s operation. However, the timing was inauspicious. The Camden 28 broke into the draft board office the same night the riot broke out. The group learned it had been betrayed by one of its own. Bob Hardy, posing as a member of the group, was working as an FBI informant the entire time. The group was caught and arrested by FBI agents. The trial, discussed in the Epilogue, would take place in 1973. According to Medina, if he had not been at City Hall that evening, the group “would have been called the Camden 29.”62

On the surface, black/ Puerto Rican cooperation simply made sense. In the urban

North blacks and Puerto Ricans suffered a similar racial oppression, a similar lack of

60 Ibid, 51.

61 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

62 Anthony Giacchino, The Camden 28 [DVD], 2007; Edward McGowan, Peace Warriors: The Story of the Camden 28 (New York, NY: Circumstantial Productions Publishing, 2002); Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

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access to resources. However, the Rodriguez brothers and their peers had never cooperated with the NAACP, CCRM, or BPUM to the extent Gil Medina worked with the BSUM and BPUM. Thus, Medina’s interpretation of the Rutgers protest as “a common struggle,” much like Sharp’s view that blacks and Puerto Ricans had “an awful lot in common,” was indicative of a larger shift towards cooperation among radical

African Americans and Puerto Ricans.

While Puerto Rican activists nationally had joined organizations like the

Communist Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the

Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s, the widespread dissemination of

Black Power politics in the mid-to-late 1960s inspired a new sense of pride among all people of color.63 Moreover, Black Power politics did not merely invite support for issues pertaining to African Americans. At the national level, important examples of black support of “Puerto Rican issues” including Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 visit to Puerto

Rico, where African Americans and Puerto Ricans marched in support of Black Power and Puerto Rican independence. Also in 1967 H. Rap Brown and Carmichael attended a teach-in on Puerto Rico at Columbia University.64 Additionally, Puerto Ricans joined the

Black Panthers, sometimes gaining notoriety for their actions. Jeffery Ogbar points out that at least two members of the infamous 1969 Panther 21--the New York-based

Panthers indicted on charges of conspiring to blow up five department stores, a police station, railroad tracks and the Bronx Botanical Garden--Raymond Quiñones and Albert

63 Ogbar, “Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón,” 151.

64 Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 345.

217

Nieves, were Puerto Rican. 65 Young Puerto Ricans, on the mainland and on the island, embraced both their African and Taino ancestry.66 Yeidy M. Rivero argues that Puerto

Rican youths appropriation of the Afro was a distinctly political action. Rivero calls the

Afro an “affirmation of Puerto Rico’s African heritage,” and, therefore, a rejection of racist ideologies and practices.67

An important ramification of this multifaceted, revolutionary framework for interracial organizing was that Puerto Ricans moved further away from identifying as

“white” and seized a “brown” identity.68 Gil Medina recalls becoming aware of “race” when he was around seven-years-old, thinking of it of it “as a descriptive fact…not a differentiator.”69 As an adult, Medina considers himself and his relatives neither black nor white, but anywhere on the gradation of color in between, depending on the shade of their skin.70

The NAACP magazine, The Crisis highlighted this growing sense of Puerto Rican

“blackness,” as the 1960s drew to a close. When the Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, Piri

Thomas released his autobiography, Down these Mean Streets, in 1968, The Crisis gave it an enthusiastic review, arguing

65 Ogbar, “Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón,” 151; For more on the Panther 21 see: Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997).

66 Ogbar, “Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón,” 163.

67 Yeidy M. Rivero, Tuning out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 83.

68 Ogbar, “Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón,” 163.

69 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

70 Ibid.

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one of the most incisive documents about racism to come along in many a year is

not the testimony of an American Negro, but a Puerto Rican, a dark-skinned

moyeto in Harlem’s El Barrio. Not since Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) has

there been published such a devastating personal statement on how it feels to be

poor and black in white America.71

In this text, Piri Thomas, the dark-skinned son of a Cuban father and a Puerto

Rican mother, recalls an argument he had with his brother, after Piri called himself a

“Negro.” Thomas asks his dark-skinned father what is wrong with being not white, claiming “I’m black and it don’t make no difference whether I say good-bye or adios—it means the same.”72 In Camden, the cooperation sprung from a generational shift, which saw radicalized Puerto Ricans, who were less concerned with identifying with whiteness than their predecessors, combined with a common problem that could no longer be ignored: the increasingly aggressive police violence.

Camden’s “Gestapo”: A Common Enemy

Of failed interracial cooperation in California, Mark Brilliant has argued that different axes of discrimination led to different avenues of redress.73 Although Camden’s population was far less diverse than the population Brilliant considers, Puerto Ricans and

African Americans did often pursue divergent paths of social reform. While blacks and

Puerto Ricans faced problems in housing, education, and employment, they were not always exactly the same problems. Housing discrimination was clearly defined as “anti-

71 Luther P. Johnson, “Culture or Color?:The Moyetos of San Juan and New York,” The Crisis 75, no. 6 (June- July 1968): 189-193.

72 Ibid.

73 Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed.

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black,” which is why the CCRM’s strategy to test housing laws, through its program called Project FREE, was to send black and white couples to look at the same apartments and not Puerto Rican couples. The largest concentrations of Camden’s Puerto Ricans were seasonal farm laborers, which created a host of unique issues that fell under the

Migration Division’s jurisdiction. While African Americans and Puerto Ricans both sought equality in Camden’s public schools, for Puerto Ricans, the major issue was the language barrier.

One issue that both Puerto Ricans and African Americans faced, in the same way, was police harassment. Sociologist Gregg Lee Carter has examined all Hispanic riots of the 1960s and 1970s and found that 42% resulted from an instance of police brutality.

The likelihood of a clash between a Puerto Rican or Mexican American and police leading to a riot was significantly increased if the police force had recently become more aggressive and if the political response to the injustice was not swift. Both of these factors were in play in in August, 1971.74

Camden’s police force had a contentious relationship with the minority community since at least the 1950s. The CCRM had been keeping track of police activities via a black officer on the squad. According to Donald Griesmann:

Police were a big problem. There was an African American police officer who

dated [CCRM member] Carolyn Burton who was leaking things to her...Hatred

was being embroiled in the police about anything that was going on in the black

movement. It was quite despicable. It took a long time for that to change.75

74 Carter, “Hispanic Rioting During the Civil Rights Era,” 301-322.

75 Donald Griesmann, interview by Laurie Lahey, February 2, 2011.

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In 1968, the New York Times confirmed Griesmann’s informant’s accusations, reporting that Chief of Police, Harold Melleby was intentionally promoting hostility towards blacks and Puerto Ricans among his police force. For example, Melleby put a memo on the police headquarters’ bulletin board, urging members of the 230-man force to “take the utmost precautions to safeguard their family, personal property, and police equipment from attack.” According to the New York Times, this warning was unprovoked. Melleby was actively pitting the police against the community.76

BPUM and FBPUM members were often the victims of police brutality. In an effort to avoid being clubbed, the BPUM put together what it called a “demonstration on wheels.” Group members would travel from corner to corner throughout Camden, protest, and then get back into the car before police could get to them. When BPUM members members drove past Melleby’s house, he reacted by standing on his front lawn with a shotgun.77

According to BPUM member Sharif Abdullah, other officers went much further.

The young members of the BPUM were in a vulnerable position with the police because they were less likely to be arrested. Abdullah claims that the police attempted to

“systematically assassinate” the youth in the movement. According to Abdullah:

We knew that it was the Camden police department that was involved in the

heroin trade. They were the ones that allowed the heroin on the street. They were

the ones, that if you didn’t give them the proper amount of shakedown money,

would then arrest you for carrying heroin.78

76 New York Times (New York, NY), Jul. 9, 1968.

77 Malik Chaka, interview by Laurie Lahey, August 10, 2010.

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The BPUM youth arm, the Black Spears made a plan for revenge. The Black Spears planned to follow the police closely to get specific information about what the police were doing: who did they meet with?, where did they meet?, how did they distribute the heroin? Abdullah assigned Black Spears to various police officers.79

The BPUM believed that Black Spear, Eugene Carrington, followed his cop too closely and was spotted. The organization claimed the officer caught Carrington, dragged him into the woods, and shot him full of heroin. According to Abdullah, he died an agonizing death, which took five hours. He was alone in his hospital room because police would not let his friends or family in to see him. Another BPUM member was hit by a police car and left for dead. When members of the group found the teen they, naively, called the police department to report the incident. Melleby responded by ordering all patrolmen to wash their cars. Later in 1968, the police beat sixteen-year-old

Abdullah so severely he required hospitalization. He was paralyzed for three days from the neck down. By this point, the youth travelled with bodyguards. Abdullah credits his bodyguard with saving his life.80

The Puerto Rican community also complained about the police. Many Puerto

Ricans believed police harassment was aimed specifically at Puerto Ricans:

One thing really used to bother us… We would stand on the street corners and

talk; there really wasn’t any other place you could get together with all your

friends. And it didn’t matter whether you were talking Spanish or English, but the

police would come and break it up, just because you looked different. They would

78 Sharif Abdullah, interview by Laurie Lahey, July 14, 2010.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

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never do that if it was Americanos on the corner, but they always did it with

Puerto Ricans.”81

These accusations cannot be corroborated. But, if they are true, where would the evidence exist? So many examples of police brutality populate the middle decades of the twentieth century that these stories are plausible; so many stories of police violence saturate Camden’s history, that the stories are even probable. However their significance in the context of the 1971 riot does not reside in their authenticity, but in their function within the black and Puerto Rican communities. One can imagine, that as Jiménez’s story circulated, it was met with similar accounts of savagery. Fabricated, exaggerated, or completely true, these narratives reified the belief that Miller and Worrell were another example of a much larger problem in the police force; that their arrest would begin to redress a long, sordid history of injustice.

By 1971 the Camden’s police force had grown by nearly 100 officers. Most officers on the 328-man squad were white. Around about twenty percent were black and four or five were Puerto Rican. Some of these minority cops, like Puerto Rican police officer Clement Quieroz, thought the Camden Police Department fostered a hostile work environment: “I was called a ‘spic.’ I had to go in the back door. I was a lieutenant and…Anytime I tried to discipline anyone, I was short circuited.” 82 Following a falling out with the Mayor, Chief of Police Harold Melleby was forced to cede some power to

Director of Public Safety, William Yeager, whom Nardi appointed. Yeager had jurisdiction over both the police and fire departments.

81 Anonymous Interview Number 1, by Deborah Velez, July 12, 1989. CCHS

82 Clement Quieroz, by Deborah Velez, July 16, 1989, CCHS “Camden City” Box 1.

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Soon after accepting the position, Yeager created the Strategic Relations Division

(SRD), to combat crime in some of Camden’s tougher neighborhoods, between 7p.m. and

3am, when most of the trouble occurred. Miller, whose father had been a Camden police officer, and Worrell, who volunteered to serve in Vietnam, were SDR members. Before

Worrell left for Vietnam in 1966, where he was a machine gunner on a helicopter, he told the Courier-Post that he was excited to go because “you can’t do anything like that here.”83 The SDR was not entirely dissimilar from the military. SDR members spent a week training with the Army at Fort Dix, patrolled with police dogs, and wore the SDR’s special uniforms: caps and leather jackboots. 84

African Americans and Puerto Ricans called the SDR “The Gestapo.” People had been complaining to Mayor Nardi about the unit since it was founded; as one resident put it following the Jiménez incident: “We abhor the similarity of this squad [to] Hitler’s obnoxious S.S., both in its abbreviations and intent.”85 Within the police department, other officers were wary of the SDR and Miller and Worrell, in particular. Black sergeant, Richard Conrad Hailey, one of Miller and Worrell’s supervisors, had reviewed their arrest record the previous summer and found that more than ninety-five percent of the people they arrested were black or Puerto Rican. Many arrests started with a minor

83 “On His Way to Viet Nam: City Youth, 20, Bids Dad Goodbye at Hospital,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 16, 1966.

84 Statement of Sgt. Richard Conrad Hailet, August 18, 1971. Camden Detective Bureau, Case No. 71-4708 contained in Prosecutor’s File in State of New Jersey vs. Warren L. Worrell and Gary E. Miller, Indictments Nos/ 999-71 and 1000-71, Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, Camden New Jersey (hereafter “Prosecutor’s File”); “A Policeman Prays—and Remembers,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 12, 1974; “On His Way to Viet Nam.”

85 “Yeager to Mario: 5 Minutes,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

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infraction, such as a traffic violation, and escalated to violence. 86 Some black officers, represented by the Brotherhood for Unity and Progress (BUP), were so appalled by the

Miller and Worrell’s behavior in the “Horatio Jiménez” encounter, that they took out an ad in the Courier-Post, condemning the “recent acts of violence,” and censuring “bullies who use their nightsticks as Nazi-like weapons for self-imposed law.” The BUP was

“[especially] appalled when incidents fomented by police carry racial overtones” 87

“I Saw a City Invincible”: Roosevelt Plaza, August 19:

Frustrated by the lack of progress they were making through the “political process,” Gil Medina organized a demonstration in Roosevelt Plaza, a grassy space in front of City Hall, on August 19, one week after the city’s business administrator, Joseph

Dorris rejected Puerto Rican leaders’ demands. As the crowd grew, it could be heard for blocks, black, whites and Puerto Ricans chants commingling Spanish and English:

“Justice Now!, ¡Justicia, Ahora!” Protesters carried signs demanding Miller’s and

Worrell’s suspensions. People moved closer and closer to City Hall, encircling the building under the banner of former resident Walt Whitman’s words, which had been etched forty years before on the southern façade: “In a Dream I Saw a City Invincible.”88

Gil Medina commandeered a station wagon and outfitted it with speakers, fashioning a makeshift platform for speeches. Hector Rodriguez, the director of the Puerto Rican

Conference based in Trenton, who was charged with manning the station wagon, told the

86 Statement of Sgt. Richard Conrad Hailet; “A Policeman Prays—and Remembers,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Mar. 12, 1974; “On His Way to Viet Nam.”

87 “Black Police Lash Out a ‘Nightstick Bullies’ on Force,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 14, 1971.

88 “Yeager to Mario: 5 Minutes.”

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Courier-Post that he and other Puerto Rican leaders had been trying to meet with Nardi for ten days, with no results. Rodriguez claimed the reason for the demonstration was to influence Nardi to meet with local Puerto Rican leaders.89

Several BPUM members took turns speaking, consistently arguing that both the

Puerto Ricans and blacks were oppressed peoples who must stick together to achieve political power. BPUM member, Omar Davis, argued “Only by unity can we lick this thing, together we are 75 percent of this city. Neither of us can do it by ourselves.” Davis deferred to the Puerto Rican leaders, however, telling them: “Whatever decision you make, we’re going to be with you.”90

Poppy Sharp spoke to the crowd, speaking on behalf of the black community: “as a black man, and as a member of a suppressed minority, I know I speak for all blacks, including the silent ones because they know the next day it might be one of them whose rights are violated.”91 Sharp announced, “all members of the black community will begin today wearing black armbands in support of the Puerto Rican community and will continue wearing them until unity, justice, and equality prevails. We support the Puerto

Rican community because we too have been victims of police brutality. We must work together until justice becomes a part of the Camden community.”92

89 Mike Wolk, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

90 Joseph Busler, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility: The Protesters,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

91 James Jefferson and Joseph R. McCarthy, “Yeager Hints Riot a Possible Plot,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

92 Ibid.

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Ruth Coleman, head of the Camden County Office of Economic Opportunity, agreed with Sharp, saying he spoke for her as a member of the black community.” 93

Camden Country NAACP president “Doc” John Robinson shared Sharp’s sentiments as well, stating “The NAACP cannot speak for the Puerto Rican community, but they have our moral support. The police officers should have been suspended until a (legal) outcome. This would have given the communities (black and Puerto Rican) a feeling of equal justice.” Robinson argued that the “Horatio Jiménez” incident was not simply a

Puerto Rican problem, “It is an attitude of police towards the (minority) population in general.” 94

Two and a half hours into the demonstration, the crowd approached eight hundred.

Director of Public Safety William Yeager told the crowd that the mayor was not available to meet with them 95 Mayor Nardi remained at his home on Mitchell Street in the predominantly white East Camden. Joseph Rodriguez tried continued to urge Nardi, who finally took his call, to come to City Hall as the demonstration began to escalate.

Rodriguez promised Nardi that the people in the plaza were not troublemakers, only concerned citizens, even noting that Rodriguez’s own, elderly parents were there. Still

Nardi would not budge.96

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

95 Kitty Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

96 Joseph Rodriguez, interview by Kevin Walker, October 3, 2006, courtesy of Joseph Rodriguez; Joseph Rodriguez, interview by Howard Gillette, February 9, 1998. CCHS “Gillette Collection.”

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Meanwhile, Yeager ordered his men into riot gear and stationed them on Market and

Federal Streets, flanking Roosevelt plaza. The police were armed with dogs. At

3:30p.m., a two-hour downpour commenced. The intense storm flooded the roads, causing closures. Seeking cover, demonstrators ran into City Hall. City Hall employees and police felt “under siege,” as shouts of “Justice Now!” shook he building. Someone hung a Puerto Rican flag from a balcony overlooking the lobby. Still, the crowd remained peaceful. When some kids stole candy from a blind man that ran the City Hall concession stand, demonstrators collected $68.92 to cover his loss. Yeager let the demonstrators stay in the building, but stationed his men around the lobby, sealing the corridors.97

At 5:30 p.m. Nardi talked to Medina on the phone and finally agreed to meet with a delegation of six Puerto Ricans and four observers if the demonstrators would go home.

By then, the crowd was difficult to control. Medina, Hector Rodriguez, and the

Rodriguez brothers could not make them disperse. The crowd started to turn on the leaders, charging them with not trying hard enough. 98 All demonstrators were out of the building shortly after 6 p.m., but many lingered in the plaza and on the front steps of City

Hall. Nardi argued the leaders did not keep their end of the deal: “These people are supposed to be leaders, yet they didn’t disperse their people after we agreed to the meeting. I don’t call creating a potential riot situation responsible leadership.” 99

However, by 8p.m. Nardi realized he had to do something; he agreed to go to City Hall.

97 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

98 Joseph Rodriguez, interview by Howard Gillette, February 9, 1998. CCHS “Gillette Collection.”

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“The Longer You Keep a Crowd Waiting…”: The Riot

By the time Mayor Nardi arrived at City Hall, the crowd in Roosevelt Plaza had reached 1200.100 As Mario Rodriguez told the press, “The longer you keep a crowd waiting, the harder it becomes to control…”101 Explaining the restless crowd, Hector

Rodriguez charged, “You can only do so much with people in nine hours.”102 Nardi met with a delegation of Puerto Ricans in his 17th floor office, which included Gil Medina,

Hector Rodriguez, Joseph and Mario Rodriguez, Angel Perez, director of the Community

Organization for Puerto Rican Affairs, and Luis Figueroa, president of the Puerto Rican

Action Committee. 103 Joe Rodriguez acted as the group’s attorney. The group presented

Nardi, along with Joseph Dorris and William Yeager, with a list of demands, similar to the one they gave Dorris a week earlier. The Puerto Rican leaders’ main concern was that Miller and Worrell were suspended, but Joseph Rodriguez offered a concession: they could allow a county grand jury to decide.104

An hour into the meeting, as Nardi, Dorris, and Yeager were discussing the seventeen demands privately, the crowd outside became alarmingly loud. Although

Yeager thought the police had the demonstrators under control, Nardi was panicked and

99 Mike Wolk, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 20, 1971.

100 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

101 Wolk, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility.”

102 Ibid.

103 Busler, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility.”

104 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

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told the Puerto Rican representatives there was violence in the streets.105 Yeager ordered the leaders to clear the crowd from City Hall: “You’ve got five minutes to clear it up…five minutes.” But it took five minutes for the elevator, which had become jammed, to reach the ground floor. By the time the leaders reached the street the demonstrators were throwing rocks, bricks and trashcans at police. 106 Again, the Puerto Rican leaders, with the help of the BPUM, urged the crowd to leave, even driving the centerpiece of the protest, the station wagon with the microphone setup, slowly out of the plaza toward

Federal Street. 107

Medina recalls it was then, around 9:30p.m., that “all hell broke loose”:

When a crowd numbering in the hundreds refused to disperse when it had gotten

dark, in spite of my pleas for them to do so, the police attacked men, women,

children, senior citizens. All hell broke loose and bands of young men and women

entered in to running street battles with the police. 108

Police moved in on the crowd, trapping about three hundred people with teargas and biting dogs. Younger people escaped but the older ones could not.109 At the same time,

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid; Dan Lang, “Businessmen Put Blame for Riots on Nardi,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 23, 1971.

107 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

108 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

109 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

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a fight at a nearby bar spilled into the streets.110 At 11:30p.m. people began to call the police with complaints of looting and window smashing.111

For the next two nights rioters overturned police cars, destroyed and looted stores, and threw rocks at anyone who seemed to be an enemy. On the first night, firefighters lost count of how many fires were set. Eighty-seven people reported injuries. Three people were shot. Camden's 328-member police force was supplemented by seventy- eight state troopers and seventy officers from suburban departments. 112 By dawn, on

August 20, police and firemen finally felt in control. The violence receded, save some rock-throwing that lasted until 10a.m. in sections of North Camden. The teargas police used lingered for days. 113 One resident compared breathing the teargas to being electrocuted: “It was like breathing in a jolt of electricity for adults.” When her three- year-old daughter breathed the teargas, she “convulsed with sobs.”114

After the first night of rioting, the Puerto Rican leaders, and many people in the community based on interviews reported in the Courier-Post, blamed Mayor Nardi for delaying the meeting so long. Camden business owners also attempted to meet with

110 Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 85.

111 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

112 Dan Lang, “Businessmen Put Blame for Riots on Nardi,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug 23, 1971; Renee Winkler, “Rioting Deepened Camden’s Divisions,” Courier-Post, February 1, 2007; Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”; Dennis M. Culnan, “Camden Put to the Torch, Can’t Keep Count of Fires,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971; “18 Injured in Camden Violence During Protest Against Police,” New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 21, 1971.

113 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

114 Beth Durchschlag and Craig R. Waters, “Baby Girl Can Only Cringe, Cry,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971.

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Nardi, but were ignored. According to fur-store owner, Jerry Aronberg: “I firmly, one- thousand percent, believe Nardi should have stepped in sooner… We blame everything on Nardi.” 115 Puerto Rican leaders, including Gil Medina and the Rodriguez brothers, had spent the night in a home on Federal Street, strategizing. Mario Rodriguez complained to the media that Nardi riled the crowd by keeping them waiting: “He kept those people waiting for 10 hours. He kept them waiting in the heat and in the rain. He avoided sitting down with them…”116

On August 20, City Hall was guarded by two police officers, armed, conspicuously, with shotguns.117 William Yeager released an incoherent, emotional, and inflammatory statement, comparing himself to Franklin Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor: “On this morning of August 20, 1971, I feel just as though

President Roosevelt must have felt on the morning of December 7, 1941.” Yeager claimed the riot was premeditated and barbaric:

Puerto Rican protesters situated in front of the city hall and city hall plaza

secretly, quickly, and obviously pursuant to a well-planned method of operation

effectively equipped a majority of the protesters with a huge quantity of deadly

clubs and bludgeons….The ruthless, despicable, cowardly and shameful conduct

attributed to that animalistic group of rationless two-legged beasts could only be

surpassed in nature and degree by the two-faced appalling action as represented

by the representative negotiators busily disgracing their name and culture while

115 Lang, “Businessmen Put Blame for Riots on Nardi.”

116 Busler, “Both Sides Disclaim Riot Responsibility.”

117 Caparella, “20 Hurt, 40 Jailed in Camden Rioting.”

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their cohorts unleashed their fury against an unwilling police contingent situated

at the scene.118

Both Puerto Rican and BPUM leaders were concerned about how Medina would react to

Yeager’s statement; even the militant Poppy Sharp urged Media to stay calm.119 Medina remained poised, and pointed out that the statement’s vulgar nature reflected Yeager’s character.120 The community, outraged by Yeager’s comments, showed less restraint. As it grew dark on August 20, sniper fire rained throughout the city. When a shot was fired into Mayor Nardi’s window, he worked by candlelight and required special clearance of any visitors. Police began patrolling in unmarked cars rented in Philadelphia, because so many of their vehicles had been destroyed. 121 The Puerto Rican and black community leaders worked to keep people off the streets, and chastised the Mayor for not imposing a curfew. 122 The next day, an exasperated Hector Rodriguez chastised Nardi: “The chance of violence last night was pretty obvious to us. All the bars were open. He didn’t insist on a curfew. We imposed our own curfew. If we hadn’t, there would have been more people on the streets.”123

The Camden Metropolitan Ministry supported the community through its Crisis

Communications Network, which it established during the 1969 summer. The CMM

118 Jefferson and McCarthy, “Yeager Hints Riot a Possible Plot.”

119 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 11, 2012.

120 Dan Lang, “New Riots Also Blamed on Nardi,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971.

121 “Burning Camden: A Hell for Cops,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971.

122 Joseph Rodriguez, interview by Howard Gillette, February 9, 1998.

123 Dan Lang, “New Riots Also Blamed on Nardi.”

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provided food, clothing, money, and other necessities to riot victims, via a network of local churches.124 Internally, the CMM discussed developing its relationship with Gil

Medina to become better informed about Camden Puerto Ricans’ concerns. It seems their attempts were successful, as Angel Perez met with the group to discuss the riot and its aftermath. The CMM reported that it was pleased at the continued financial success of the BPUM-EDC and hoped to become connected with the Puerto Rican community in a more “structural” way.125

On August 21, Mayor Nardi declared a State of Emergency, which included a curfew and several other regulations.126 Yet, he knew he was beyond salvaging his reputation with the community, lamenting, “I ain't loved by nobody.”127 Both city and

Puerto Rican leaders, realizing the situation was beyond their control, agreed to New

Jersey Governor William Cahill’s suggestion to invite professional mediator, Irwin

Goldabor, to negotiate a truce. Goldabor had successfully mediated similar disturbances in Passaic and Asbury Park, New Jersey”128 At their meeting in nearby Cherry Hill, NJ,

Goldabor recommended Miller’s and Worrell’s suspensions. Nardi conceded. Just hours

124 Administrative Council, Camden Metropolitan Ministry, “Memo,” to Committee on National Mission, Presbytery of West Jersey (CMM Records); Phillip Kelly, “Letter to Richard Whitman,” October 6, 1971 (CMM Records); “The Crisis Communication Network: An Evaluation” (CMM Records).

125 “Some Thoughts About Community Organization and Some Suggestions About Working with Spanish Speaking People” undated (CMM Records); CMM Ad Council “Minutes,” September 23, 1971, 2 (CMM Records).

126 “Proclamation,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971.

127 Kevin Riordon, “Judge Joseph M. Nardi Jr. Dead at 71,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Nov. 25, 2003.

128 “Both Sides Agree on Mediation,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 21, 1971; Renee Winkler, “Rioting Deepened Camden’s Divisions,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Feb. 1, 2007.

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after the city announced the police officers’ suspensions, the violence ended. When

Rafael Rodriguez Gonzales died, Miller and Worrell were charged with murder.

However, when their case went to trial, the charges were downgraded to manslaughter.

Gary Miller and Warren Worrell were acquitted by a jury.129

“All That Is Good…Comes at a Price”: Conclusion

Camden’s 1971 riot was a significant turning point in the city’s history, leaving a lasting impact. Future Camden Mayor Melvin “Randy” Primas, Camden’s first black mayor and former-BPUM member, still felt the riot’s influence on the city in the 1980s:

“There was a mass exodus. As folks moved out, the folks coming in were of a lower economic level. There were more folks with needs.”130 Business owners blamed the riot for dwindling revenue. Just days after the riot, the Camden Business Improvement

Association membership decreased from one hundred to thirty.131 Perhaps the association’s members felt the way one shoe store proprietor did, who on a Sunday morning in the midst of the riot, explained to the Courier-Post why he refused to board up his store windows: “‘I’m going to give it back to the city,’ he said quietly.” His windows had been smashed for the second time in two days of rioting on Saturday...

‘This just about finishes Camden as a businessman’s city.”132

Ultimately Camden’s minorities did not get the justice they sought. Police officers killed a Puerto Rican man and, despite the community’s best efforts, they did not

129 Renee Winkler, “Rioting Deepened Camden’s Divisions.”

130 Bill Shralow, “Camden Still Stuggles to Regain Lost Glory,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Apr. 8, 2003.

131 Lang, “Businessmen Put Blame for Riots on Nardi.”

132 Ibid.

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go to prison. However, for Gualberto Medina, and maybe for the other African

Americans, Puerto Ricans, and whites who joined his public rejection of the city’s ambivalence, the community’s united resistance was an accomplishment in itself.

In reflection on those four days in August, forty years later, Medina remembers one poignant moment more clearly than the rest:

When [the riots] first broke out, a group of student leaders/organizers rushed to

Broadway to attempt to stop the looting and attacks on merchants. One of the

shops attacked belonged to Gypsies, today called Roma. I went in to apologize to

the husband and wife proprietors. [The husband] stopped me from speaking,

rolled up his sleeve and showed me the tattoos [that had been] engraved on his

arm at Auschwitz. He gazed at me intently and said, “because we did not resist,

millions of innocents died needlessly.” A valuable lesson that all that is good in

life---love, beauty, justice---sometimes comes at a price. 133

Clearly the Holocaust, like the perpetration of African slavery or colonial, third world oppression, did not lack resistance on the behalf of the dominated. Instead Medina’s recollection--prone, of course, to time’s depredation--emphasizes the framework in which black and Puerto Rican militants located their activism. Comparing their resistance with those persecuted by Third Reich, both in the Roma shop-owner story and through equating the Strategic Relations Division with the Gestapo, indicates that the 1971 riot was about much more than Horatio Jiménez, that interracial cooperation in Camden was about much more than local circumstances. Similar to Moon-kie Jung’s Filipino,

Portuguese, and Japanese laborers, blacks and Puerto Ricans came together in Camden

133 Gualberto Medina, interview by Laurie Lahey, September 9, 2010.

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not because they erased their racial differences, but because they imbued their racial identities with a new common meaning.

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EPILOGUE

deep in rank grass, through a bullet-riddled helmet: an unknown flower1

Camden is ranked consistently in the top-five “most dangerous cities” in the

United States and in 2004, 2005, and 2009 it was ranked number one. In 2011, Camden’s murder rate was ten times New York City’s and thirty percent higher than the nation’s most dangerous large city, New Orleans. In 2012, Camden set a new record for homicides in a year: 67 people, in a population of just over 77,000, were murdered.2 In

April 2013, the city’s 141-year old police department will close, ceding power to a county-run force. Forty-two percent of Camden’s population lives below the poverty line.3 It seems that Camden’s civil rights movement failed.

In the years following the 1971 riot, Camden’s activists pursued many paths.

1 Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, 12.

2 Based on 2006 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Camden was designated the poorest city in the U.S. because 44% of its population is below the poverty line. For further explanation of this statistic see Edward Mulvihill’s article “Camden: Poorest City in the U.S.” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Aug. 30, 2006. The “most dangerous city” designation is based on FBI and Morgan Quinto ranking service statistics and is available in City Crime Rankings: Covering the Debate (New York, 2007); “Report Ranks Camden Most Dangerous U.S. City,” Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ), Nov. 24, 2009; Jessica Beym, “Camden Sets New Record with 59th Homicide,” South Jersey Times (Woodbury, NJ), Nov. 16, 2012.

3 John Rudolph, “Chris Christie Pushes Camden Police Force to Disband, Despite Questions over New Plan’s Finances,” Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/chris-christie-camden- police_n_2025372.html, accessed January 30, 2013.; Emily Babay, “Slain Woman is Camden’s 67th Homicide Victim this Year,” December 18, 2012, Philly.com http://articles.philly.com/2012-12-18/news/35871331_1_multiple-gunshot-wounds- homicide-thurman-street

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The Camden 28 went to court in 1973 and represented themselves in a trial Supreme

Court Justice William Brennan would call “one of the great trials of the 20th Century.” In an unusual move, Judge Clarkson Fisher allowed the Camden 28 members to introduce evidence about the immorality of the Vietnam War as a defense for their actions. In other draft board raiders’ trials, such as the Baltimore 4, the Catonsville 9, and the Milwaukee

14, the jury was only allowed to consider the actual crimes (breaking and entering, destruction of government property, et cetera). Howard Zinn and Daniel Berrigan served as witnesses for the Camden 28’s defense.

Michael Doyle showed slides in the courtroom of pictures of run-down, dilapidated houses in Camden, which made it look like Camden had been bombed, interspersed with slides of bombed or burning Vietnamese villages. As he showed the slides, he talked about how money needed for Camden’s poor was funding destruction in

Vietnam. Doyle told the court that the thirty-one young men from Camden that had been killed in Vietnam were not the sons of rich men. On May 20, the Camden 28 was found

“not guilty” on all counts. This was the first complete legal victory for the peace movement.4

In 2013, Michael Doyle is still the pastor of Sacred Heart Church, still championing the causes of Camden’s poor. Samuel Appel remained in New Jersey and continued his urban ministry through the Presbyterian Church. Today, at age eighty- seven, he still volunteers in Camden when he can, wherever he is asked to go. After law school, Donald Griesmann left the Episcopalian Church and moved to New York, where he currently advises non-profit organizations on writing grant proposals. Amos Johnson works as a financial planner in California and is no longer a minister.

4 Giacchino, The Camden 28; McGowan, Peace Warriors.

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Malik Chaka (Michael Edwards) eventually returned to the United States from

Africa when the charges against him were dropped. He has developed a career working in various capacities to influence U.S. policy in Africa. Most recently, he is employed as the Director of Threshold Programs for the Millennium Challenge Corporation in

Washington, DC. Sharif Abdullah, inspired by Donald Griesmann, went to law school in the 1970s. Today he is a motivational speaker, author, sometimes-college-professor, and humanitarian based in San Diego, California. Gil Medina became an attorney and served as Secretary of Commerce for the state of New Jersey before becoming an executive at a real estate consulting firm.

Many BPUM members were employed in local government jobs in the 1970s.

Other BPUM members, who figured less prominently in this story, also turned their activist experiences into successful careers, such as former assistant U.S. attorney,

Edward S.G. Dennis and Delaware Superior Court judge Joshua Martin. As the marching quieted and militants traded in their berets for briefcases, critics accused them of “selling out.” Yet, as Poppy Sharp argued, those jobs were the entire reason for their years in the streets: "[there was no point in] breaking down the door if [people] weren't going to go through it."5

In 1972 Poppy Sharp had risen to a leadership position with the Congress of

African People (CAP), a national federation of Black Power and pan-African organizations, formed in 1970 in Atlanta. Amiri Baraka became the CAP’s chairman in

1972, and put Sharp in charge of “economic concerns,” presumably because of the

5 Dwight Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1993.

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BPUM-EDC’s success. The CAP’s major goal was to have an African American elected mayor of a large northeastern city—a goal Sharp attended to in Camden.6

When Mayor Nardi retired in 1973, unwilling to face another term and unlikely to be reelected anyhow, the BPUM and Puerto Rican leaders encouraged Democrat, Italian-

American Angelo Errichetti to run. By that time, Sharp had so much clout in the city, people referred to him as the “black prince”; he promised Errichetti he would ensure his victory if Errichetti put BPUM-member Melvin “Randy” Primas on his ticket for a city council seat. Errichetti remembered Sharp and his supporters “urged [him] to run for mayor because they felt [he] would be a person who would understand and bring the city together." Once mayor, Errichetti appointed Sharp coordinator of the Mayor's Youth

Council. Sharp maintained one government position or another until his death in 1999.7

In 1981 Randy Primas became the first black mayor of Camden, only the third black mayor elected in a northeastern city since CAP stated its goal.8

…

Nick Virgilio’s haiku captures the intricacy of Camden’s civil rights movement legacy. The city is “rank”; it is “bullet-ridden”; but it is not without, mostly unknown,

6 Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 220.

7 Dwight Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Mar. 19, 1993.

8 Newark, NJ, elected black mayor Kenneth A. Gibson in 1970, but the election of the first black mayor of a “major” northeastern city did not happen until 1975 when Walter Washington was elected mayor of Washington DC, after serving as “Mayor- Commissioner,” a Presidential appointment, since 1967. The next black mayor elected in the northeast was Randy Primas in Camden.

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“flowers.” Today, Ulysses S. Wiggins elementary school is located on the corner of 4th

Street and Mount Vernon Avenue, the same block where he and Alice lived. The Poppy

Sharp Community Center is on Broadway, just a half-block from the community center where the BPUM was headquartered. The Paul Robeson Library sits on Rutgers

University’s campus, where the BSUM fused black and Puerto Rican militancy. Amid the violence, the drugs, the death, and the destruction, there are remnants of people who tried and often succeeded. When asked if he thought the civil rights movement in

Camden was a success, Poppy Sharp reflected, “I think we have won the race to the finish line. It wasn't a war. It was a race for dignity and respect. As a people, I think we achieved that in Camden."9

In 2003 the portrait of Lord Camden that hung in City Hall since it opened in

1933 was taken down. Lord Camden, a white British aristocrat named Charles Pratt, was the most senior British official to protest, consistently and publically, England’s oppression of the American colonies. By the time he died in 1794, Lord Camden was so revered in the newly formed United States that twenty-six towns on the east coast were named in his honor. As Lord Camden’s image faded beyond recognition in the old painting, the city decided to replace him with a portrait of Poppy Sharp. 10 These images, these buildings, these stories, serve as reminders that there is more work to be done. In

Camden, the obstacles may seem insurmountable, but so were they when Poppy Sharp lived there. Today, in City Hall--where Sharp spent so many days chanting, shouting,

9 Ott, “Camden Civil Rights Activist Looks Back.”

10 Dwight Ott, “Murals are on the Way: Lord Camden is gone from Camden City’s Council of Chambers.” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), Jan. 20, 2003.

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singing, and setting fires both literal and figurative in protest of the city’s oppression--he has become an official part of Camden’s story. Camden’s story is, in fact, his story.

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