The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question: How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle.

Hettie V. Williams is an associate professor of history at Monmouth University in Long Branch, New Jersey. Her previous books include A Seat at the Table: Black Women Public Intellectuals in U.S. History and Culture;Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History;Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union; and We Shall Overcome to We Shall Overrun: The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Revolt 1962-1968.