Creator:  NJ Center for Civic Education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Grade Level: Secondary

Objectives: Student will be able to:

• Explain the scientific method and how it was used by New Jersey inventors
• Define what makes an entrepreneur and identify New Jersey inventors that fit this definition
• Explain how inventions from New Jersey ushered in the market revolution of the 1820s-60s with John Steven’s steam transportation
• Determine how Thomas Edison’s inventions pushed a revolution in communications at the turn of the 19^th century
• Describe how Dr. Waksman developed streptomycin and its impact on to deadly diseases such as tuberculosis in the 1950s
• Analyze the beginnings of the computer age with Bell Lab’s transistor, laser, information theory, UNIX operating system and programming languages in the1970s and 80s
• Determine how innovations from New Jersey have improved society

Questions:

• Why were the Great Falls in Paterson, NJ selected as the site for the first industrial city in the country?
• What new areas of the economy did the invention of the light bulb, the phonograph, the automobile and the motion picture open?
• How have these inventions contributed to the improvement of our lives?
• How has the electronics and internet revolution changed the way we live?
• Why do you think that many of these inventions were initially developed in New Jersey?
• How can we balance the need for economic development with preservation of the environment and a lifestyle free from unhealthy contaminants?

NJ Student Learning Standards for Social Studies (2020):

6.1.8.EconNE.4.a:   Explain how major technological developments revolutionized land and water transportation, as well as the economy, in New Jersey and the nation.

6.1.12.EconEM.2.c: Analyze how technological developments transformed the economy, created  international markets, and affected the environment in New Jersey and the nation.

6.1.12.EconNM.11.a: Analyze how scientific advancements, including advancements in agricultural technology, impacted the national and global economies and daily life.

6.1.12.HistoryCA.11.a: Evaluate the role of New Jersey (i.e., defense industries, Seabrook Farms, military installations, and Battleship New Jersey) and prominent New Jersey citizens (i.e., Albert Einstein) in World War II

6.1.12.EconEM.12.a: Assess the role of the public and private sectors in promoting economic growth and ensuring economic stability.

6.1.12.EconEM.14.a: Relate the changing manufacturing, service, science, and technology industries and educational opportunities to the economy and social dynamics in New Jersey.

6.1.12.EconNE.16.a: Make evidenced-base inferences regarding the impact of technology on the global workforce and on entrepreneurship.

 6.1.12.EconNE.16.b: Evaluate the economic, political, and social impact of new and emerging technologies on individuals and nations

Contextual Background: Of the eleven innovations that the History Channel has identified as changing the world (the wheel, the printing press, the compass, paper money, steel, the electric light, domesticated horses, transistor, magnifying lenses, the telegraph, antibiotics and the steam engine), five were either invented in New Jersey or extended and made more usable by someone from New Jersey! (See 11 Innovations That Changed History)  More than half a dozen innovations from New Jersey have dramatically improved lives and spurred economic revolutions in transportation, food, medicine, and communication. The seven lessons below may be incorporated individually as time periods from the 1790s to today are explored or they may be used together as a unit on innovation, invention and entrepreneurship.

Anticipatory set:  Ask students: What is an “innovation”? Discuss student responses and make sure that students understand that an innovation is a new idea, or more-effective device or process. An innovation may be the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.   Then ask, what is an “invention”?  Again, discuss student responses and make clear that an invention may be an improvement upon a machine or product, or a new process for creating an object or a result.  Ask, what is the difference between an invention and an innovation? To be called an invention, an idea only needs to be proven as workable. But to be called an innovation, it must also be replicable at an economical cost, and must satisfy a specific need. That's why only a few inventions lead to innovations because not all of them are economically feasible.  An inventor develops a new good or service, but does not necessarily bring it to market. An entrepreneur risks resources (natural, human and capital) to bring a new or improved product or service to market. The entrepreneur may not have invented the product or service. Profit is the incentive for the entrepreneur.  As an introductory activity, go to the lesson on Econedlink by the Council for Economic Education at https://econedlink.org/resources/improving-on-the-original/ to understand the difference between innovations, inventions, and entrepreneurs.

1. Alexander Hamilton and Great Falls, Paterson, NJ—the first industrial park

Background: Teacher presentation or lecture or student handout or reading. Recognizing the need to spur economic development, the founders included in the U.S. Constitution a provision authorizing Congress  “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries” (Art. I, Sec. 8, para. 8), that is, patents and copyrights.  The United States Patent Office considers an invention patentable only if the invention is novel; not obvious; and has utility. Over 6 million patents have been issued since the first patent in 1790

At the start of the republic, the new nation was an agricultural society, importing most of its needed manufactured goods from Britain. As President Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton had a vision to secure the economic foundation of the United States that included the federal assumption of state debts, the creation of the Bank of the United States and support from the government to encourage the growth of manufacturing.  The first Congress approved the assumption of state debts from the Revolution by the federal government in the Funding Act of 1790. It also approved legislation to create the First Bank of the United States in 1791, which was built in Philadelphia while it was still the nation’s capital.  In December 1791, Hamilton presented to Congress a Report on the Subject of Manufacturers, which recommended high tariffs to protect American industry from competition, government subsidies for “new inventions…particularly those which relate to machinery” and internal improvements.  Congress, however, was not as enthusiastic. The report was never put up to a vote. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL4hkHAa85o)

In the meantime, however, Hamilton and his former Treasury Department assistant, William Duer, founded the "Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures." Supported by private investors, the society was chartered by New Jersey under Hamilton's direction to exploit the falls for this planned city, which Hamilton called a "national manufactory". The enterprise was a public-private partnership: it was exempt from property taxes for ten years. The society founded the city of Paterson in the vicinity of the falls, naming it in honor of William Paterson, the governor of New Jersey. Hamilton commissioned civil engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, responsible for the layout of the new capital at Washington, D.C. to design the system of canals known as raceways supplying the power for the watermills in the new town. His magnificent and impracticable ideas were soon abandoned but a series of raceways were constructed.

The Great Falls of the Passaic River,

Showing the turbine housing of the S.U.M. dating from 1911

The Great Falls of the Passaic River in Passaic, New Jersey became America’s first planned industrial city in 1791. The water falls were harnessed as a power source for grist mills and resulted in the growth of Paterson as one of the first industrial centers in the United States.  Hamilton hoped to demonstrate the ability of the United States to make proper use of its plentiful raw materials and its people's special aptitude for technological pursuits through successful manufacturing. Although the Society was dissolved after only five years because it was losing money, it was the first manufacturing corporation chartered by the state of New Jersey and established a model for the future.  Later on, the management of the falls became a lucrative source of profits as the area became the nucleus for a growing mill industry. By 1815, thirteen water-powered cotton mills were operating beside the falls, operated by over 2,000 workers. As a result of the society's success in promoting industry, the population of Paterson grew from 500 in the 1790s to over 5,000 by 1820. By the 1830s, the textile mill industry in the area had been surpassed by larger and better-capitalized steam-powered operations in New England and the local mill industry shifted toward the manufacture of steel and locomotives. The Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works, which began operating in 1832, was the first such success. By the time of the American Civil War, the milling of steel and the manufacture of locomotives had become the dominant industry. In the 1880s, the area became the center of the nation's silk industry. The society continued operations into the 20th century but fell into decline with the abandonment of the area by industry. In 1945, the society's charter and property were acquired by the city of Paterson. But American industry started here.

Critical thinking activity:  Ask students to look at a map of the eastern United States and explain why Hamilton selected the Great Falls as the site for the first United States industrial park.  Hamilton had visited the Great Falls of the Passaic River in 1778 when he was serving as an aide to General Washington during the American Revolution and saw how powerful they were. The energy of the waterfalls was harnessed as a power source for raw products (cotton, iron, silk) that could be manufactured into finished products.  The falls were not only powerful but also conveniently located within the main population centers of the country between New York City and Philadelphia and on a river which could be reached from New York Harbor.  In addition to being located near the nation’s population centers, land in New Jersey was cheap and there were abundant forests and rivers.

Why did New Jersey fit the criteria of a manufacturing location described by Alexander Hamilton in his Report on Manufacturers? Why did railroads come to New Jersey? Go to the NJ Digital Highway at  Growth of Industry | New Jersey Digital Highway for an activity to help answer this question.

Critical thinking activity:  Ask students: What governmental support did the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures (SUM) have from the government? It was exempt from local property taxes for ten years. Do you think that the federal /state or local government should be supporting economic development or should it be left to private individuals? How do you think the government should support economic development?

1. John Stevens, Steam engines and Interstate Commerce

Industrial development in the early 19^th century would not have been possible without steam engines.  In 1781 Scottish engineer James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion.  Watt's ten-horsepower engines enabled a wide range of manufacturing machinery to be powered. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained. With steam engines, it was possible to construct mainline railways, which were a key component of the industrial revolution.  Railways reduced the costs of shipping, and allowed for fewer lost goods, compared with shipping over water, which faced occasional sinking of ships. The change from canals to railways allowed for "national markets" in which prices varied very little from city to city. Watt’s steam engine also enabled a wide range of manufacturing machinery to be powered since the engines could be placed anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel was available.

Steam engines were also being used to power ships and for manufacturing.  John Stevens was a lawyer, engineer and inventor in Hoboken, NJ, who constructed the first U.S. steam locomotive, the first steam-powered ferry and the first U.S. commercial ferry service.  In 1791, Stevens received one of the first three patents issued by the United States Patent Office, all three of which were applications of steam power.  In 1809, Steven’s steamship, Phoenix, left Hoboken on a trip down the Atlantic Ocean along the coastline of New Jersey and then up the Delaware River to Philadelphia. It was the first steamship to make an ocean voyage.  In 1811, Steven’s steam ferry, Juliana, was the first to run across the Hudson River between New York and Hoboken.  The first railroad charter in the U.S. was given to Stevens and others in 1815 for the New Jersey Railroad. He designed and built a steam locomotive capable of hauling several passenger cars at his estate in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1825.

Procedures/Comparing Inventors Activity: John Stevens (1749-1838) and James Watt (1736-1819) were both interested in developing the use of steam engines. Have students conduct research (or use the information provided below) and complete the graphic organizer Handout 1:  John Stevens and James Watt.  Alternatively, students prepare a short essay comparing their backgrounds and accomplishments. Essays should note the similarities: both came from prominent educational backgrounds and were curious tinkerers, their inventions were practical and had enormous impact on the improvement of transportation during the early 19^th century, and institutions of higher learning were established in their names.

• James Watt was born in a Scottish seaport on the Firth of Clyde in 1736. His father was a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, and served as a civic officer for the town. His mother came from a distinguished family and was well educated. When he was eighteen, his mother died and his father's health began to fail. Watt travelled to London to study instrument-making for a year, then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow intent on setting up his own instrument-making business. Although steam engines had been in use for more than 50 years, they weren’t very workable. In 1765, Watt realized that too much heat was being lost in the process and developed a model of a more efficient steam engine that provided more steam to perform work. Watt had a working model later that same year and a patent for it by 1781. Watt Memorial Library was begun in 1816 with Watt's donation of scientific books, and developed as part of the Watt Institution by his son, which ultimately became the James Watt College, now part of West College Scotland.

• John Stevens was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His father was a prominent state politician who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and his mother, Elizabeth Alexander, was the daughter of New York lawyer and statesman. Stevens graduated from King's College (now Columbia University) in 1768. At age 27 he was appointed a captain in Washington's army, and was afterwards treasurer of New Jersey. In 1784, he bought land that had been confiscated from a Tory (Loyalist) landowner at a public auction from the state of New Jersey. His land purchase comprised approximately what is now the city of Hoboken. Stevens was a lawyer, engineer and inventor. He constructed the first U.S. steam locomotive, the first steam-powered ferry, the Phoenix in 1806, which was the first steamship to successfully navigate an open ocean to Philadelphia, and first U.S. commercial ferry service in 1811 from Hoboken, NJ to New York City, NY. He obtained the first railroad charter in 1815 and designed and built a steam locomotive capable of hauling several passenger cars in 1825. He also helped to develop U.S. patent law. Stevens built an estate at Castle Point in Hoboken, on land that was given by his son to create Stevens Institute of Technology in 1870. 

John Stevens and James Watt

	James Watt	John Stevens
Birth date and place	Island of Firth, Scotland 1736	Perth Amboy, NJ 1745
Families	Father a civic leader Mother from a distinguished family and well-educated	Father a prominent statesman Mother from a distinguished family
Eduational Background	Well educated	Graduated from a prestigious university
Accomplishments	Developed and patented in 1781 a workable steam engine	Constructed the first U.S. steam locomotive, and the first steam-powered ferry, the Phoenix in 1806, , and the first U.S. commercial ferry service from in 1811 from Hoboken, NJ to New York City, NY. Obtained the first railroad charter in 1815 and designed and built a steam locomotive capable of hauling several passenger cars in 1825. Helped to develop U.S. patent law.
Legacies	Watt Memorial Library, now part of West College in Scotland	Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ
Other information

The Law and the entrepreneur: Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): The case that defined the scope of interstate commerce.

It was the operation of steamboats on the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York that prompted the U.S. Supreme Court decision that made it clear that the federal government had the right to regulate interstate commerce.  A New York state law gave to individuals the exclusive right to operate steamboats on waters within state jurisdiction. Laws like this one were duplicated elsewhere which led to friction as some states would require foreign (out-of-state) boats to pay substantial fees for navigation privileges. In this case Thomas Gibbons -- a steamboat owner who did business between New York and New Jersey under a federal coastal license -- challenged the monopoly license granted by New York to Aaron Ogden. New York courts consistently upheld the state monopoly.

On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court under Art III, Section 2 granting the federal courts jurisdiction over cases arising “between Citizens of different States,” the question was: Did the State of New York exercise authority in a realm reserved exclusively to Congress, namely, the regulation of interstate commerce?

The unanimous Court found that New York's licensing requirement for out-of-state operators was inconsistent with a congressional act regulating the coasting trade (Act of February 1793, Sec. 1, Clause 8). The New York law was invalid by virtue of the Supremacy Clause U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 3: granting Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes”.  In his opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall developed a clear definition of the word commerce, which included navigation on interstate waterways. He also gave meaning to the phrase "among the several states" in the Commerce Clause.  Marshall's was one of the earliest and most influential opinions concerning this important clause. He concluded that regulation of navigation by steamboat operators and others for purposes of conducting interstate commerce was a power reserved to and exercised by the Congress.

Close Reading Activity:   Have students read Handout 2: Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). Have them identify and define any words that they do not understand.  Students answer the following questions:

1. How does the U.S. Supreme Court define “commerce”?
2. How does it define “among the several States”?
3. Why does the Court conclude that the New York law must give way to federal law?
4. Why was this decision important to the development of commerce in the United States?
5. Why was this decision important to the development of the power of the federal government?

Gibbons v. Ogden set the stage for future expansion of congressional power over commercial activity and a vast range of other activities once thought to come within the jurisdiction of the states. After Gibbons v. Ogden, Congress had preemptive authority over the states to regulate any aspect of commerce crossing state lines. Thus, any state law regulating in-state commercial activities (e.g., workers' minimum wages in an in-state factory) could potentially be overturned by Congress if that activity was somehow connected to interstate commerce (e.g., that factory's goods were sold across state lines). Indeed, more than any other case, Gibbons v. Ogden set the stage for the federal government's overwhelming growth in power into the 20th century. All started by a dispute between ferry boat transportation across the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York.

Alfred Vail and the Telegraph

Telegraph Key created by Alfred Vail, 1844,

Artifact, National Museum of American History, EM*181411.

Provide background:  Born in 1807 in Morristown, New Jersey, Alfred Vail’s father owned the Speedwell Iron Works.  Situated at a natural gorge of the Whippany River, several hydraulic powered forges predated the establishment of the ironworks. In 1815, Vail became sole owner of the Speedwell works and expanded it, producing a variety of agricultural and industrial machinery.  After completing public school, Alfred Vail worked as a machinist at the iron works.  The engine for the SS Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, was built at the Speedwell Ironworks in 1818. In 1832, he began coursework in theological studies at the University of the City of New York, now New York University, with the hope of becoming a Presbyterian minister. 

Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, Mass. in 1791. He was a professional artist, not a scientist. He graduated from Yale in 1810 and lived in England from 1811 to 1815, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1813. He spent the next ten years as an itinerant artist with a particular interest in portraiture. He returned to America in 1832 and became a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York. Hearing a discussion on electromagnets gave him the idea for an electric telegraph and he gave the development of a telegraph his full attention.  In 1837 Vail saw Morse demonstrate an early version of his electric telegraph in New York, and convinced Morse to take him on as a partner. The contract between the two stated that Vail—for a share of interest in Morse’s rights to the telegraph—would work on constructing the telegraph machines and financing the American and foreign patents.  During his work on the telegraph, Morse needed political help to obtain support from Congress as much as he required technical and financial assistance, and he also shared ownership in a future telegraph system with Congressman Francis Ormond Jonathan "Fog" Smith (four shares).

Vail vastly improved Morse’s original design of the machine. Instead of using pendulums, Vail added weights to the machine’s turning key. He also substituted a steel pointed pen for the pencil Morse had employed, to indent the code into the paper tape the machine used and improved the mechanics of the register, the instrument that punched out the code via electric impulse, as well. Additionally, Vail developed a simpler alphabetic system of code to replace Morse’s original, but more complicated numerical code, in which dashes and dots were interpreted as numbers and then translated into words in a code book. Vail’s alpha code greatly sped up the process of deciphering messages. Though his contributions to the project were extremely significant, it was Morse’s name that appeared on the patents. Consequently, Morse is remembered, and Vail is often not.

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail sent the first telegram using Morse code, and the first in America, on January 11, 1838 in Morristown, New Jersey from the Speedwell Ironworks. It was the beginning of a revolution in communications, as soon there were lines linking all the major cities on the East Coast. By 1861, the telegraph connected the West Coast to the East Coast, bringing an end to the Pony Express. 

With changing industrial trends and a decline in the flow of the Whippany River, the ironworks were shut down in 1873, and its equipment sold.  The remains of the factory buildings burned in 1908, and the few surviving walls and foundations remain unrestored.  Speedwell Village was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974.

Go to the video about the Invention of the Telegraph at Invention of the Telegraph.

You decide:  Both Vail and Morse left their papers to the Library of Congress, including their contract.  Based on their contract,  do you think it was fair for Morse to patent the telegraph solely in his name? Why or why not? (For additional information on Vail, Morse and their contract, see: https://www.loc.gov/collections/samuel-morse-papers/articles-and-essays/collection-highlights/invention-of-the-telegraph/)

1. Thomas Edison, patents and the communications revolution

Although protecting authors and inventors with limited monopolies was not without precedent, few countries have enshrined this concept in their founding document. The United States Constitution included a specific provision for Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries” (U.S. Constitution Art. 1, Sec. 8, para. 8, 1787 ratified 1788), which was done through the passage of the Patent Act of 1790 and successive patent acts.

 We associate the invention of the lightbulb with Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, but we often forget that Edison was the author of many other important inventions, including the idea of a research lab.  Edison called his research lab his “invention factory.”  In fact, Edison did not “invent” the light bulb.  Arc lighting, which was bright enough to light a street but too bright for inside, had been invented prior to Edison. What he did invent was the incandescent bulb in 1879 which was soft enough for inside use and burned long enough to light a home for many hours. Then Edison and his lab assistants invented the electric power system, including wires, fuses and switches, to bring electricity to homes and businesses.  

Background: Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the last of the seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Thomas's father was an exiled political activist from Canada. His mother was a school teacher and a major influence in Thomas’ early life. In 1854, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where Edison attended public school for a total of 12 weeks. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction, he was deemed "difficult" by his teacher. His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home. At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects. In this wide-open curriculum Edison developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him throughout his life.

At age 12, Edison began to sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Exploiting his access to the news bulletins teletyped to the station office each day, Edison began publishing his own small newspaper, called the Grand Trunk Herald. The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and took the opportunity to capitalize on it.  While he worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. After Edison saved a 3-year-old from being run over by an errant train, the child’s grateful father rewarded him by teaching him to operate a telegraph. By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator. For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War. He read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science. In 1868, Edison ventured to Boston, landing a job with the Western Union Telegraph Company. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature—his first patent.  The following year Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker, the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions. The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed, they paid him $40,000 for the rights. Edison was only 22 years old. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.

Thomas Edison with his second phonograph photographed by Matthew Brady, April 1878.

In 1870, Thomas Edison set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, and employed several machinists. As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed his products for the highest bidder. Often that was Western Union, but just as often, it was one of Western Union's rivals. In 1876, he moved his expanding operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent industrial research facility incorporating machine shops and laboratories. That same year, Western Union encouraged him to develop a communication device to compete with Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He never did. However, in December of 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph. Though not commercially viable for another decade, the invention brought him worldwide fame.

Edison cylinder phonograph ca.1899

In his first public display of incandescent lighting, Thomas Alva Edison lit up the streets of Menlo Park, New Jersey on December 31, 1879. The following January, Edison was granted a patent for “an improvement on electric lamps and in the method of manufacturing the same,” and he set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power and light the cities of the world. That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became the General Electric Corporation.  Watch the video of Thomas Edison’s Light Bulb at Thomas Edison's Light Bulb.

 In 1881, he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed.  In 1882, the Pearl Street generating station provided 110 volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. In 1887, Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the primary research laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent most of his time there, supervising the development of lighting technology and power systems. He also perfected the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery.

Over the next few decades, Edison found his role as inventor transitioning to one as industrialist and business manager. He eventually became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla, an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time, parting ways in 1885. The two would publicly clash about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. alternating currents, which Tesla championed. The latter inventor entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor as well, and thus a major business feud over electrical power came into being.

But more inventions were in store for Edison: the motion picture.  In 1893, the world's first film production studio, the Black Maria, was completed on the grounds of Edison's laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, for the purpose of making film strips for the Kinetoscope.  It got its name because it was large and black and looked like the police wagons of the day, which were called black marias. On January 7, 1894, the experimental kinetoscope film of Thomas Edison’s employee Fred Ott sneezing was filmed at the Edison Laboratories in West Orange. It was the first motion picture copyrighted in the United States. The kinetoscope enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures. In 1895, the French Lumiere brothers invented a portable motion-picture camera, film processing unit and projector called the Cinematographe, three functions covered in one invention that projected moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more than one person. Later in 1896, Edison showed his improved Vitascope projector and it was the first commercially, successful, projector in the U.S. On April 23, 1896, Edison became the first person to project a motion picture, holding the world's first motion picture screening at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City.  On December 1, 1903 “The Great Train Robbery,” the first “western” film, produced by Edison Laboratories and filmed at various locations in New Jersey, was released to the public. Edison produced 200-300 films at the Black Maria.

Edison and most of his Lab Staff in West Orange, NJ, 1893, LC-USZ62-98068

So began the film industry…in New Jersey.  By 1914, the early film series, “The Perils of Pauline,” was filmed largely in Fort Lee, NJ. It brought us the term “cliffhanger.” The series premiered At Loew’s Broadway Theater in New York City.  By 1918 the film industry had moved to warmer climates in California.  Watch the video about the birth of the film industry in Ft. lee, NJ at The Birth of the Film Industry in Fort Lee.

Edison’s Black Maria film production studio on the grounds of Edison’s Lab in West Orange, NJ, 1893

And the automobile battery. As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in 1912. The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.

Edison experimenting in his lab, 1920 LC-USZ62-98832 

Edison earned 1,093 United States patents, a record number for one person that still stands. He also earned at least several hundred foreign patents from Great Britain, France, Germany and other countries. Most foreign patents were similar to the American ones. Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont," in West Orange, New Jersey. He was 84 years old.

Jigsaw Activity:  Divide students into six groups. Prepare cards with selections from Edison’s biography (early life, early inventions, Menlo Park lightbulb, phonograph, motion pictures, automobile battery and share one card with each group.  Have students  jigsaw and explain the early life or inventions of Thomas Edison to the other groups. Have students use Handout 3 - Thomas Edison Graphic Organizer  to organize and summarize Edison’s life and inventions.

The scientific method:  Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."

Critical thinking activity: Ask students to consider and respond to the following questions on Handout 4 - Thomas Edison and His Inventions:

• Why did Edison choose to open his lab in NJ?
• How did people react to his inventions?
• How did Edison expect his inventions to be used?
• Did Edison follow the scientific method in developing his inventions?
• Why is Edison considered a pioneer of the research and development process that exists today?
• Does Edison fit the definition of an “entrepreneur”?

Activity:  Edison on Trial.  Some people believe that historians give too much credit to Edison and not enough is given to his assistants for these inventions. Your job is to sit as a member of a jury that must decide whether or not Edison deserves all of the credit he is given. Since this is a civil case rather than a criminal case, the burden of proof necessary for a guilty verdict is only more likely than not. (over 50%)

• You will be presented with a case for the prosecution that charges that, "Thomas Alva Edison primarily succeeded not because of his own inventive ability, but as a result of the ingenuity and efforts of the many inventors and machinists that worked for him."
• The defense will argue that although Edison did have teams of assistants and machinists, he succeeded as a result of his own ideas, intellectual ability, leadership and hard work.
• The court case will rely heavily on statements from Edison and those who knew and worked with him. Any statements in quotes are directly from the witnesses and those that are not in quotes were developed for the purposes of this case based on the opinions and ideas of the witnesses.

For documents and instructions, Go to the NJ Digital Highway at Thomas Edison and the Process of Invention | New Jersey Digital Highway

1. John Philip Holland and the Submarine

John Philip Holland was born on the coast of Ireland in 1841, where his father was a coastguard, He had an engineering degree and was teaching science in Ireland while experimenting with designs for underwater boats (Submarines). In 1873, he immigrated to the United States, settling in Boston.  Initially working for an engineering firm, he returned to teaching at St. John's Catholic school in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1875, his submarine designs were submitted for consideration by the US Navy but were turned down as unworkable. The Fenians (Irish revolutionaries), however, continued to fund Holland's research and development expenses at a level that allowed him to resign from his teaching post. In 1878 he demonstrated the Holland I prototype. In 1881, Fenian Ram was launched but, soon after, Holland and the Fenians parted company on bad terms over the issue of payment within the Fenian organization, and between the Fenians and Holland. The submarine is now preserved at Paterson Museum, New Jersey.  In 1887, while living in Newark, Holland Although ideas for underwater boats date back to the 1500s, Holland’s submarine was accepted by the U.S. Navy.

Holland stands in the hatch of a submarine.

Holland continued to improve his designs and worked on several experimental boats and founded the Holland Torpedo Boat Company in 1896. The following year he succeeded in building the first submarine with the power to run submerged for any considerable distance, and the first to combine electric motors for submerged travel and gasoline engines for use on the surface. After rigorous tests, the U.S. Navy bought Holland’s submarine and commissioned it as USS Holland. Seven more of her type were ordered, with five built at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and two built at Union Iron Works in California. The company that emerged from under these developments was called The Electric Boat Company, founded in 1899, which eventually evolved into the major defense contractor General Dynamics.

The U.S. government ordered six more; similar orders came from England, Japan, and Russia. Holland’s final years were marked by litigation with his financial backers. One of his last inventions was an apparatus designed to enable sailors to escape from damaged submarines.

Submarines changed the nature of warfare.  Submarines with torpedoes for damaging boats were the instruments of choice by the participants in World War I, particularly Germany, which   used them to sink American ships crossing the Atlantic. 

Fun Fact:  But no, the Holland Tunnel was not named after John Philip Holland, but rather, it bears the name of its first chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, who with his team surmounted many previously unsolved tunnel engineering problems. Unfortunately, Holland died before the tunnel's completion.

1. Food and New Jersey

Although many scoff at the idea of New Jersey as the “Garden State”, New Jersey is home to more than 9,071 farms covering 715,057 acres of farmland. The state is among the leaders in many forms of agricultural production.  For example, New Jersey ranks 5^th in blueberry production, 3^rd in cranberry production, 3^rd in spinach, 3^rd in bell peppers, 4^th in peach production.  It was the location of several important improvements in foods that we eat every day.

Iconic Campbell’s Soup can

Condensed soup. Doctor John T. Dorrance, a chemist with the Campbell Soup Company, in Camden, NJ, invented condensed soup in 1897.  Canned soup can be condensed, in which case it is prepared by adding water (or sometimes milk), or it can be "ready-to-eat," meaning that no additional liquid is needed before eating. Condensing soup allows soup to be packaged into a smaller can and sold at a lower price than other canned soups. The soup is usually doubled in volume by adding a "can full" of water or milk (about 10 ounces). Campbell's products are sold in 120 countries around the world. For a video about the Campbell Soup Company go to The Campbell Soup Company.

Elizabeth White

Blueberries.  The birthplace of the cultivated blueberry is Whitesbog. Today, blueberries are considered a super-food, rich in vitamins and antioxidants, and grown around the world; North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, and New Jersey are the top U.S. producers. Americans consume, on average, five cups of blueberries per year . But until the early twentieth century, most farmers thought that wild blueberries could not be cultivated successfully.  Elizabeth Coleman White (1871-1954) grew up on her father's cranberry farm in Whitesbog, an agricultural community in the Pine Barrens in Pemberton Township, New Jersey.  Whitesbog was the largest cranberry farm in the state and its founder (her father) was a nationally recognized leader in the cranberry industry.  At the time, people did not believe that blueberries could be domesticated.  In 1911, Elizabeth White became interested in blueberry propagation and, using her father's farm, she collaborated with Dr. Frederick Coville, a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist, to identify wild blueberry plants with the most desirable properties, crossbreed the bushes and create vibrant new blueberry varieties based on wild varieties. By 1916, they had developed blueberry plants that could be grown and sold commercially.  In 1927, she helped to start the New Jersey Cooperative Blueberry Association. Thanks to Elizabeth White, blueberries are now produced in 38 states, with Michigan producing the most but New Jersey not far behind! For additional information on Elizabeth White, see  Elizabeth Coleman White - New Jersey Women's History.

The Rutgers tomato was introduced in 1934 by Rutgers breeder Lyman Schermerhorn as an ideal locally well-adapted and improved "General Use" tomato for processing (canning and juicing) as well as fresh market. The Rutgers tomato was developed and released in the period between World War I and World War II, during expansion of canning and truck farming, when 36,000+ acres of tomatoes were grown in the Garden State. The Rutgers tomato was a genuine horticultural improvement over non-certified saved seeds, as well as over commercial varieties, with improved attributes, including:  Pleasing flavor and taste of the juice;  more uniform sparkling red internal color ripening from center of the tomato outward; smooth skin; freedom from fruit cracking; 'second early' maturity;  handsome flattened globe shape; vigorous healthy foliage to ripen more fruit and reduce sunscald; firm thick fleshy fruit walls for its time, though considered extremely soft by today's definition of tomato firmness; uniformity true to type in the field.

Rutgers tomato

Activity:  Let me count the ways.  How often do you eat a tomato or tomato product (sauce, stewed, sun-dried)? How about a blueberry or blueberry product (yogurt, cake of muffins, etc.)? How about something from a can? What can you conclude about the impact of agricultural improvements from New Jersey based on your calculations?

Consider the method for identifying the best way to cultivate blueberries or tomatoes for market. How are these methods the same as those for other “inventions”?  (In both cases, the scientific method of investigating what worked and what did not was followed.)

1. Alice Parker and the natural gas heating furnace

Before 1919, people had to cut wood to burn in their fireplaces or stoves to heat their homes.  In 1919, Alice Parker, an African American inventor from Morristown, NJ, was awarded a patent for a natural gas heating furnace.  Using gas as a fuel, the furnace carried warm air throughout various rooms of a house.  Alice Parker graduated from Howard University with honors at a time when most women were not attending college; it is unclear if this statement is even true (See the Feb. 28, 2022 investigative article by Audry Henderson at What we know about Alice Parker, a ‘hidden figure’ in modern heating). Alice Parker’s patented system of using natural gas to power a heating furnace was a revolutionary idea that conserved energy and paved the way for the central heating systems we have in our homes today, making cold, winter days much more comfortable. It may not have changed the world, but it made it much more comfortable.  (For additional information on Alice Parker see Alice H. Parker - Wikipedia)

2. Selman Waksman and the development of antibiotics

Born in Russia (near Kiev) in 1888, Selman Waksman entered Rutgers University as an undergraduate in 1911 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture in 1915. He completed his Master's Degree also at Rutgers while working as a research assistant in soil bacteriology at the New Jersey Experimental Agriculture Station. After working in California on his Ph. D in Microbiology he was invited back to Rutgers, where he worked his way up from Associate Professor to head of the Microbiology Department when it was organized in 1940.

Dr. Selman Waksman in his lab, 1953

In 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming made a chance discovery from an already discarded, contaminated Petri dish. The mold that had contaminated the experiment turned out to contain a powerful antibiotic, penicillin. However, it wasn’t until 1940 that two scientists at Oxford University, Australian Howard Florey and German refugee Ernst Chain, developed a chemical technique for producing a penicillin that kept its antibacterial power for longer than a few days and was safe to use. Mass production started immediately since the new drug was needed to save lives that otherwise would have been lost due to bacterial infections in even minor wounds.

At the turn of the 20^th century, tuberculosis was an urgent health problem. It was contagious and usually fatal.  No immunization or effective treatment was available. Individuals with tuberculosis were isolated in facilities. In 1882 the Prussian physician Robert Koch had identified the cause of tuberculosis to be a specific bacteria or bacillus. He developed a protein from the bacteria with the hope that it would prove to provide effective immunization, but it did not. Since 1915, Dr. Waksman had been analyzing soil. In 1939, i.e. one year before the rediscovery of penicillin by Florey and Chain, Dr. Waksman started an extensive study aimed at determining the nature of the substance by which the various soil microbes destroyed each other. In 1940 Dr. Waksman and his colleagues at Rutgers University had succeeded in isolating the first antibiotic, which was called “actinomycin” but it was very toxic. In 1942 another antibiotic was detected and studied, called “streptothricin”. This had a high degree of activity against many bacteria and also against the tubercle bacillus but was also too toxic.  During the streptothricin studies Dr. Waksman and his colleagues, Albert Schatz, Elizabeth Bugie, developed a series of test-methods, which helped to isolate the antibiotic, streptomycin, in 1943. Streptomycin was the first effective cure for tuberculosis and dramatically reduced the number of cases, although the hope of total eradication has been thwarted by the development of drug-resistant strains. 

In 1949, an Institute of Microbiology was established at Rutgers University with Dr. Waksman as its first Director. Today this institute bears his name. In 1952, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine for his work on antibiotics (including streptomycin) and their effect on tuberculosis. Located on Busch Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the Waksman Institute of Microbiology is an interdisciplinary research institute devoted to excellence in basic research including developmental biology, cell biology, biochemistry, structural biology, genetics, and genomics but now employs molecular tools to streamline and accelerate laboratory processes. Watch the video at  Selman Waksman: Celebrating Rutgers’ 250th anniversary.  Although he officially retired from Rutgers in 1958, Dr. Waksman still maintained an office and conducted research from time to time.  A research facility on the campus of the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, was established in 1962 with Dr. Waksman as its director. Dr. Waksman died in 1973.

Activity: The role of the legal system in the creation of, protection of, and profit from intellectual property such as new antibiotics.  The pharmaceutical/chemical manufacturer Merck and Co. was interested in manufacturing and marketing these new antibiotics. Dr. Waksman could have used his discoveries to make himself rich, but chose instead to divert most of the profits of his work to the Institute.  His influence at Merck led Merck to give up its exclusive license on the manufacture of streptomycin so that it could be licensed to other companies in order to rapidly distribute it for the treatment of tuberculosis.  In spite of his philanthropic approach, Albert Schatz, one of Dr. Waksman’s research assistants, sued him for a share of the profits.  For directions and documents to use regarding this lawsuit to understand the role of the legal system in protecting inventions and intellectual property, go to the NJ Digital Highway at Unit #2 Schatz Lawsuit | New Jersey Digital Highway

1. Bell Labs and the start of the electronic and internet revolution

Watch the video about Bell labs at Bell Labs: Communication Innovation. Bell Labs has its roots in the consolidation of several engineering departments within the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) company and the Western Electric company, the manufacturing organization for the Bell System. These departments had been tasked with overcoming the day-to-day engineering challenges of building a national communications network. But as large parts of that network were deployed and the emerging telephone business took hold in the 1920s, attention increasingly turned to exploring fundamental areas of science likely to shape the future of the industry.

As a result, about 4,000 of these scientists and engineers were assigned to a newly created Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in 1925, and were to be fully dedicated to such research. Go to Claude Shannon for background on early work at Bell Labs “Math Department”.

Bell Labs headquarters was in Murray Hill, NJ. In 1934, AT&T’s Development and Research Department, which had been devoted to bridging the gap between laboratory research and the operations of communication systems, was integrated into Bell Laboratories.  Growth continued as engineers from development departments were also folded into Bell Laboratories.  In 1947, the transistor was developed at Bell Labs, the start of the 20^th century communications revolutions that resulted in cell phones and computers.  Scientists from Bell Labs developed a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language.  Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell labs.

Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ

As a consequence of a divestiture agreement with the U.S. Government in 1984, AT&T Corporation divested itself of its local exchange companies and the Bell System as it was known ceased to exist. As part of the divestiture agreement, AT&T Technologies assumed the business of Western Electric and Bell Laboratories. Concurrently, several thousand Bell Laboratories employees were split off to form Bellcore, the organization established to provide research and technical functions for the newly independent local exchange carriers. In 1996, AT&T spun off most of Bell Laboratories and its equipment manufacturing business into Lucent Technologies, Inc. (now Alcatel-Lucent).   Bell Laboratories is a research and scientific development company that now belongs to Nokia. Its headquarters are located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in addition to other laboratories around the rest of the United States and in other countries.

Activity:  Questions to consider (Handout 5):

1. How does Bell Labs differ from Edison’s Invention Lab? How is it similar?
2. Not all inventors are entrepreneurs. Can the teams working at Bell Labs be considered entrepreneurs if the risk is taken by the company?
3. How much can one person’s innovation reshape a region? How important is collaboration in bringing such innovations to fruition?
4. What current companies do you think of as “entrepreneurial” today? Why do they fit the definition?

Assessment : The Invention Process. Have students work in small groups to brainstorm and come up with possible inventions that would make your lives easier, safer, or more enjoyable and then go through Edison’s process for developing the invention.  For directions and details, go to: Thomas Edison and the Process of Invention | New Jersey Digital Highway

Extension Activities:

• Visit Paterson Great Falls, For more information go to nps.gov/pagr
• Visit Speedwell Historic Village. For more information go to .Historic Speedwell - Morris County Park Commission
• Visit Thomas Edison’s home, Glenmont, and his Lab Complex, in West Orange, NJ. For additional information go to Thomas Edison National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
• Visit the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park & Edison Memorial Tower. For more information go to Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park & Edison Memorial Tower | VisitNJ.org
• Visit Historic Whitesbog Village. For more information go to Whitesbog Preservation Trust

 

Handout 1:  John Stevens and James Watt

	James Watt	John Stevens
Birth date and place
Families
Educational Background
Accomplishments
Legacies
Other information

 

Handout 2: Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)

The facts:  A New York state law gave to individuals the exclusive right to operate steamboats on waters within state jurisdiction. Laws like this one were duplicated elsewhere which led to friction as some states would require foreign (out-of-state) boats to pay substantial fees for navigation privileges. In this case Thomas Gibbons -- a steamboat owner who did business between New York and New Jersey under a federal coastal license -- challenged the monopoly license granted by New York to Aaron Ogden. New York courts consistently upheld the state monopoly. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court under Art III, Section 2 granting the federal courts jurisdiction over cases arising “between Citizens of different States,” the question was: Did the State of New York exercise authority in a realm reserved exclusively to Congress, namely, the regulation of interstate commerce?

The decision:  The unanimous Court ruled for Gibbons, holding that New York’s exclusive grant to Ogden violated the federal licensing act of 1793.  The New York law was invalid by virtue of the Supremacy Clause U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 3, which granted Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes”. 

The reasoning:  “The subject to be regulated is commerce, and our Constitution being,… one of enumeration, and not of definition, … it becomes necessary to settle the meaning of the word. …Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations, in all its branches, and is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse.

…. All America understands, and has uniformly understood, the word "commerce" to comprehend navigation. It was so understood, and must have been so understood, when the Constitution was framed. The power over commerce, including navigation, was one of the primary objects for which the people of America adopted their government, and must have been contemplated in forming it. The convention must have used the word in that sense, because all have understood it in that sense, and the attempt to restrict it comes too late.

The word used in the Constitution, then, comprehends, and has been always understood to comprehend, navigation within its meaning, and a power to regulate navigation is as expressly granted as if that term had been added to the word "commerce."

To what commerce does this power extend? The Constitution informs us, to commerce "with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes."

…The word "among" means intermingled with. A thing which is among others is intermingled with them. Commerce among the States cannot stop at the external boundary line of each State, but may be introduced into the interior.

It is not intended to say that these words comprehend that commerce which is completely internal, which is carried on between man and man in a State, or between different parts of the same State, and which does not extend to or affect other States. Such a power would be inconvenient, and is certainly unnecessary.

Comprehensive as the word "among" is, it may very properly be restricted to that commerce which concerns more States than one. …The genius and character of the whole government seem to be that its action is to be applied to all the external concerns of the nation, and to those internal concerns which affect the States generally, but not to those which are completely within a particular State, which do not affect other States, and with which it is not necessary to interfere for the purpose of executing some of the general powers of the government. The completely internal commerce of a State, then, may be considered as reserved for the State itself.

…We are now arrived at the inquiry -- What is this power?

It is the power to regulate, that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution. …If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, is vested in Congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its Constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the Constitution of the United States.

The power of Congress, then, comprehends navigation, within the limits of every State in the Union, so far as that navigation may be in any manner connected with "commerce with foreign nations, or among the several States, or with the Indian tribes." It may, of consequence, pass the jurisdictional line of New York and act upon the very waters to which the prohibition now under consideration applies.

…the Court will enter upon the inquiry whether the laws of New York, as expounded by the highest tribunal of that State, have, in their application to this case, come into collision with an act of Congress and deprived a citizen of a right to which that act entitles him.

…the framers of our Constitution foresaw this state of things, and provided for it by declaring the supremacy not only of itself, but of the laws made in pursuance of it. The nullity of any act inconsistent with the Constitution is produced by the declaration that the Constitution is the supreme law. The appropriate application of that part of the clause which confers the same supremacy on laws and treaties is to such acts of the State Legislatures as do not transcend their powers, but, though enacted in the execution of acknowledged State powers, interfere with, or are contrary to, the laws of Congress made in pursuance of the Constitution or some treaty made under the authority of the United States. In every such case, the act of Congress or the treaty is supreme, and the law of the State, though enacted in the exercise of powers not controverted, must yield to it.”

 

Handout 3: Thomas Edison Graphic Organizer

	Dates	Key facts
Early Life
Teletype
Lightbulb
Phonograph
Motion picture
Automobile battery
Invention factory

Handout 4: Thomas Edison and His Inventions

1. Why did Edison choose to open his lab in NJ?

2. How did people react to his inventions?

3. How did Edison expect his inventions to be used?

4. Did Edison follow the scientific method in developing his inventions?

5. Why is Edison considered a pioneer of the research and development process that exists today?

6. Does Edison fit the definition of an “entrepreneur”?

 

Handout 5: Bell Labs

1. How does Bell Labs differ from Edison’s Invention Lab? How is it similar?

2. Not all inventors are entrepreneurs. Can the teams working at Bell Labs be considered entrepreneurs if the risk is taken by the company?

3. How much can one person’s innovation reshape a region? How important is collaboration in bringing such innovations to fruition?

4. What current companies do you think of as “entrepreneurial” today? Why do they fit the definition?

 

Ship from Liverpool filled with immigrants sailing to Ellis Island. (1907)

This series of lessons may be taught as part of a week-long unit on Immigration or the individual lessons and activities might be integrated as part of U.S. History from 1840 to today.

Lesson Creator: New Jersey Center for Civic Education, Rutgers University, Piscataway

Grade Level:  Secondary

Time: Three-Five 45-minute periods

Objective: Students will be able to:

• explain why immigrants decided to leave their homelands and settle in New Jersey in the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries
• compare and contrast the immigration debate in the 1920s to today’s debate about immigration policy
• identify current issues regarding immigration and their impact on New Jersey
• analyze the historical impact of changing U.S. immigration policies on New Jersey

NJ Student Learning Standards:

6.1.12.HistoryCA.2.a: Research multiple perspectives to explain the struggle to create an American identity.

6.1.12.HistoryCA.3.b: Use primary sources representing multiple perspectives to explain the impact of immigration on American society and the economy and the various responses to increased immigration

6.1.12.CivicsDP.5.a: Analyze the effectiveness of governmental policies and of actions by groups and individuals to address discrimination against new immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans (1870-1900)

6.1.12.HistoryUP.5.a: Using primary sources, relate varying immigrants’ experiences to gender, race, ethnicity, or occupation.

6.1.12.HistoryCA.5.a: Assess the effectiveness of public education in fostering national unity and American values and in helping people meet their economic needs and expectations.

6.1.12.CivicsHR.8.a: Analyze primary and secondary sources to explain how social intolerance, xenophobia, and fear of anarchism led to restrictive immigration and refugee laws, and the violation of the human rights of individuals and groups.

6.1.12.GeoPP.13.b: Use quantitative data and other sources to describe the extent to which changes in national policy impacted immigration to New Jersey and the United States after 1965.

6.1.12.CivicsPI.14.d: Use primary sources representing multiple perspectives and data to determine the effectiveness of the federal government in addressing health care, income equality, and immigration.

6.1.12.GeoPP.14.a: Use data and other evidence to determine the impact of recent immigration and migration patterns in New Jersey and the United States on demographic, social, economic, and political issues.

6.1.12.HistoryCA.14.c: Determine the influence of multicultural beliefs, products (i.e., art, food, music, and literature), and practices in shaping contemporary American culture

Common Core Standards:

RH.9-10.1    Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.

RH.9-10.4    Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary describing political, social, or economic aspects of history/social science.

RH.9-10.7    Integrate quantitative or technical analysis (e.g., charts, research data) with qualitative analysis in print or digital text.

RH.9-10.9    Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources.

RH.11-12.3 Evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain.

RH.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text

RH.11-12.7 Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.

RH.11-12.9 Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

Essential Questions:

• Why has New Jersey had a continuing history of attracting foreign-born immigrants?
• What are the push-pull factors that attracted immigrants to New Jersey at various times in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries and today?
• How has national immigration policy influenced immigration to New Jersey?
• How have immigrants influenced the culture of New Jersey?

Overview

Historians divide the immigration experience into three periods. From 1830-40 to 1880-90 immigration came almost entirely from Ireland, Germany, and Great Britain. This is called the "old" immigration. After 1880 more and more people came from southern and eastern Europe: Poland, Italy, Hungary, Greece, and elsewhere. This is called the "new" immigration, and it lasted until 1925 when Congress for the first time sharply restricted entry into the United States. In 1965, immigration laws were revised and immigration dramatically increased.  Since 1965 the major sources of immigrants were Latin America and Asia rather than Europe.  These lessons primarily explore the impact of changing national immigration policies on the population of New Jersey.

Vocabulary

• Anti-semitism--prejudiceagainst, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews as a national, ethnic, religious or racial group
• Benefits –strengths of alternative actions that can be taken
• Chain Migration--One immigrant sponsors several other immigrants for admission, who then sponsor several others themselves, and so on.
• Civil unrest—public disturbances caused by political, labor or other issues
• Costs-weaknesses of alternative actions that can be taken?
• Emigrant—a person who  leaves one country or region to settle in another
• Ethnicity-- a socially defined category of people who identify with each other based on a common ancestral, social, cultural or national experience
• Famine—extreme scarcity or shortage of food
• Immigration—the process or action by which individuals come to live permanently in a foreign country
• Indentured Servant—An immigrant who entered into a contract to work for someone for a specified term—usually five to seven years-- in exchange for transportation and the prospects of a job and a new life in the American colonies
• Land reclamation--the process of creating new land from ocean, river or lake beds either by filling the area with rock, cement and then clay and soil (land fill) or by draining submerged wetland
• Migration-- the movement by people from one place to another with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location
• Opportunity Costs—value of the best alternative forgone (what you give up) in a situation in which a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources (e.g., to stay or to go)
• Political freedom-- state of being free from government oppression.

Activities/Procedures

1.  Immigration 1840-1890

Castle Garden Immigration Center, New York

Castle Clinton (formerly Ft. Clinton and Castle Garden), at Tip of Manhattan

 

Background: Before Ellis Island was built, immigrants came to the United States through several state locations. The first immigration station established in the United States was at Castle Garden, which had originally been built in 1811 as a fort (Ft. Clinton) at the southern tip of Manhattan to protect New York Harbor and was turned over to the State of New York in 1824 and turned into an entertainment facility for the next 32 years. It 1855 it became New York’s first official immigration processing center and the point of entry for many who settled in New Jersey. Between 1855 and 1890, more than 8 million people arrived in the U.S. through Castle Garden. The building is now a national monument, Castle Clinton, operated by the National Park Service in Battery Park, New York City.

Photo Analysis Activity: Look at the image of immigrants at Castle Garden in 1866 (Handout 1). What is the source? Is it reliable? What is the image showing? What is the language on the signs? (German) What does this image tell us about immigration in the 1860s in the New York area? (Many were from German-speaking countries!)

Critical Thinking Activity: Why did immigrants come to NJ and the U.S. as indentured servants?

Background:

• Beginning in the 1840s, immigration to New Jersey increased dramatically. About 80 percent of these new arrivals were from Germany and the British Isles, primarily Ireland.
• There were many reasons why these immigrants left their homeland to come to the United States.
• For the Irish, the Potato Famine which lasted from 1845-1851, was the most common reason for them to leave. As the Irish farmers moved from their unproductive farms to overcrowded cities where they could not find employment, poverty pushed many to leave for decades afterwards.
• For the German, most came to the United States for political freedom after the 1848 Revolution in the (not yet unified) German states and to avoid the economic hardship caused by the civil strife.
• These new immigrants often faced discrimination in the United States as they supplied the needed manpower for the state's growing industries in Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Trenton and Camden.

Narrative writing activity:

• Draw conclusions: What factors pushed individuals to leave Ireland in the 1840s-60s? What factors pushed people to leave Germany during this time period? Why did many of them settle in New Jersey during this time period? What were some of the challenges that both faced during their journey to the United States?
• Imagine that you are an Irish or German immigrant who arrived in NJ in the 1850s and write a letter to a friend who is planning to emigrate to NJ from Ireland or Germany explaining the challenges you have faced, the benefits you have gained and offer advice.

The impact of technology

Beyond the “push” and “pull”, technology had an impact on immigration.

Background:

• The simple innovation of sailing on a schedule gave immigrants and the American economy a boost in the early 1800s. Traditionally, ships sailed when they had loaded enough cargo to justify a voyage. Passengers could be delayed days or even weeks waiting for the holds to fill. After the War of 1812, ship owners began experimenting with regular timetables, and the 1820s and 1830s saw a boom of scheduled shipping lines across the ocean and along the coasts. Sailing across the Atlantic took 1-2 months, depending on weather.
• By the 1840s, steamships cut the trip across the Atlantic from 1-2 months to 8-14 days, making immigration to the United States from Europe much quicker, easier and less expensive.
• However, for many it was still a long and arduous journey. Just to get to a port of embarkation might mean days or weeks of travel on foot, by rivercraft, or in horse-drawn vehicles

Compare the 1840s and today: Would you be willing to spend 1-2 months on a sailing ship to emigrate to another country? Compare travel in the 1840s with travel today? How do most immigrants come to the United States in the 21st century?

2. Immigration 1890-1920s

Ellis Island Primary Source Photo Activity

Background:

• The Immigration Act of 1891 moved the burden of processing new immigrants from the states to the federal government and authorized the construction of an immigration facility at Ellis Island in New York Bay. The island, which was expanded with reclaimed land from dredging, is owned partially by the state of New York and partially by the state of New Jersey.
• After the rigors of the voyage, immigrants landed at Ellis Island in New York harbor. There they were questioned, processed, inspected for diseases, and then admitted to the country. As in earlier years, a disproportionate number settled in New Jersey.
• Between 1880 and 1920, immigration to New Jersey was predominantly from central and southeastern Europe, particularly Italy, Poles, Russian Jews, Greeks, Czechs (Bohemians), Finns, Armenians, Hungarians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.

 

The newly built Main Immigration Building at Ellis Island c.1904-1910.

National Archives and Records Administration

 

• Photo analysis activity: What can we learn about immigration by looking at images?
  • Divide the class into five groups and have each group look at one of the following photographs:

1. Handout 2: Emigrants coming to the “Land of Promise,” 1902—LC-USZ62-7307 at http://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3a09957/
2. Handout 3: Landing at Ellis Island, 1902—LC-USZ62-12595 at http://www.loc.gov/item/97501086
3. Handout 4: At Ellis Island, 1900 LC-B2-5338 at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/ggbain/50400/50437r.jpg
4. Handout 5: The Registry Room in the Main Immigration Building c. 1906. NPS Photo at https://www.nps.gov/elis/learn/historyculture/images/RegistryRoom.jpg?maxwidth=650&autorotate=false
5. Handout 6: S. Inspectors examining eyes of immigrants, 1913—LC-USZ62-7386 at http://www.loc.gov/item/97501532/

• Jigsaw and have each group explain what its photo tells us about the experience of coming to America as an immigrant at the turn of the 20^th century (1890-1920)
• Draw conclusions based on consideration of all five images.

1. Comparison of 1880 and 1920

• Background: After 1880 the percentage of Irish, British, and Germans began to drop as conditions in those countries became more settled. At the same time, immigration from southern and eastern Europe-from Italy, Poland, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire-began to rise.
• What “pushed” individuals to leave southern and eastern Europe after 1880?
  • The unification of Italian states in 1861 led to political and social unrest and a tax burden on the southern area where the soil was already depleted. Many sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and small business and landowners chose to emigrate rather than face the prospect of a deepening poverty.
  • The unification of the German states by Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1871 pushed Catholics from southern Germany to leave in the face of religious oppression.
  • Growing ethnic tension and required army conscription led many in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to leave.
  • Anti-semitism and programs in Russia drove millions of Jews to leave the Russian Empire.
• What “pulled” émigrés to the U.S., and especially to New Jersey after 1880?
• Industries were actively recruiting workers from eastern and southern Europe to fill the labor shortage that existed in the years following the Civil War, as industrialization spread.
• Economic growth attracted immigrants, and the arrival of new workers, in turn, quickened the pace of industrialization. Immigration, then, was both a cause and an effect of economic growth. An expanding economy provided increasing numbers of jobs at every skill level.
  • Why New Jersey? Adjacent to ports of entry, New Jersey quickly developed a large immigrant presence.
  • Chart activity: compare the state's largest immigrant groups in 1880 with those in 1920 as shown in Handout 7. How did immigration after the Civil War change the face of New Jersey?
  • While the British, Irish, and Germans were still the major sources of immigration to New Jersey in 1880, they were much less prominent forty years later.
  • By 1920, Italians constituted by far the largest immigrant group, Germans the second largest, Poles the third and Russian Jews the fourth.

1. Where did the new immigrants go in New Jersey, 1870-1920?

• Background: Where did the immigrants settle in New Jersey and why? Immigrants settling in New Jersey entered a dynamic economy with an expanding industrial base and a constant demand for skilled and unskilled labor. They found work in the steel, tobacco, and pencil factories of Jersey City; in the leather and textile works of Newark; in the silk mills of Paterson; and in the potteries of Trenton. They laid railroad and streetcar track, dug the Since 1870 there has been heavy immigration to urban centers, including Newark, Hoboken, Jersey City, Paterson, Passaic, Perth Amboy, Trenton, and Camden water and sewer ditches required by booming cities, and unloaded freight from railroad cars, canal boats, barges, and steamers.
• Map activity: the development of New Jersey’s cities. Use Handout 8: Map of New Jersey with the location of its largest cities in 1870. Divide into eight groups and have each group find information about the development of one of the following cities:
  • Camden
  • Newark
  • Hoboken
  • Jersey City
  • Passaic
  • Paterson
  • Perth Amboy
  • Trenton

Have the groups jigsaw or share with the rest of the class. Discuss and conclude why population centers developed where they did (rivers, ports, etc.—jobs)

1. Case Study of Italians (or select another ethnic group) coming to New Jersey—1880-1920

• Research activity: Have students select an ethnic group and conduct a short research project to identify where Italian (or other) emigres to New Jersey settled, why they settled there and what challenges they faced. Make a brief oral or visual presentation.
• Background: Whenever possible, individuals from Italy emigrated to a place where someone they knew, either kin or neighbor, had already settled. People intending to emigrate carefully planned to link up with someone who would help in finding work and lodging. Few people sailed off into the sunset alone. Most joined relatives or villagers who had successfully gone before.
• From 1880 to 1920, an estimated 4 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, the majority from 1900 to 1914. Once in America, the immigrants faced great challenges. Often with no knowledge of the English language and with little formal education, many of the immigrants were compelled to accept low-wage manual-labor jobs, and were frequently exploited by the middlemen who acted as intermediaries between them and the prospective employers. Many sought housing in the older sections of the large northeastern cities where they settled, that became known as “Little Italies”, frequently in overcrowded substandard tenements which were often dimly lit with poor heating and ventilation. 
• Italians in Newark grew from 400 in 1880 to 27,000 in 1920, 15% of the city’s population. Ethnic clustering created ethnic neighborhoods. Here immigrants could continue familiar customs and ways. In Newark's The "New" Immigration, 1880-1920 41 crowded First Ward, Italian immigrants could deal only with other Italians and satisfy all their daily needs. Boarding houses catered to new arrivals from Italy, easing their entry into American society. Street vendors with pushcarts or horse-drawn wagons sold fruits and vegetables. Small groceries occupied the ground floors of comer tenements. One observer in the 1930s wrote of their "cheeses, garlic, salami and red pepper hanging from the rafters, . . . over 150 different types of macaroni,"
• Italians generally were unskilled laborers. By 1890, half of the laborers who maintained the railroad tracks between New York and Philadelphia were Italian, rapidly replacing the Irish. "Industry in New Jersey," one historian has written, "developed a rough caste system in which ethnic origin largely determined one's position in the occupational hierarchy." At the top, as owners and managers, were native white Americans. In the middle, as foremen and skilled workers, were Irish, German, and British.

1. Ethnic tensions

• Background: Immigration to the United States after the Civil War (1880-1920) created a society that was both increasingly diverse and increasingly uncomfortable with that diversity. Today we celebrate American pluralism, our self-proclaimed ability to harmonize divergent cultures with minimal discord. Nineteenth-century Americans did not seek or value pluralism. Instead they labeled many of the religious beliefs and social practices that immigrants brought with them as threats to "American" values and culture.
• What were the sources of the ethnic tensions?
• Religious differences. Since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, European Protestants and Catholics had distrusted and disliked each other. Between 1500 and 1800, Europeans went to war on several occasions over religious issues. In Protestant nations, Catholics were viewed as potential subversives, as were Protestants in Catholic nations. Protestant English colonists brought their suspicions and fears to America. Their nineteenth-century descendants, schooled in these traditions, viewed the Catholic Church as an alien force that threatened the foundations of religious freedom and democratic order. A New Jersey Dutch Reformed minister wrote in the 1850s that Catholicism was "subversive alike of civil liberty, freedom of conscience, and the purity of Religion."! Until 1844 the New Jersey state constitution only allowed Protestants to hold public office.
• Fear that immigrants would take away jobs from “Natives” and bring down wages.
• Belief in the “racial” (race was used for ethnicity in this period) inferiority of southern and eastern European immigrants and they supposedly lacked the Anglo-Saxon gift for democratic self-government and therefore to be incapable of assimilation.
• Fear of political radicalism. The native-born blamed most labor discontent on "foreign" political and economic ideologies imported by immigrants. They felt particularly threatened by Socialists, who rejected private ownership of profit-making property, and Anarchists, who rejected most government. Strikes and other disorders were often blamed on them. Anarchists and Socialists were also condemned for questioning the basic fairness of the economic system and the distribution of wealth and income.
• The Nativist or Know Nothing Party supported these views
• These arguments helped fuel the movement for immigration restriction, which gained strength in the early twentieth century.
• Political cartoon analysis: Look at Handout 9: Political Cartoon from Puck magazine, 1889. In In the late 19th Century, long before MadMagazine and the Daily Show, there was Puck. The magazine helped to change the very nature of political cartooning, was at the forefront of printing technology and agitating for progressive causes during the Gilded Age. Who is the woman wrapped in the American flag stirring the “teacup” of citizenship? (The U.S.) Why is she using a spoon marked “equal rights”? Who is the man holding a flag and a dagger? (a radicalist). Who would be today’s “radical”? (Terrorists)  Look at the faces of the others in the teacup? Do you see ethnic looking individuals? Yes, a German-looking man with a Prussian helmet. A French or Italian with a beret-type hat.  What is the cartoon trying to say?  

3. Immigration Restrictions in the 1920s-60s

1. Background

• Until the 1920s, immigration was open to almost everybody (i.e., any European who wanted to come to the U.S.) with the following exceptions:
• 1875 Immigration Act excluded prostitutes, convicts and Chinese contract workers
• 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
• 1891 Immigration Act excluded idiots, insane persons, paupers, diseased persons, felons, polygamists
• 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” limited number of Japanese immigrant laborers
• 1907: Congressional Dillingham Commission report: new immigrants from eastern and southern European harder to assimilate; immigration should be restricted by nationality
• 1896, 1913 and 1915: Congress proposed a literacy test
• 1917: Literacy test passed over President Wilson’s veto
• Responding to the fears of anarchist immigrants and the recession of 1920-21 as well as fears by Native-born Protestants that they would soon be overwhelmed in their own land, Congress saw itself as fighting to preserve an embattled Anglo-Saxon tradition and passed an Emergency or Temporary Quota Act that established for the first time quotas restricting immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries.
• The 1921 law reduced total annual immigration to the U.S. from 800,000 to 300,000 a year.

1. Historical roleplaying activity--The National Origins Act

• A major national debate occurred in 1923-24 over the provisions of the Johnson-Reed bill (which became the National Origins Act of 1924) to impose permanent restrictions or quotas on immigration by nationality:
• Restrictions were supported by the American Federation of Labor, the American Legion , the Ku Klux Klan and the Immigration Restriction League. They were opposed by Congressman such as LaGuardia from New York City, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Federal Council of Churches
• Students roleplay groups supporting and opposing immigration restrictions in the 1920s and try to negotiate a solution, using the chart attached as Handout 10.
• After debriefing the roleplaying, students compare the results of their historical roleplaying with what really happened in history:
• The National Origins Act was passed and signed into law in 1924 severely restricting immigration from southern and eastern Europe:
• It banned immigration from East Asia entirely.
• It reduced the quota for European immigrants to two percent of the population from that country in the United States in the 1890 census (In 1927, the basis was changed from 1890 to 1920).
• It made the restrictions permanent.
• Quotas were based on the number of people in the United States who were descended from each European nationality.
• Thus new immigrants were to be admitted in a rough ratio with those already here. To establish quotas it used population figures for 1890, before most southern and eastern Europeans had entered the country. This further reduced immigration from those nations
• The law was revised in 1927 to base its calculations on the more recent 1920 census, and thus liberalizing the number of immigrants allowed from eastern and southern European countries.
• Students consider what options were possible in the 1920s.

1. The impact of the National Origins Act: Case Study of the impact of the National Origins Act on German-Jewish Immigration, 1920s-40s

• Background: Why did the Jews from Germany want to immigrate to the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s?
• In the 1930s events in Germany forced thousands of German Jews to leave their homes as Adolf Hitler came to power and blamed Jews for the troubles (unemployment, poor economy) in Germany. Many came to the United States.
• Hitler had made Anti-Semitism part of his government’s policy
• After 1938 the German government seized most Jewish owned property.
• Hitler’s government began to move Jews to concentration camps where the conditions were terrible and many died.
• What were some of the challenges the Jews faced during their journey to the United States?
• Not all attempts to escape were successful because of the immigration quotas in place in the U.S. at the time limited the number of people who could immigrate from Germany and other European countries.
• The St. Louis: Look at Handout 11 and review the story of the St. Louis.
• How would you have felt if you had been on that ship?
• The National Origins Act had severely limited the number of Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany who were allowed into the US immediately before and during World War II. The President or the State Dept. could have intervened and increased this number, but they did not.
• So when the St. Louis reached Havana, Cuban govt. refused to allow most of the refugees to come on land. The ship sailed up the coast of Florida with the U.S. Coastguard following to make sure that no one tried to swim ashore.
• The State Dept. refused to allow the refugees to land without special legislation or executive order. The U.S. was not yet at war with Germany. Neither legislation nor an executive order was forthcoming.
• The Louis returned to Europe where several nations, such as the Netherlands, did allow asylum to some of the refugees. But Germany later invaded these countries and most of the ill-fated passengers were sent to concentration camps where many died.
• Narrative writing Activity:
• What were some of the challenges the Jews faced in the US? Imagine you are a German Jewish immigrant who arrived in NJ in the 1940s. Write a letter to a friend who is planning to emigrate to NJ from Europe. Explain the challenges you have faced and offer advice. Many managed to come to the U.S. and most of them settled in the New York area, which included NJ.
• What are some ways the Jews helped NJ and America? (Einstein)
• What are some examples of culture that the Jews brought to the US? (music, movies)

4. Immigration after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

• Background:
  • Entry into World War II forced the United States to shift its immigration policies to support its allies and its war supply needs.
  • Immigration policy was used to cement international relations, e.g., by opening immigration and citizenship to Chinese in 1943, the US bolstered its alliance with Chiang Kai-Shek’s China.
  • While the doors were finally opened for Chinese, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) were interned in camps for fear that they would be spies or collaborators.
  • While 400,000 persons of Mexican descent (an estimated half of them U.S. citizens) had been repatriated during the Depression of the 1930s because they failed to enter with proper visas or other violation of U.S. laws or regulations, during World War II, Mexican workers were granted temporary relief from immigration quotas under the “bracero” (“day laborer”) program. This program continued after the war.
  • In 1948 Displaced Persons Act admitted 400,000 Europeans uprooted by war.
  • With less immigration, a more homogeneous society briefly emerged in the post-World War II period (1947-1965)
  • Immigrants from Puerto Ricans (who were not restricted under the 1920 National Origins Act—Puerto Ricans were, in fact, migrants rather than immigrants since Puerto Rico was and is a territory of the United States) began immigrating to New York City and industrial centers in nearby Hudson, Essex and Passaic counties in New Jersey. Puerto Rico underwent an economic upheaval after World War II that disrupted its traditional agricultural society. Disruption set people adrift, and these were the people most likely to become migrants, willing to seek work and a more secure life outside of Puerto Rico. Between 1950 and 1980 the number of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey rose from under ten thousand to more than 240,000. In 1980 57 percent lived in Hudson, Essex, and Passaic counties.
  • Responding to growing efforts to change the 1920s immigration policy, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was enacted, which:
    • Abolished national origins quotas and gave preference to skilled workers and immigrants with close relatives in the U.S.
    • Set overall limits for immigration from Western and Eastern hemispheres.
  • Congress had anticipated that most immigrants would continue to be Europeans. However, general improvement in European economy, worsening conditions in Latin America and war in Vietnam, together with system of family preferences, resulted in greater number of immigrants from Asia and Latin America in 1970s and 80s.

• Census data activity: Use the census data to compare the growth of foreign-born residents as a percentage of the state population (Handout 12) with the changing national immigration policies and draw conclusions about the impact of immigration policies on the nature of the population of New Jersey.

• Critical thinking activity: Take a position and support it

Chain migration happens because present U.S. immigration policy is based on the principle of broadly defined family reunification; immigrants are able to sponsor their relatives back home to be admitted as immigrants here. Under the "immediate relatives" category, the parents, spouse, and children of a U.S. citizen are admitted without limit. Therefore, once the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family reunification system, chain migration caused the numbers in this category to steadily rise.

Do you think family reunification is a good basis to accept immigrants? Why or why not?

5. Immigration Today

• Background
• The 1996 Immigration Act doubled the size of the border patrol, authorized the construction of barriers along the US-Mexican border and made illegal immigrants ineligible for most governmental benefits.
• Since 1997, the United States has been admitting approximately 900,000 legal immigrants a year.
• Another 300,000 people illegally cross the borders annually.
• By 2007 the number of illegal immigrants in the US leveled off at about 11 million
• The majority of illegal immigrants live in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas, but New Jersey has many also
• Numerous efforts have been made in Congress to enact a bill to reform US immigration policy (increasing border security, legalizing illegal immigrants, providing a temporary worker program and a family and merit-based visa program to reduce the backlog of those waiting and set up a new point system) but none has succeeded.
• Federal inactivity has sparked local and state initiatives to deny illegal immigrants benefits (CA law struck down by court), limit the actions of day laborers or provide in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants when the Dream Act, which would have given legal status and a chance for citizenship for those who came to the U.S. as minors, failed to pass even though the Senate supported it 55 to 41 because of the filibuster need to 60 votes in Dec. 2010
• Some colleges and universities have decided to accept young people who came to the US before age 16, lived there and graduated from a U.S. high school or received a GED in-state tuition.

• Impact in New Jersey
• New Jersey has one of the most diverse populations in the country. The the percentage of foreign-born resident in New Jersey was 23.4% in 2019, the largest number of foreign-born residents in the country, second only to California. The percentage of foreign-born in the United States as a whole was 13.7% in 2019.
• New Jersey has the second largest Jewish population by percentage (after New York); the second largest Muslim population by percentage (after Michigan); the largest population of Peruvian Americans in the United States; the largest population of Cubans outside of Florida; the third highest Asian population by percentage; and the third highest Italian population by percentage, according to the 2000 census.
• Today’s immigrants to New Jersey are coming from India (10%), Mexico (6.7%) and the Philippines (4.9%).
• Look at the chart by county (Handout 13) and identify those counties that have growing immigrant populations (Hudson, Middlesex, Bergen, Passaic and Essex Counties) and those that have small immigrant populations (Cape May, Salem, Gloucester and Ocean Counties). Have recent immigrants primarily been attracted to north or south Jersey (North). Why do you think this is the case?
• Research and add the county numbers from the 2020 census.

6. Immigration policies and public opinion

• Form a Continuum, Take a Stand, Listen to other views and perhaps change your views
  • Ask students who believe that we should be allowing greater number of immigrants to enter the country and providing a path to citizenship for those who entered the country without proper documentation to stand to your right and those who do not agree to stand to your left.
  • Then ask them to explain their positions and move students to places that reflect their views from strong support to strong disagreement.
  • Students cannot interrupt the person speaking.
  • As students explain their view, ask others if they would like to change their positions based on what they heard.
  • This is a listening activity designed to make students consider the reasons for their political views and to consider other views.

• Political Cartoon Analysis
  • Have students look at the recent political cartoons about immigration (Handout 14), all but the first one from New Jersey newspapers.
  • What do you see in each cartoon? What is the message that the cartoon is trying to convey

1. Deutsch—US history is rife with negative views about immigrants, in 1780, 1850, 1920 and today
   2. Drew Sheneman, The Newark Star-Ledger, 2012—Unclear if the man blaming immigrants for taking our jobs and resources is Uncle Sam or NJ Governor Christie since he looks a lot like Gov. Christie
   3. Jimmy Margulies, The Record, 2013—It’s a rough path to citizenship because it has to go through the Congress
   4. Drew Sheneman, The Newark Star Ledger, 2014—Making fun of ideas to deport immigrants

• Do you think that these cartoons express the opinions of most people in New Jersey?

Assessment

• Select three of the following topics for short essays:

1. Compare the issues involved in the immigration debate in the 1920s and those today.
2. What has the impact of the 1965 immigration act been on New Jersey? The 1983 immigration reform act?
3. Who should be a citizen and why?
4. Could you pass the Citizenship test?
5. Explain why it is important to understand the perspectives of the many cultures in New Jersey.

• Project: Identify the issues involved in immigration reform and research and draft legislation to address these issues (Would your family qualify for citizenship under your policy? Send it to your members of Congress)

Extension

• Visit Ellis Island. During the island's 62 years of operation (1892-1954), over 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island. Following restoration in the 1980s, the Great Hall immigration processing building reopened as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, a symbol of this nation's immigrant heritage. The museum exhibits chronicle Ellis Island's role in immigration history, in the context of four centuries of immigration to America. Ellis Island is run by the National Park Service. It is open every day except December 25. Ellis Island can only be reached by ferries, which run on a regular schedule from Battery Park, NY, and Liberty state Park, NJ. For additional information go to  http://www.nps.gov/elis/index.htm.

• Consider the history of Ellis Island. An interstate compacthad been signed between New York and New Jersey prior to Ellis Island becoming a major immigration center. This compact granted New York the rights to all islands in the water channel separating the two states (including both Ellis Island and the much larger  Staten Island), but granting New Jersey the rights to half of the water channel. This agreement was fashioned in order to allow New Jersey to build docks on the riverfront, while allowing New York to control islands that it already considered integral parts of its territory. This led to places such as Ellis Island located on the New Jersey half of the river, but belonging to New York. Later, Ellis Island was expanded through land reclamation and soon became a major center for immigrants coming from Europe to the United States. This land was added by New York and operated by New York for decades.

In a lawsuit brought to determine which state “owned” Ellis Island, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in New Jersey v. New York, 523 U.S. 767 (1998), that since the land added was not expressly granted to New York by the interstate compact and was in water that had been expressly granted to New Jersey, the reclaimed land belonged to New Jersey.  All land originally given to New York by the compact (the original, natural Ellis Island) remains under the jurisdiction of New York, The two states jointly negotiated a post-trial settlement to decide exactly where and how to draw the lines on the 27.5 acre-island in accordance with the Supreme Court decision. While the court decision has changed the state control and jurisdiction of most parts of the island, the actual current landowner is the federal government.

Although New Jersey owns 90% of the land mass, the Great Hall is on the New York portion and most sales taxes go to New York. The New Jersey area includes the unrestored Ellis Island Hospital Complex, built in 1909, which was one of the first and largest public health hospitals in the United States, with 725 beds, a powerhouse, a laboratory and housing for doctors and nurses, kitchens, laundries and recreation facilities.  Save Ellis Island is an effort to raise funds to restore these facilities and to provide programs about them and in them. For more information go to http://www.saveellisisland.org/

• Can you pass the citizenship test?  Immigrants who have been permanent residents for at least five years may become citizens. They must complete naturalization papers, meet with an officer of the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship services and take and English and civics test.  The English test has three components: reading, writing, and speaking. The civics test includes basic questions about important subjects in U.S. history and government.  Can you answer the civics questions correctly? For the 100 questions, ten of which may be asked on the civics exam, go to http://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learners/study-test .

Additional resources:

• New Jersey State Library at http://www.njstatelib.org/research_library/new_jersey_resources/digital_collection/unit_9_world_war_i/
• Cohen, David Steven. New Jersey Ethnic History: A Bibliography. Trenton, New Jersey: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1986.
• Cunningham, Barbara, ed. The New Jersey Ethnic Experience. Union City, New Jersey: William H. Wise & Co., 1977.

• Wacker, Peter O. Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey: Origins and Settlement Patterns. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1975.

 

Handout 1

Immigrants at Castle Garden, New York City, 1866.

From The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, originally from a wood engraving in

 "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper", 20 January 1866, vol. 21, p. 280-281.

 

Handout 2

Emigrants aboard ship to the “Land of Promise,” 1902

LC-USZ62-7307

 

Handout 3

Landing at Ellis Island, 1902

LC-USZ62-12595

 

Handout 4

Ellis Island, 1900

LC-B2-5338

 

Handout 5

The Registry Room in the Main Immigration Building c. 1906.

NPS Photo

 

Handout 6

U..S Inspectors examining eyes of immigrants, Ellis Island, 1913

LC-USZ62-7386

 

Handout 7

Immigration to New Jersey, 1880 and 1920

Percentage of immigrants in NJ 1880			Percentage of immigrants in NJ 1920
Ireland	42%		Italy	21.3%
Germany	29.3%		Germany	12.5%
Great Britain	18%		Poland	12.2%
Holland	1.9%		Russia	10%
France	1.7%		Ireland	8.9%
			Great Britain	8.9%

Sources: U.S. Census, 1880 and 1920

Handout 8

 

Handout 9

Political Cartoon from the magazine Puck, 1889

 

Handout 10

Immigration Quotas proposed In 1923

Source: Immigration and Naturalization Service

 

Handout 11

This is a picture of the St. Louis, a passenger ship which left Germany in 1939 with nearly 1000 refugees, most of them Jews who had qualified for but not yet received American visas, and then arranged for temporary Cuban visas.

 

Handout 12

Foreign born Population of New Jersey

Year	Total NJ Population	Percent Foreign Born
1870	906,096	20.85%
1880	1,131,116	19.60%
1890	1,444,933	22.77%
1900	1,883,669	22.93%
1910	2,537,167	25.94%
1920	3,155,900	23.40%
1930	4,041,334	20.90%
1940	4,160,165	16.80%
1950	4,835,329	13.05%
1960	6,066,782	10.15%
1970	7,171,112	8.85%
1980	7,364,823	10.23%
1990	7,730,188	12.50%
2000	8,414,350	17.55%
2010	8,791,894	20.10%
2020	9,288,994
2025	9.5 million est.

Source:  https://www-doh.nj.gov/doh-shad/indicator/summary/Dem_Nat.html

 

Handout 13

New Jersey Percent Foreign Born by County

	1990	2000	2012	2020	2025
Atlantic	6%	12%	16%
Bergen	18%	25%	29%
Burlington	5%	6%	9.5%
Camden	4%	7%	10%
Cape May	3%	3%	5%
Cumberland	4%	6%	10%
Essex	16%	21%	24.5%
Gloucester	3%	3%	5%
Hudson	31%	39%	41%
Hunterdon	5%	6%	8.5%
Mercer	9%	14%	20%
Middlesex	14%	24%	39%
Monmouth	8%	10%	13%
Morris	11%	15%	19%
Ocean	6%	6%	8%
Passaic	19%	27%	27.5%
Salem	2%	3%	4%
Somerset	11%	18%	23%
Sussex	5%	6%	7%
Union	18%	25%	29%
Warren	4%	6%	9%

 

Handout 14: Political Cartoons

 Political Cartoon from the magazine Puck, 1889

 

 

 

Proprietary House, Perth Amboy, official residence for NJ’s Royal Governor, 1764-1776

Lesson Creator: New Jersey Center for Civic Education, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Grade Level: Secondary

Objectives:

Students will be able to:

• Analyze several historical documents and identify and compare beliefs presented in them about equality, liberty and consent of the governed and how they relate to the historical foundation of New Jersey and the United States
• Draw conclusions about the extent and nature of religious and political liberties that were guaranteed by colonial governments to their citizens.

New Jersey Student Learning Standards for Social Studies:

6.1.12.CivicsPI.1.a: Explain how British North American colonies adapted the British government structure to fit their ideas of individual rights, economic growth, and participatory government.

6.1.12.CivicsPD.1.a: Use multiple sources to analyze the factors that led to an increase in the political rights and participation in government.

6.1.12.CivicsPI.2.a: Prepare and articulate a point of view about the importance of individual rights, separation of powers, and governmental structure in New Jersey’s 1776 constitution and the United States Constitution.

Focus Questions:

• How did the British American colonies govern themselves?
• How and why are American ideals, such as equality, liberty and consent of the governed, embodied in key historic documents?
• What was the extent and nature of religious and political liberties that were guaranteed by colonial governments to their citizens?
• How do primary sources help us to understand what happened in the past?

Background:

1. How did New Jersey become a British colony?

• For a 90-second video about the Founding of New Jersey in 1664 go to https://youtu.be/_F8Riyul1G8?t=49
• New Jersey did not start as a British colony. Dutch, Swedes and Finns lived scattered in the area of New Jersey since the 1630s.
• After Britain won the Anglo-Dutch war in 1664, New Amsterdam came under British control as New York.
• The British Duke of York gave the land of New Caesarea or New Jersey to two of his friends: Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. They were co-proprietors from 1664 to 1674.

• After the second Anglo-Dutch war 1672-78, the Delaware Valley came under English control and Lord Berkeley had political differences with the Governor of New York.

2. How were the Provinces of East and West Jersey established?

• In 1674 Lord Berkeley sold his share of the colony to a religious group known as the Quakers or Society of Friends, splitting New Jersey into two colonies: East Jersey belonging to Carteret and West Jersey, now belonging to the Quakers.
• Examine the map of East and West Jersey attached as Handout 1. Why are there three different lines showing the boundary? The boundary was based on a poorly drawn map and the colonists argued about it for more than 140 years. Province Line Road which divided the two colonies can still be found running near Princeton in Mercer County, where a plaque commemorates the boundary and its history.

3. How did New Jersey become one unite colony?

• The division of East and West Jersey remained until 1702 when the proprietors asked the British Crown (Queen Anne) to take back and unite the two sections of the proprietary colony into one united royal colony of New Jersey.
• However, from 1702 to 1738 the royal colony of New Jersey shared a governor with New York, making it difficult for New Jersey to establish its own political identity. Conflicting land claims led to a series of land riots, raising the issue of how one proves ownership of land. New Jersey witnessed a series of land riots. The proprietors argued that ownership of land came from royal authority by way of the grant from the Duke of York to John, Lord Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret. Some of the rioters argued that ownership of land should come from settling on it and improving it.
• There was a question about whether the land grant that established New Jersey included the right to govern and be governed separately from New York.
• In 1738, after years of efforts to get its own governor, Lewis Morris became the governor of New Jersey.

Activities:

1. How did the British American colonies govern themselves? What ideas and beliefs influenced the development of colonial governments?

• Discuss the vocabulary (Handout 2)

• Students read and discuss the Mayflower Compact (excerpt attached as Handout 3) and discuss the political ideas of the first colonists
• If students need help understanding the documents, review handouts 4, 5, 6 and 7 with the class. Then divide the class into four groups. The members of each of the four groups read and discuss one of the following four founding documents:

• Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Jersey, 1664 (excerpt attached as Handout 4)
• Charter for the Province of West Jersey, 1676 (excerpt attached as Handout 5)
• Fundamental Constitutions for the Province of East Jersey, 1683 (excerpt attached as Handout 6)
• New Jersey Constitution, 1776 (simplified constitution attached as Handout 7)

• Those assigned the same document meet to determine the key ideas that they will share about their document.
• Jigsaw so that there is at least one “expert” student familiar with each document in a new grouping. Experts share the key ideas with other members of the new groups.
• Students use a graphic organizer (Handout 8) to take notes about each document.

Completed graphic organizer:

Document and date	Purpose of government	Structure of Government	Source of Authority	Religious Freedoms
Mayflower Compact, 1620	For our better Ordering and Preservation	N/A	Consent to enact, constitute and frame just and equal laws, ordinance, acts, constitutions and officers	N/A
Agreement of Proprietors of Province of New Jersey, 1664	Peace and welfare	Governor appointed by the Proprietors	From Lords Berkeley and Carteret, Proprietors of the colony by grant from the British Crown	General Assembly may appoint preachers and ministers as necessary. But every person may freely enjoy his judgments and consciences in matters of religion and no person shall be punished for any difference in opinion or practice in matters of religious concerns.
Charter for Province of West New Jersey, 1676	For the prevention of invasion and oppression and for the preservation peace and tranquility	Legislature chosen by the Proprietors and freeholders	By mutual consent of the Proprietors. Legislature to make such laws as agree with and maintain the Fundamental Charter.	No person shall be called into question, punished or hurt for the sake of his opinion, judgment, faith or worship. Every person may freely have and enjoy his judgment and the exercise of conscience in matters of religious worship.
Constitution for Province of East New Jersey, 1683	For the well ordering and governing of the Province	A great Council of 24 proprietors or their proxies and 144 to be chosen by the freemen of the Province.	Proprietors of the colony by grant from the British King	No one shall be molested or prejudged for their religious persuasions and exercise in matters of faith and worship nor compelled to maintain any religious worship. But no man may be on the Council or hold other public trust who does profess belief in Jesus Christ.
1701-
New Jersey Constitution, 1776	To unite people and preserve order	Inhabitants over 21 worth 50 pounds and reside in the county vote for one representative to the Legislative Council three representatives to the General Assembly. A person must have lived and owned property in the country for at least a year and be worth at least 1000 pounds to be a member of the Legislative Council. A person must have lived in the country for at least one year and be worth 500 pounds to be a member of the Assembly. The Council and Assembly elect the Governor for one year. The Governor is also president of the Council. The Governor and Council form the Court of Appeals of last resort.	Government vested in a Governor, Legislative Council and General Assembly	Inhabitants may practice whatever religion they please and no one will be compelled to attend a place of worship contrary to his beliefs or be required to pay taxes for the building or repairing of a place of workshop or for the maintenance of a religious minister. There is no established church. The civil rights of Protestants are protected and Protestants may be elected to any office.

2. Once students have notes about the key ideas from each document, then the small groups draw conclusions about what ideas and beliefs were viewed as important in setting up the colonial government of New Jersey and how these ideas and beliefs would influence the liberties of the people. Students respond to the following questions regarding religious and political liberties guaranteed in the three New Jersey historical documents:

• Why was religious freedom important to the 17^th century European settlers in New Jersey?
• Why did the proprietors of New Jersey think it was necessary to grant a degree of religious freedom to the settlers in the colony?
• Do you think that the English conquest of the Dutch in what is now New York and East New Jersey influenced the extent of freedom in the colony?
• Do you think that the Quaker views influenced the scope of religious freedom in West New Jersey?
• Did the laws, charters, agreements, and constitutions discriminate against anyone?
• Did religious freedom in New Jersey increase or decrease from 1664 to 1683? To 1776?

3. Discuss and draw conclusions:

There was more than a century of constitutional government in New Jersey before the adoption of the Constitution in 1776. Compare the New Jersey Constitution of July 2, 1776 (excerpts attached as Handout 7) with Pennsylvania Constitution of Sept. 28, 1776 and Virginia Constitution of June 29, 1776

• What similarities do you see? They all establish three branches of government with election for the legislature.
• What differences do you see? The 1776 NJ Constitution did not set forth a declaration of liberties or a bill of rights as was done in the other states. Why do you think this was the case? Unlike Virginia and Pennsylvania, the British were at New Jersey’s coast in June 1776. To avoid them, the New Jersey delegates moved inland from Elizabeth to Burlington. With the British at Sandy Hook, New Jersey’s state constitution was written very quickly--in a matter of days and adopted on July 2 by a vote of 26 to 9.

Assessment:

Students write an essay responding to one or more of the following critical thinking questions, providing support for their conclusions:

1. Do you think the laws and government established in the founding constitutions were fair?
2. How and why are American ideals, such as equality, liberty and consent of the governed, embodied in key historic documents?
3. Take a position about the importance of individual rights, separation of powers and governmental structure in New Jersey’s 1776 constitution and the United States Constitution.

Extension activities:

• Students write a short essay: How much religious freedom should people have?
• How did the decisions of individuals and groups reflected in the foundational documents influence the creation of New Jersey and the United States?
• Consider and explain: Why are primary sources valuable records of the past? How do primary sources help us to understand what happened in the past?
• Visit the Proprietary House in Perth Amboy, NJ. Built 1762-1764, the Proprietary House was commissioned by the Board of Proprietors of East Jersey to serve as the official residence for then-Royal Governor William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin. In addition to the Royal Mansion, the house later served as a private residence, a hotel, a Civil War hospital for Union officers after the battle of Gettysburg, an orphanage, a retirement home, and an apartment building as late as the 1950's, before it was turned into an historic museum. Go to proprietaryhouseproprietaryhouse.org/ or call 732-826-5527 to make an appointment to visit.

 

Handout 1

East and West Jersey

East and West Jersey boundary line(s), 1784

https://geography.rutgers.edu/historical-maps-of-new-jersey

 

Handout 2

VOCABULARY

Compact - An agreement between two or more people

Conscience - Sense of moral goodness or wrongfulness of one’s own conduct or character

Consent - To approve or agree

Constitution - The basic principles and laws of a nation, state or social group that determines the powers and duties of the government and guarantees certain rights to the people in it (often the written document that embodies these principles and laws)

Civil body politic - The state or its citizens

Civil society - Voluntary, non-governmental organizations

Freemen - Men given citizenship of a place; the owner of property; not a slave

Freeholder - Landowner

Office - A duty or position of authority to exercise a public function

Order - Stability, harmony, peace, tranquility

Ordinances - Decrees, rules or laws (usually by a local governmental authority)

Proprietor - Owner of land

Province - A unit, region or area within a country (The North American Colonies were provinces)

Preservation - Protection, safeguarding, maintenance, continuation

Quaker - Members of a Protestant religious group begun in England in the 1640s that recognized all people as equal and each person’s ability to communicate directly with God, who refused to take oaths or to fight. Many immigrated to colonial North American (especially Pennsylvania and Western New Jersey)(also called “Friends”)

Religious Liberty - Freedom of an individual or community to follow its religious beliefs

Representatives - Individuals chosen (usually through elections) to act on behalf of others (usually in a legislative body)

Subjects - Individuals who owe allegiance to the power of another, e.g. a king (as opposed to citizens of a nation with an elected government)

 

Handout 3

Excerpt from the Mayflower Compact, 1620

(Full document may be found at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mayflower.asp)

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.

 

Handout 4

Excerpt from Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Jersey, 1664

(Full document may be found at The Avalon Project : The Duke of York's Release to John Ford Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret, 24th of June, 1664 (yale.edu)

Lords John Berkeley and George Carteret (the Proprietors) appoint a Governor who chooses 6-12 “councellors “ or advisors

…the Governor, Councellors, Assembly Men, Secretary, Surveyor, and all other officers of trust, shall swear or subscribe that they will bear true allegiance to the King of England, his heirs and successors; and that they will be faithful to the interests of the Lords Proprietors of the said Province and their heirs, executors and assigns; and endeavour the peace and welfare of the said Province; and that they will truly and faithfully discharge their respective trust in their respective offices, and do equal justice to all men, according to their best skill and judgment, without corruption, favour or affection…

That all persons that are or shall become subjects of the King of England, and swear, or subscribe allegiance to the King, and faithfulness to the lords, shall be admitted to plant and become freemen of the said Province, and enjoy the freedoms and immunities hereafter express'd,

…no person qualified as aforesaid within the said Province, at any time shall be any ways molested, punished, disquieted or called in question for any difference in opinion or practice in matter of religious concernments, who do not actually disturb the civil peace of the said Province; but that all and every such person and persons may from time to time, and at all times, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their judgments and consciences in matters of religion throughout the said Province they behaving themselves peaceably ant quietly, and not using this liberty to licentiousness, nor to the civil injury or outward disturbance of others; any law, statute or clause contained, or to be contained, usage or custom of this realm of England, to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.

…we do hereby grant unto the General Assembly of the said Province, power by act to constitute and appoint such and so many ministers or preachers as they shall think fit, and to establish their maintenance, giving liberty beside to any person or persons to keep and maintain what preachers or ministers they please.

The Assembly shall have power to enact and make all such laws, acts and constitutions as shall be necessary for the well government of the said Province, to constitute all courts, to tax

The Governor shall have the power to see that all courts establish'd by the laws of the General Assembly, and all ministers and officers, civil and military, do and execute their several duties and offices respectively, …to place officers and soldiers for the safety, strength and defence of the forts, castles, cities &c. according to the number appointed by the General Assembly…

The Governor with the advice of his Council shall muster and train all forces within the said Province, to prosecute war, pursue an enemy, suppress all rebellions, and mutinies, as well by sea as land; and to exercise the whole militia…

 

Handout 5

Excerpts from Charter or Fundamental Laws of West New Jersey, 1676

(Full document may be found at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nj05.asp)

“That the common law or fundamental rights and priviledges of West New Jersey, are individually agreed upon by the Proprietors and freeholders thereof, to be the foundation of the government, which is not to be altered by the Legislative authority, or free Assembly hereafter mentioned and constituted, but that the said Legislative authority is constituted according to these fundamentals, to make such laws as agree with, and maintain the said fundamentals, and to make no laws that in the least contradict, differ or vary from the said fundamentals,...

“…no men, nor number of men upon earth, hath power or authority to rule over men's consciences in religious matters, therefore it is consented, agreed and ordained, that no person or persons whatsoever within the said Province, at any time or times hereafter, shall be any ways upon any presence whatsoever, called in question, or in the least punished or hurt, either in person, estate, or privilege, for the sake of his opinion, judgment, faith or worship towards God in matters of religion. But that all and every such person, and persons may from time to time, and at all times, freely and fully have, and enjoy his and their judgments, and the exercises of their consciences in matters of religious worship throughout all the said Province.”

 

Handout 6

Excerpts from the Fundamental Constitutions for the Province of East New Jersey, 1683

(Full document may be found at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nj10.asp)

“Since the right of government, as well as soil, is in the four and twenty Proprietors, and that the same is confirmed to them a new by a late patent from James Duke of York pursuant to patent granted to Him from the King; the Proprietors for the well ordering and governing of the said Province, according to the powers conveyed to them, do grant and declare, that the government thereof shall be as followeth, VIZ. …for the government of the Province, there shall be a great Council, to consist of the four and twenty proprietors, or their proxies in their absence, and one hundred forty-four to be chosen by the freemen of the Province.“

I. The 24 Proprietors formerly chose Robert Barclay as Governor during his life. After his decease the Proprietors shall choose a Governor for three years

II. A great Council shall consist of 24 Proprietors or their proxies and 144 chosen by the freemen of the Province.

III. Freemen include planters and inhabitants residing in the Province who possess 50 acres of ground and have cultivated 10 acres of it; who owns a house and three acres; or leases a house and land but 50 pounds.

IV. For the constant government of the Province there shall be a Governor and common Council consisting of 24 Proprietors and 12 freemen to be chosen by ballot out of the freemen of the great Council.

V. The Governor and Common Council shall choose Secretary, Register, Treasurer, Surveyor General and Marshal.

VI. All persons living in the Province who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and Eternal God, and holds themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and quietly in a civil society, shall in no way be molested or prejudged for their religious persuasions and exercise in matters of faith and worship; nor shall they be compelled to frequent and maintain any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever: Yet it is also hereby provided, that no man shall be admitted a member of the great or common Council, or any other place of publick trust, who shall not profaith in Christ Jesus, and solemnly declare that he doth no ways hold himself obliged in conscience to endeavour alteration in the government, or seeks the turning out of any in it or their ruin or prejudice, either in person or estate, because they are in his opinion hereticks, or differ in their judgment from him: Nor by this article is it intended, that any under the notion of this liberty shall allow themselves to avow atheism, irreligiousness, or to practice cursing, swearing, drunkenness, . . . murdering or any kind of violence, or indulging themselves in stage plays, masks, revells or such like abuses; for restraining such and preserving of the people in deligence and in good order, the great Council is to make more particular laws, which are punctually to be put in execution.

 

Handout 7

New Jersey State Constitution,

July 2, 1776

Preamble

WHEREAS all the constitutional authority ever possessed by the kings of Great Britain over these colonies, or their other dominions, was, by compact, derived from the people, and held of them, for the common interest of the whole society; allegiance and protection are, in the nature of things, reciprocal ties; each equally depending upon the other, and liable to be dissolved by the others being refused or withdrawn. And whereas George the Third, king of Great Britain, has refused protection to the good people of these colonies; and, by assenting to sundry acts of the British parliament, attempted to subject them to the absolute dominion of that body; and has also made war upon them, in the most cruel and unnatural manner, for no other cause, than asserting their just rights-all civil authority under him is necessarily at an end, and a dissolution of government in each colony has consequently taken place.

And whereas, In the present deplorable situation of these colonies, exposed to the fury of a cruel and relentless enemy, some form of government is absolutely necessary, not only for the preservation of good order, but also the more effectually to unite the people, and enable them to exert their whole force in their own necessary defence: and as the honorable the continental congress, the supreme council of the American colonies, has advised such of the colonies as have not yet gone into measures, to adopt for themselves, respectively, such government as shall best conduce to their own happiness and safety, and the well-being of America in general:-We, the representatives of the colony of New Jersey, having been elected by all the counties, in the freest manner, and in congress assembled, have, after mature deliberations, agreed upon a set of charter rights and the form of a Constitution, in manner following, viz. New Jersey Constitution

Three Branches of Government

I. That the government of this Province shall be vested in a Governor, Legislative Council, and General Assembly.

VII. That the Council and Assembly jointly, at their first meeting after each annual election, shall, by a majority of votes, elect some fit person within the Colony, to be Governor for one year, who shall be constant President of the Council, and have a casting vote in their proceedings; and that the Council themselves shall choose a Vice-President who shall act as such in the absence of the Governor.

IX. That the Governor and Council, (seven whereof shall be a quorum) be the Court of Appeals, in the last resort, in all clauses of law, as heretofore; and that they possess the power of granting pardons to criminals, after condemnation, in all cases of treason, felony, or other offences.

The Electorate

IV. That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the county at large.

Religious Freedom and Rights

XIX. That there shall be no establishment of any one religious sect in this Province, in preference to another; and that no Protestant inhabitant of this Colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right, merely on account of his religious principles; but that all persons, professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect, who shall demean themselves peaceably under the government, as hereby established, shall be capable of being elected into any office of profit or trust, or being a member of either branch of the Legislature, and shall fully and freely enjoy every privilege and immunity, enjoyed by others their fellow subjects.

(Full document may be found at https://www.nj.gov/state/archives/docconst76.html)

 

Alternative Handout 7

New Jersey Constitution (simplified version)

July 2, 1776

Burlington, NJ

Since the authority that the kings of Great Britain had over the colonies came from the people and King George III has not protected the colonies, his authority is ended.

However, since some form of government is necessary to unite people and preserve order, the Continental Congress has advised the colonies to adopt a constitution for their government.

We, the representatives of the colony of New Jersey have been elected by the counties, assembled and agreed upon the following Constitution:

I. The government shall be vested in a Governor, Legislative Council (Senate) and General Assembly.

III. Each year the counties shall each choose one person to be a member of the Legislative Council and three to be members of the Assembly. To be a member of the Legislative Council, a person must have lived and owned property in the county for at least one year and must be worth at least 1000 pounds. To be a member of the Assembly, a person must have lived in the country at least one year and must be worth at least 500 pounds. (These were significant amounts of money in 1776.)

IV. Inhabitants of this Colony, age 21 or more, who are worth 50 pounds and have resided in the county in which they want to vote for one year, may vote for representatives to the Council and Assembly and for all other public officers. (Unmarried or widowed women and African Americans with 50 pounds of money or property could vote in NJ until the Legislature took away this right in a 1807 statute.)

VII. The Council and Assembly by majority vote elect a person to be Governor for one year, who shall also be President of the Council and cast a vote in the Council.

VIII. The Governor shall have supreme executive power, be Chancellor of the Colony, and commander in chief of the militia.

IX. The Governor and Council shall form the Court of Appeals of last resort (Supreme Court).

XVIII. Inhabitants may practice whatever religion they please and no one will be compelled to attend a place of worship contrary to his beliefs or be required to pay taxes for the building or repairing of a place of worship or for the maintenance of a religious minister.

XIX. There is no established church; the civil rights of Protestants are protected and Protestants may be elected to any office.

XXII. The common law of England shall remain in force until altered by a future law of the Legislature.

If Great Britain and the colonies reconcile, this Charter shall be null and void—otherwise to remain firm and inviolable.

 

Handout 8

Comparing Documents

Document and date	Purpose of government	Structure	Authority	Religious Freedom
Mayflower Compact, 1620	For Order and Preservation	N/A	Consent to enact just and equal laws, ordinance, acts, constitutions and officers	N/A
Agreement of Proprietors of Province of New Jersey, 1664
Charter for Province of West New Jersey, 1676
Constitution for Province of East New Jersey, 1683
New Jersey Constitution 1776

New York Times: National Guardsmen wielding rifles with bayonets advanced along Springfield Avenue in Newark on July 14, 1967.

Grade Level:  Secondary

Lesson Creator by:  The New Jersey Center for Civic Education

Overview: The series of activities consider the causes and consequences of race riots in Newark, New Jersey, in the context of efforts by African-American to obtain civil rights during the 1960s, and today.

Time:  Three 45-minute periods

Objectives:   Students will be able to:

• examine the impact of restrictive covenants and redlining utilized under the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) program on race segregation in NJ
• describe the difference between the de jure and de facto discrimination
• debate whether and why eliminating de facto discrimination is tougher than ending de jure discrimination
• explain why race riots in many of New Jersey’s cities took place in the 1960s
• analyze the role of the Federal and State Governments in ensuring Civil Rights and its impact on race relations
• explain the differences between political and economic and social civil rights
• compare and contrast the conditions that led to the urban race riots in New Jersey in the 1960s to those that contribute to present day race riots in the United States
• assess the success of the civil rights movement in New Jersey and nationwide
• analyze various perspectives about Black Lives Matter
• create an agenda of what needs to be done to address the underlying issues that have spurred the Civil Rights Movement as well as race riots and protests

NJ Social Studies Content Standards:

6.1.12.EconNM.8.a: Analyze the push-pull factors that led to the Great Migration

6.1.12.HistoryCC.8.a: Make evidence-based inferences to explain why the Great Migration led to heightened racial tensions, restrictive laws, a rise in repressive organizations, and an increase in violence.

6.1.12.CivicsPI.13.a: Craft an argument as to the effectiveness of the New Jersey Constitution of 1947, New Jersey Supreme Court decisions (i.e., Hedgepeth and Williams v. Trenton Board of Education), and New Jersey’s laws in eliminating segregation and discrimination.

6.1.12.CivicsDP.13.a: Analyze the effectiveness of national legislation, policies, and Supreme Court decisions in promoting civil liberties and equal opportunities (i.e., the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title VII, Title IX, Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade).

6.1.12.EconEM.13.a: Explain how individuals and organizations used economic measures as weapons in the struggle for civil and human rights (e.g., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sit downs).

6.1.12.EconNE.13.b: Evaluate the effectiveness of social legislation that was enacted to end poverty in the 1960s and today by assessing the economic impact on the economy (e.g., inflation, recession, taxation, deficit spending, employment, education).

6.1.12.HistoryCC.13.c: Determine the impetus for the Civil Rights Movement and generate an evidence based argument that evaluates the federal actions taken to ensure civil rights for African Americans.

6.1.12.CivicsPI.14.c: Analyze how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to define and expand individual rights and use evidence to document the long-term impact of these decisions on the protection of civil and human rights.

6.1.12.HistoryCA.14.b: Create an evidence-based argument that assesses the effectiveness of actions taken to address the causes of continuing racial tensions and violence.

Compelling Questions:

• What were the causes of race riots in New Jersey in the 1960s?
• Was the Civil Rights movement successful in NJ?

Focus Questions:

• How did redlining contribute to de facto segregation in NJ?
• What is the difference between political and economic and social civil rights?
• To what extent have the conditions that led to the urban race riots in New Jersey and other cities in 1967 been addressed?

1. Historical Background

The Great Migration

During the Great Migration between 1900 and 1960, six million African-Americans moved from rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities. The primary push factors for migration were segregation, widespread violence and lynching and lack of opportunities in the South.  In the North, African Americans could also find better schools and jobs.

Aside from the availability of jobs and the general search for a better life, some African Americans settled in New Jersey because its cities were of a medium size, offering a somewhat slower urban pace than the great northern metropolises.  New Jersey’s cities also accommodated the spillover from the large migration to its two neighbors—New York City (Harlem in particular) and Philadelphia. 

The African-American population in New Jersey’s cities grew dramatically--especially in Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth and Trenton.  More than 100,000 African Americans looking for economic opportunities and relief from Jim Crow laws moved to Newark alone from the rural South. The Black population of Newark doubled from 1910 to 1920. 

The northern cities also attracted a record number of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe between 1890 and 1920. Tensions arose between the African-Americans and the European immigrants as they competed for jobs and housing.  Newark witnessed a racial clash in 1917. Termed a “race riot” by the Newark Evening News, it was precipitated by a dispute arising from a dice game involving black and white youths and lasted several hours. Black and white mobs armed with revolvers, knives, bottles, clubs and bricks, fought each other. Many were injured and fifteen black youths were arrested.

Residential Segregation through Restrictive Deeds or Covenants

Although the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley that a city ordinance prohibiting the sale of real property to blacks violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the practice of private, racially restrictive and legally binding covenants evolved as a reaction to the Great Migration of southern blacks.  The imposition of private restrictions on real estate is a concept that had been in use for centuries. At common law, the right to own and enjoy real estate was considered to include, as an element of ownership, the right to restrict how that property might be used in the future.  A restriction, such as “This lot shall be owned and occupied by people of the Caucasian race only," written into a deed to a home by a seller would require the new homebuyer to abstain from selling to certain categories of people.

For a century after the Civil War, such practices were legal and resulted in the exclusion of unwanted immigrant groups--but primarily African-Americans--from large parts of northern cities and towns, including many in New Jersey.  It was not until 1948 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not enforce such private racial restrictions. In 1968, Congress outlawed them altogether.

Residential Segregation through Redlining

After the outlawing of restrictive covenants, residential segregation was instead maintained through “redlining” by banks and insurance companies. Redlining is the practice by lenders of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor. While discriminatory practices existed in the banking and insurance industries well before the 1930s, the New Deal’s Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), created to stabilize real estate that had depreciated during the depression and to refinance urban mortgage debt, instituted a redlining policy by developing color-coded maps of American cities that used racial criteria to categorize lending and insurance risks. New, affluent, racially homogeneous housing areas received green lines while black and poor white neighborhoods were often circumscribed by red lines denoting their undesirability. Banks and insurers soon adopted the HOLC's maps and practices to guide lending and underwriting decisions.  In addition, although the HOLC was defunct by 1954, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934, used the HOLC's methods to assess locations for federally insured new housing construction.

Without bank loans and insurance, redlined areas lacked the capital essential for investment and redevelopment. After World War II, the Federal Housing Administration guaranteed low-cost mortgages to returning soldiers. However, the FHA redlined nearly all of Newark, sending white soldiers and their families to almost exclusively white suburbs. As a result, suburban areas received preference for residential investment at the expense of poor and minority neighborhoods in cities like Newark and Chicago.

Newark by the 1960s

The African-American population in Newark, which was only 2.7% in 1900, grew to 17.1% by 1950.  From the 1950s to 1967, Newark’s white population shrank from 363,000 to 158,000, while its black population grew from 70,000 to 220,000. Despite the enormous reduction of Newark's white population, property ownership and political power remained overwhelmingly in white hands. For example, in 1960, while 60% of its population was black 83% of Newark’s police force was white.  In a 1966 application for federal aid, 40,000 of Newark’s 136,000 housing units were classified as substandard or dilapidated.

Activity 1: Definitions, Document Analysis and Class Discussion

1. Have students find the definitions for de jure and de facto segregation.

 “De Jure” is Latin and means according to law or by law. Discuss with students what they think this means in relation to segregation. Some ideas that may be mentioned are Jim Crow laws, such as segregated buses, restaurants and schools.  De jure segregation is segregation of a race, ethic or other group as required by law, as it was required in public accommodations such as training, buses, hotels, schools, etc., in most southern states after the Civil War until the 1950s. 

 “De Facto” means actual or in fact. Have students discuss how de facto segregation differs from de jure segregation. De facto segregation is segregation that happens in practice but is not required by law. De facto segregation was very prevalent in northern states until the 1950s. Ask students to give examples of de facto segregation.  Responses might be:  De facto segregation would include schools that are segregated because of a policy of having neighborhood schools where the housing pattern separates families by their income and creates wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, which are then reflected in the schools. Or de facto segregation might result from the selection of certain students for AP or honors courses, or even self-segregation by racial groups (e.g., students at lunch tables).

2. Have students analyze Handout 1 - Redlining Map, Essex County and draw conclusions about its impact.

Note the legend for  the “Residential Security Map” at the top of the page, with green as first grade, blue as second grade, yellow as third grade and red as fourth grade (grey areas are industrial and white areas are parklands).  Where are the blue and green areas? In Roseland, Caldwell, the Oranges (green strip in the middle). Where are the red areas? In Newark, primarily next to the industrial areas.

In a circular case of cause and effect, areas redlined because African-Americans and poor immigrants lived there left these residents unable to get bank loans and insurance, further cementing housing segregation and contributing to the economic plight of the city.

3. Ask students if redlining is de jure or de facto segregation and to explain their conclusion.

Some students may argue that redlining is de jure segregation because it was based on federal laws.  Other students may argue that it was de facto segregation because the intent of the HOLC was not to segregate and the actual refusals to provide mortgages and insurance was being done by private banks and insurance companies.

4. Have students look at Handout 2 - Federal Efforts to Eliminate Discrimination and decide whether or not redlining violated it, explaining their reasoning.

The 14^th Amendment mandates that states not “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor…: deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Students may argue that African-Americans were being denied “equal protection of the laws” by redlining because they were not being given the same opportunities to purchase property, improve and enjoy property as wealthier white residents.

The Start of the Civil Rights Movement

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest Dec. 1, 1955

Discrimination against African-Americans not only resulted in poorer housing, but also in poorer schools, jobs and treatment.  For decades the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) tried to address this through litigation, culminating in the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional. The decision was met with more opposition than compliance.  But it gave African-Americans a legal basis for their complaints of discrimination and the hope for change. Following the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, the local African-American community was aroused by the Women’s Political Council and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to protest with their feet with a boycott of the city buses. Although the issue was ultimately resolved in the courts, the peaceful protest on the streets was brought to the attention of the nation through the news media. It showed that nonviolent, direct action could work. Out of the boycott an informal network of southern Baptist churches formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the American Civil Rights Movement took shape, aimed at pressuring the president and congress to address the continuing discrimination in the country.

Black students from area colleges led a sit-in at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina in February 1960 to protest Woolworth's policy of excluding African Americans from being served food there.  This was quickly followed by nonviolent confrontations at public parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public facilities in the South; kneel-ins at local churches: and freedom rides.  Such actions often defied court-ordered injunctions barring the protests and resulted in mass arrests.   In August 1963, there was a mass March on Washington, D.C.-- a collaborative effort of all of the major civil rights organizations, the more progressive wing of the labor movement, and other liberal organizations. The march had six official goals: meaningful civil rights laws, a massive federal works program, full and fair employment, decent housing, the right to vote, and adequate integrated education.  In response, President Kennedy declared support for a comprehensive civil rights bill. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson obtained passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (See Montgomery Bus Boycott | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute)

Civil Rights March on the Mall, Washington, D.C., August 1963

Racial Violence in 1964-65

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Handout 2 - Federal Efforts to Eliminate Discrimination) was signed into law on July 2, 1964, banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  But segregation remained the norm in most places. African-Americans and others who opposed segregation held “sit-ins” in cafes, restaurants and hotels, to protest discriminatory service and hiring practices. Segregationists, angered by the Civil Rights Act, took to the streets as well, often attacking African American demonstrations across the South. Racial violence broke out in many northern cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Jersey City, and Paterson.

Riots began in Harlem, New York, on July 18, 1964, following the shooting of fifteen year-old James Powell by a white off-duty police officer.  Claiming that the incident was an act of police brutality, an estimated eight thousand Harlem residents launched a large-scale riot, breaking windows, setting fires and looting local businesses. The violence soon spread to the nearby neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and continued for six days, resulting in the death of one resident, over 100 injuries, and more than 450 arrests.  As the civil unrest in New York City began to cool, another riot broke out upstate in Rochester, New York, following another allegation of police brutality. For three days, violent protestors overturned automobiles, burned buildings, and looted stores.  The National Guard was mobilized and public order was restored to Rochester on July 26.

A few days later, on August 2, 1964, a woman's arrest in a public housing complex in Jersey City, New Jersey, led to three days of rioting, during which garbage cans were thrown through storefront windows and bottles were tossed at police. The violence was eventually quelled, but the anger and frustration that caused it remained.  On August 11-13, 1964, Elizabeth, New Jersey, was the site of a three-day uprising. The New York Times reported that it was instigated by the arrest of a black woman on a disorderly conduct charge.  Eighteen people were arrested.  A separate clash occurred simultaneously in nearby Paterson, New Jersey.

Elizabeth policemen struggle with a man as they try to move him from area of rioting in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on August 12, 1964, the second night of violence in Elizabeth and Paterson, New Jersey (AP Photo)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that the disturbances in Elizabeth and Paterson were the aftershocks of the larger uprisings in New York City, Rochester, and Jersey City, citing “school dropouts,” “young punks,” “common hoodlums” and “drunken kids” as the ones responsible for the outbreak of violence.  While socioeconomic problems within the African American communities were considered to be a part of the problem, the FBI blamed the violence on a marked decrease in respect for law and order by young people in urban neighborhoods. The FBI concluded that issues such police brutality were not the cause of the uprisings in Elizabeth or elsewhere in the nation.  Although Elizabeth city officials agreed with this assessment, African American community leaders in Elizabeth saw the situation differently, citing high unemployment, poverty, discrimination, and the treatment of blacks by the police as the causes of the unrest.  With the two sides far apart on the reasons for the uprisings and violence in 1964, little was done in response.

The following summer, on August 11, 1965, violence erupted in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles after the attempted arrest of a young black motorist by white police officers. A taunting crowd gathered and an increasing number of police reinforcements were called. The police arrested half a dozen men and women.  Angry young men charged down the main street, overturning cars, looting stores and burning buildings.  The rampage resumed each night and lasted for six days. More than 34 people were killed and 1000 injured, 4200 arrested and some $200 million worth of property was damaged or destroyed.

Two years after the 1965 riots in Watts, racial tensions erupted into violence in more than 150 cities, the two most well-known and destructive uprisings in Detroit and Newark. The main concerns expressed by African-Americans in Newark and other cities in the 1960s were police brutality, housing code violations, lack of community representation and lack of good jobs.  The killing of a black man, Lester Long, by Newark police officer Henry Martinez in 1965 reinvigorated community demands for a police review board. Newark mayor Hugh Addonizio directed the Newark Human Rights Commission to hold a series of public hearings on the issue, but when the Commission split 6-6, he rejected the proposed police review board. Instead he announced that future allegations of police brutality would be forwarded to the FBI, and instituted a citizen observer program, a Human Relations Training Institute, a community relations post within the police department and a code of conduct for the police. Newark tenants were encouraged to submit housing complaints to the city’s housing authorities. Although submitting these complaints to city agencies officially documented housing violations, it rarely compelled any action by city officials.

Newark Community Union March Against Police Brutality across Broad and Market Streets in Newark in 1965 (Doug Eldridge Collection, Newark Evening News)

As federal funding from antipoverty programs arrived in Newark, there was jockeying for control of the money.  In statements presented by members of the Newark Community Union Project to the Congressional Committee investigating the War on Poverty in April 1965, Newark residents described the lack of community representation and involvement in decision-making.  Many African-Americans, especially younger community leaders, felt that they were largely disenfranchised in Newark despite the fact that Newark had become one of the first majority back major cities in America. Newark Mayor Addonizio was charged with failing to incorporate blacks in civil leadership positions and failing to help blacks get better employment opportunities.  Only 154 of the 1322 police officers (11%) were black, while the city remained more than 50% black. 

1. The Race Riots in Newark in 1967

This unrest came to a head on July 12, 1967 when two white Newark policemen arrested a black cabdriver, John Smith, for improperly passing them and double-parking.  Smith was taken to the 4th Police Precinct, which was across the street from Hayes Homes, a large Public Housing Project. Residents of Hayes Homes saw an incapacitated Smith being dragged into the precinct, and a rumor was started that he had been killed while in police custody (In fact, Smith had been moved to a local hospital). This set off six days of riots, looting, violence, and destruction.  Within 48 hours the violence had gotten beyond the ability of the Newark police to control. A curfew was imposed between 10 p.m. and dawn. Mayor Addonizio requested that New Jersey Governor Hughes send the National Guard to Newark, which he did.   Ultimately, the violence left 26 people dead, 725 people injured, and close to 1,500 arrested. Property damage exceeded $10 million.

The Newark Riots on the front page of the New York Times, July 13, 1967

 

https://newark-path-manhattan.blogspot.com/2012/02/newarks-1967-race-riots.html

A series of racially charged violent disturbances mirroring those that took place in Newark also occurred 20 miles away in Plainfield, New Jersey, starting on July 14, 1967. It took the National Guard three days to restore order (See RACE RIOTS: History on Plainfield, NJ Jake Uprising 1967).

Activity 2:   What happened in Newark in July 1967?

1. Have students watch Revolution 67, a five-minute video of the 1967 Newark riots at Revolution '67 or at Riots in Newark New Jersey 1967and summarize what happened in their own words.
2. Have students consider the definitions of “riot” and “rebellion” and give examples of each. A “riot” is broadly any violent, public disturbance of the peace by a crowd. A “rebellion” is an act of violence or resistance against an established government or ruler. However, a civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property or people, is often characterized as a “riot”. The Civil Rights Movement (1955-68) was a form of rebellion against the systematic discrimination and disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the lack of opportunities for satisfactory housing and jobs.  It focused on planned nonviolent protests and civil disobedience, such as marches (e.g., Birmingham and Selma, 1965), sit-ins e.g., Greensboro, North Carolina, 1960) and economic boycotts (e.g., Montgomery, 1955-56). The disturbances in the cities were aimed at the same underlying problems but were unplanned and resulted in violence.
3. Have students explain why they would call the events in Newark in July 1967 a “riot” or a “rebellion”.

Why did the civil disturbances occur?

President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to understand why riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission’s 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Commission Report (the Commission was chaired by Otto Kerner, the Governor of Illinois), determined that the civil disturbances usually started at night, without premeditation or planning, and were triggered by an incident between black residents and white police, which escalated to looting and burning. The report concluded that the overriding causes of the rioting—unemployment, poverty, lack of education, exploitation—were rooted in a pervasive white sense of the inferiority of blacks.  The Kerner Commission Report delivered an indictment against “white society” for isolating and neglecting African Americans and recommended legislation to create jobs, job training programs, and decent housing.  It cautioned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a “system of ’apartheid’” in its major cities. President Johnson, however, did not immediately seek to implement the recommendations.  (See Handout 3:  Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders ).

New Jersey’s Governor Hughes also appointed an independent commission to investigate the 1967 riots in Newark.  Chaired by Robert Lilley, the commission held 65 meetings and examined 106 witnesses. The New Jersey Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder (the Lilley or Hughes Commission) made similar recommendations about the need for police and economic reform in its Report for Action - nj.com. The Commission noted that more than a third of black men ages 16 to 19 were unemployed.  It made specific recommendations for police and economic reform similar to the Kerner Commission (See Handout 4: Report for Action: An Investigation into the Causes and Events of the 1967 Newark Race Riots).

Activity 3:  Why did the civil disturbances in 1967 happen?

Have students read the summary of the Report of the Handout 3 -National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Handout 4 - Report for Action: New Jersey Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder and discuss the following questions or write an essay responding to the following questions:

1. Why did people riot or rebel in 1967?
2. Was it justifiable? 
3. Was it a type of political action?
4. Life Magazine (July 28, 1967) called the civil disturbance in Newark in July 1967, “the Predictable insurrection”.  Would you agree or disagree? Why?

III.   Progress in the 1960s and 1970s

Poor People’s Campaign:  The Move to Achieve Economic Civil Rights

In response to black rioting in 180 cities during the summer of 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King said, "the riot is the language of the unheard... America has failed to hear... that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met."  In 1967, one in seven Americans was living in poverty.  Activist Marian Wright suggested to King that the civil rights movement stage a poor people's march--"a nonviolent army of the poor"-- in Washington, D.C.  The Southern Christian Leadership Conference embarked on an ambitious Poor People's Campaign to bring attention to the nation's most needy people. The goal was to   demand that President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care and decent homes.

On March 27, 1968, King spoke to a packed auditorium of students at South Side High School in Newark and visited the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church and Abyssinian Baptist Church in Newark, as well as stopping in Orange and Jersey City.  King then detoured to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. There, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated. Riots erupted in more than 100 cities around the country as people mourned the loss of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference pressed forward with the Poor People's Campaign just weeks later, and more than a thousand people came to Washington, D.C. on May 12, 1968. Many thousands more arrived and settled on the National Mall in an encampment they called "Resurrection City" during late May and early June 1968. However, the protest was bogged down by heavy rains and unclear agendas. On June 5, 1968 word came that presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, a champion of civil rights, had been assassinated in California. In recognition of the poor people's protest, the hearse bearing Kennedy's body was brought through the encampment in Washington. But soon, Resurrection City was shut down.  (For additional information see City of Hope: Marking 50 years since Resurrection City and Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign: MLK's final protest)

During 1966-1967, Congress had regularly considered a fair housing bill, but failed to garner a majority for its passage. President Lyndon Johnson utilized the tragedy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination to urge Congress to speedily approve what became the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is also known as the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, sex, (and was amended in 1988 to include disability and family status) and authorized the Justice Department to bring suits on behalf of victims in federal district courts. This was supported by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, which required the release of data on bank lending, and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to lend in areas from which they accepted deposits.

The extent of progress in ending redlining in the insurance industry remained an ongoing debate. In 1968, the President's National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas found that insurance underwriting manuals explicitly instructed agents to use racial data in determining risk. While states passed laws prohibiting insurance redlining, federal legislation has never directly addressed the issue. Court cases, however, have forced change in both the banking and insurance industries. In the 1990s, prominent banks and insurance firms settled several major lawsuits, agreeing to change their business practices to remove discriminatory policies and procedures.

In New Jersey, the nation’s first state-wide civil rights enforcement statute, “The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination,” had been enacted in 1945. It made it unlawful to subject people to differential treatment based on race, creed, color, national origin, nationality, ancestry, age, or sex (NJSA 10:5-12).

In spite of state and federal laws, discrimination continued in more subtle ways.  A real estate broker may “forget” to show an African American family house in certain areas. A bank may decline to provide a mortgage.  More importantly, low and moderate income families—often minorities—often do not have the funds to purchase homes in areas with satisfactory housing, schools and services because zoning ordinances made it impossible to build low and moderate income housing.

In 1974, the Housing and Community Development Act authorized the creation of a Community Development Block Grant program in the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, both as an anti-poverty program and responding to the need for affordable housing. The program provides funds to state, counties and cities on a formula basis to create additional low and moderate-income housing.  However, affordable housing has never been declared a constitutional requirement for cities and states.

 In New Jersey, the State Supreme Court held in 1975 in South Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel, 67 NJ 151(Mt. Laurel I), that zoning ordinances which make it physically and economically impossible to provide low and moderate income housing  violated the New Jersey Constitution.  Eight years later in 1983, the New Jersey State Supreme Court put teeth in the original decision by creating a fair share formula to measure each municipality's obligation to provide affordable housing, and by fashioning a "builder's remedy" to force municipalities to fulfill that obligation. Accepting the premise that there was a constitutional obligation for municipalities to foster the development of some degree of affordable housing, the state created a Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) to establish regulations whereby the obligation of each municipality in terms of the number of units and how the obligation could be satisfied.

Activity 4:  How effective have efforts by the federal and state governments to eliminate discrimination been? 

1. Ask students to distinguish and explain the differences between political, economic and social civil rights.

Political (often called “civil”) rights are focused on the ability to participate in government through the right to vote and to hold office, as well as freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. Such civil or political rights are explicitly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution in the First, Fifth-Eighth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. However, Articles I and II of the U.S. Constitution leave the regulation of elections to the states. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are attempts by the federal government to ensure that African Americans (and other groups discriminated against) can participate in electing those to represent them in government.

Economic and social rights are focused on the daily needs of life, such as jobs, housing, education, travel, food, health care and sanitation.  Social, economic and cultural rights are protected in the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948). However, this document is basically aspirational only and has no enforcement mechanism other than public pressure. Economic, social and cultural rights are not specifically included in the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court has not interpreted the Constitution to include them.  Human needs for adequate education, housing and food have been seen as "benefits" rather than rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving individuals with no legal claims to fundamental things like food and shelter from the federal government.   .

2. Ask students to look at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 (Handout 5), the NJ Law Against Discrimination and NJ Constitution (Handout 6) and to analyze the role of the federal and state governments in eliminating discrimination.  

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to break the grip of state disfranchisement of African-Americans.  During the hearings on its extension, Congress heard extensive testimony concerning the ways in which voting electorates were manipulated through gerrymandering, annexations, adoption of at-large elections, and other structural changes to prevent newly-registered black voters from effectively using the ballot. Congress also heard extensive testimony about voting discrimination that had been suffered by Hispanic, Asian and Native American citizens. Beginning in 1980, however, the U.S. Supreme Court began to require that any constitutional claim of minority vote dilution must include proof of a racially discriminatory purpose, a requirement that was widely seen as making such claims far more difficult to prove.  In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the requirement that jurisdictions that have a history of discriminatory voting practices get advance approval from the federal government before changing their election laws (Shelby Co. v. Holder), reducing the protection of racial and language minority citizens against losing the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or to have their votes diluted.  Several states have put more restrictive voting laws in place.

The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, first enacted in 1945 and updated through 2007, prohibits unlawful discrimination in employment, housing, places of public accommodation, credit and business contracts. New Jersey also has been in the forefront in terms of providing equal funding for local education.  The New Jersey Constitution provides that:  “The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years” (Art. VIII, Sec. IV, para 1).  This has led to a series of lawsuits that resulted in equalizing funding for New Jersey’s school districts, which has provided financial support for the public schools in urban districts. However, the New Jersey’s schools are highly segregated (For additional information see School Segregation in the Garden State? - New Jersey State Bar Foundation)

1. Was the Civil Rights movement successful?

After the acquittal in the trial of the four white Los Angeles police officers indicted in the beating of Rodney King, a black driver pulled over in northern Los Angeles in March 1991, riots began in a black neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles and destruction, looting and burning of businesses quickly spread to other areas of the city, including areas that were mostly Latino and Korean. Some 2300 people were injured and more than 1000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Police made 10,000 arrests, mostly males, many Hispanic.

The underlying causes seemed to be police brutality, high unemployment, failed education, racism, neglect of the inner city—the same causes identified years earlier in the Kerner Commission report. However, the fuse seemed to be lit by the ethnic, racial and class antagonisms in Los Angeles at the time, particularly grievances against Korean merchants by poorer Black and Hispanic residents. Efforts to build coalitions led to changes in the leadership in Los Angeles. Although South Central Los Angeles remains one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, violent crime and unemployment are both lower in Los Angeles than they were in 1990.

Although the 1992 riots in Los Angeles were one of the worst civil disturbances in America in decades, they did not spread to other cities. No similar violence erupted afterwards in any other major cities in 1992.

In 2015, after years of pressure from civil rights groups, the Obama administration established a federal housing rule to fully implement the 1968 Fair Housing Act’s goal of forbidding discrimination in housing by requiring communities to affirmatively address patterns of racial residential segregation—the first major commitment to address racial inequality in housing in decades. However, in 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Trump suspended until 2020 the requirement that communities analyze their housing segregation and submit plans to reserves it as a condition of receiving billions of federal dollars in block grants and housing aid. HUD contended that local communities were struggling to figure out how to measure their progress and needed more time and technical assistance. Republicans in Congress critical of the rule argued that it was an aggressive intrusion by the federal government into individual and community decisions about where to live. (For additional information see Trump Administration Postpones an Obama Fair-Housing Rule - The New York Times)

Newark today

For decades Newark has been a symbol of America's decaying cities with violence, entrenched poverty, vanishing jobs, struggling schools and blighted blocks. The flight of the city’s white population, which had begun with the advent of the highway system and the rise of the suburbs in the 1950s, intensified with the unrest in 1967 and the negative view of the city. In 1996, Money magazine ranked Newark "The Most Dangerous City in the Nation."  Yet, slowly but steadily, Newark has been transforming itself into a hub for arts and higher education with bustling ethnic neighborhoods.  In 2007, the crime rate in the city began to drop and has been declining each year since then.  Newark’s population fell from a height of 438,000 in 1950 to a low of 275,221 in 1990.  However, since the turn of the 21st century, Newark’s population began to grow and was at 278,783 in 2015. It has also gotten more diverse:  the white population grew to 26.31%, the Black population decreased to 52.35%, the Hispanic population grew to 33.83% and the foreign-born population increased by 85% since 1970 from 40,104 to 74,305 in 2010.

By 2020, the population of Newark has increased to 311,549. It was 28% white, 50% African American and 36% Hispanic. The population was 31.8% foreign born, and the median income was $35,199. (See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/newarkcitynewjersey%20).

Port Newark-Elizabeth is the primary container shipping terminal of the busiest seaport on the American East Coast.  Newark Liberty International Airport, the first municipal commercial airport in the United States, is one of its busiest.  Several leading companies have their headquarters in Newark, including Prudential, PSEG, Panasonic Corporation, Audible.com, and IDT Corporation. More than 100,000 people commute to Newark each workday, making it the state's largest employment center with many white-collar jobs in insurance, finance, import-export, health-care, and government.  As a major courthouse venue including federal, state, and county facilities, it is home to more than 1,000 law firms. The city is also a "college town", with nearly 50,000 students attending the city's universities and medical and law schools. Local cultural venues include the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark Symphony Hall, The Prudential Center and the Newark Museum.

Skyline of downtown Newark as seen from across the river in Harrison, NJ, in 2016.

However, five of the previous seven mayors of Newark have been indicted on criminal charges, including Hugh Addonizio, the son of Italian immigrants who served from 1962 to 1970; Kenneth Gibson, the first African American mayor of Newark who served 1970-86, and Sharpe James, who served 1986-2006. In addition to political corruption, Newark has been plagued by ineffective schools, with low levels of   student  academic performance and low graduation rates, neglected buildings, and charges of mismanagement, nepotism, cronyism and rampant political interference.  The Newark Public Schools were taken over by the State of New Jersey in 1995, which resulted in the state appointing the school superintendent.  After many years, the schools began showing some improvements in student performance, and local control was restored in 2017. While the public schools in Newark have improved with the expansion of magnet and charter schools with several Newark high schools having graduation rates of more than 90%; many of Newark’s 16 high schools have graduation rates of 70% or less. (See Newark Public School District - U.S. News Education

In spite of the influx of development in Newark, not everyone has benefitted. There is a widening disparity between the places where gleaming towers have risen and where opportunity has not yet arrived. Poverty in Newark is still well above the national average. Only 18% of people who hold jobs in Newark live there.  The unemployment rate, which reached a high of 18%  in 1992, was down to 7.4% for 2017 as compared with the rate in New Jersey (4 to 5%) in 2017 or nationally (4.1 to 4.8%). https://www.homefacts.com/unemployment/New-Jersey/Essex-County/Newark.html

In 2015, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka created the city’s first citizen complaint review board in response to a damning report by the U.S.  Department of Justice. The board's 11 members are empowered to review police misconduct allegations and make sure that discipline is administered when it occurs.  They would be able to conduct an independent investigation on cases brought before them, and to summon the officers facing the allegations to a formal hearing. The board would issue a determination as to whether an act of misconduct occurred, which will be forwarded to the city's police chief, who would issue a final decision on punishment using a so-called "discipline matrix" that creates guidelines for certain offenses and their severity. Most other cities do not have this power. The Newark Fraternal Order of Police promptly brought the issue to the courts arguing that the board’s authority undermines the Newark police department’s disciplinary process. This resulted in a court injunction restricting the use of subpoena and investigatory powers by Newark's civilian police review board, drawing  the ire of activists who say those powers -- long questioned by police union officials -- are necessary tools. (“Court order leaves Newark police review board toothless, activists say.” The Star ledger, Dec. 16, 2016 at  https://www.nj.com/essex/2016/12/injunction_against_newark_police_review_board_prom.html

Continuing Poverty and Inequality in the U.S.

In 1968, 25 million people — nearly 13% of the population of the United States — were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau.  By 2006, this had been slightly reduced to 12% of the population.  The recession in 2008-09 increased the number of those living below the poverty line to 14.3% of the U.S. population, but by 2016 this level had been reduced to 12.7%—approximately where we had been in 1968. However, the rate of poverty among African-Americans is more than twice that of whites (See chart below, “Poverty rates by race/ethnicity and metro-nonmetro residence, 2015”). Poverty is also more pronounced in the South than the northeast (See chart below, “Poverty rates by region and metro/nonmetro status, 2011-2015”). Interestingly, although the civil disturbances were all in cities in the 1960s, the poverty rate is higher in non-metropolitan areas.

The “Black Lives Matter” Movement

The problem of police responses to confrontations with African American men has continued into the 21^st century with the lack of prosecution of police officers involved resulting in civil disturbances, including protests that erupted in  Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown by police officers  and protests in New York City after a grand jury refused to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner in 2014; days of protest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015; protests and riots in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina  in 2016. These incidents have all led to the movement, “Black Lives Matter”. (See  Timeline: The Black Lives Matter movement - ABC News.

The Black Lives Matters movement is the 21^st century version of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of having charismatic leaders such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. unifying and pressing the demands of African-Americans, there are many voices with varying interests.

Activity 6: Assessing the success of the civil rights movement in New Jersey and nationally

Consider the poverty charts and gather other data about how African-Americans and other minority groups in Newark are doing today. Consider whether the civil rights movement in New Jersey has attained its goals. Draw a conclusion and support it with evidence.

Activity 7: What do you think? What would you do?

1. Class discussion or individual essay: Do you agree or disagree with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? With Barbara Ransby? With Elizabeth Hasselback? Why or why not?
2. Class discussion or individual essay: How has the approach to gain civil rights changed since the 1960s? Do you think this approach will be more or less likely to succeed?
3. Small group activity: in groups of 3-5, create a specific agenda—a list of exactly what you think needs to be changed and how this can be achieved.

“This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.  …Worse, certain politicians and entrepreneurs conspire to keep the poor just as they are. On his HBO comedic news show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ran an expose of the payday loan business and those who so callously exploit the desperation of the poor. How does an industry that extorts up to 1,900 percent interest on loans get away with it? In Texas, State Rep. Gary Elkins blocked a regulatory bill, despite the fact that he owns a chain of payday loan stores. And the politician who kept badgering Elkins about his conflict of interest, Rep. Vicki Truitt, became a lobbyist for ACE Cash Express just 17 days after leaving office. In essence, Oliver showed how the poor are lured into such a loan, only to be unable to pay it back and having to secure yet another loan. The cycle shall be unbroken. …The multitude of millionaires and billionaires who lobby to reduce food stamps, give no relief to the burden of student debt on our young, and kill extensions of unemployment benefits. The middle class has to join the poor and whites have to join African-Americans in mass demonstrations, in ousting corrupt politicians, in boycotting exploitative businesses, in passing legislation that promotes economic equality and opportunity, and in punishing those who gamble with our financial future.”(“The Coming Race War Won’t be about Race,” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time Magazine, Aug. 17, 2014, at Ferguson: The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

Fox News host Elizabeth Hasselbeck asked why Black Lives Matter has not been labeled as a “hate group” on the morning show “Fox and Friends”.  Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a civil-rights leader, WND columnist said: “Without a doubt, Black Lives Matter is a hate group,” Peterson told WND. “If a white group was encouraging violence and targeting police, they would be rightfully labeled a ‘hate group’ by the mainstream media and by far-left groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and People For the American Way.” See Black Lives Matter under fire as a 'hate group' * WorldNetDaily * by WND Staff

“When people on the ground make decisions, articulate problems and come up with answers, the results are more likely to meet real needs. And that’s more sustainable in the long run: People are better prepared to carry out solutions they themselves created, instead of ones handed down by national leaders unfamiliar with realities in local communities. Such local work allows people to take ownership of the political struggles that affect their lives.” (“Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action,” by Barbara Ransby, in The New York Times Opinion, Oct. 21, 2017 at Opinion | Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action - The New York Times.

 

Handout 1:  Redlining Map, Essex County, NJ HOLC-MED.jpg

Handout 2: Federal Efforts to Eliminate Discrimination

Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

An Act To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

 

Handout 3:  Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (The “Kerner” Commission Report)  February 29, 1968

SUMMARY OF REPORT

The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.

The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.

On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States established this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions:

What happened?

Why did it happen?

What can be done to prevent it from happening again?

To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country.

This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.

Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.

To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.

The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society.

This alternative will require a commitment to national action--compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.

Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot--it will not--tolerate coercion and mob rule.

Violence and destruction must be ended--in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people.

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget--is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.

Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:

* To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:

* To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;

* To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.

These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience.

Source: The Eisenhower Foundation

 

Handout 4: Report for Action: An Investigation into the Causes and Events of the 1967 Newark Race Riots by New Jersey Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder (the Lilley or Hughes Commission) at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/69748NCJRS.pdf

FINDINGS (pages 143-144)

 1. The Newark City Administration did not adequately realize the bitterness in important sectors of the Negro community over the Administration's policies and conduct in the u,edical school and Parker-Callaghan controversies. The Administration did not seem to understand that political support by large numbers of Negroes in past municipal elections was not a guarantee against disaffection and disappointment over specific issues of direct and deep interest to Negroes. This reflects a serious lack of communication between established authority and the black community, which is one of the prime ills of Newark.

2. There was virtually a complete breakdown in the relations between the police and the Negro community prior to the disorders, and there is no evidence that there has been any improvement since July. Distrust, resentment and bitterness were at a high level on both sides, and there was no evidence of any significant improvement in this vital area when the Commission ended its hearings late in 1967.

3. Pre-riot planning by the Newark Police Department was inadequate. The department did not have sufficient resources for riot control, and it had not prepared a plan of operations for coping with the possibility of large-scale disorders.

4. Those who passed out leaflets and called for a rally on the evening of Thursday, July 13, in front of the Fourth Precinct, following the night of the Smith arrest, showed poor judgment. In the light of the high state of tension in the community, a rally was far more likely to lead to disorder than to nonviolent protest.

5. The Administration of the City of Newark was too hesitant to request State Police assistance, despite the views of high officers in the Newark Police Department that such aid was needed. Had aid been requested earlier, the rioting might have been contained more quickly and effectively.

 6. Once assistance was requested, the State responded promptly and with adequate forces. However, due to the absence of an adequate plan for the control of disorders setting forth the command structure among the various law enforcement elements, delays and other problems arose that inhibited the effectiveness of the overall effort.

7. The inability of the various police forces to broadcast over one another's radio frequencies created major communications problems. The absence of a single radio communications channel for all police forces hampered the performance of all riot-control elements.

 8. The amount of ammunition expended by police forces was out of all proportion LO the mission assigned to them. All police forces lacked an adequate system of ammunition control. No proper procedures had been established for dispensing and accounting for the expenditure of ammunition. The use of personal weapons by members of the Newark Police Department created special problems in this area and should be condemned.

9. The technique of employing heavy return fire at suspected sniper locations proved tragic and costly. 10. The heavy firing by police elements against suspected snipers makes it difficult to determine the extensiveness of sniping. There may have been some organized sniping activity once the riot had reached its Friday peak.

11. There is evidence of prejudice against Negroes during the riot on the part of various police and National Guard elements. This resulted in the use of excessive and unjustified force and other abuses against Negro citizens.

12. The damage caused within a few hours early Sunday morning, July 16, to a large number of stores marked with "Soul" signs to depict non-white ownership and located in 143 a limited area reflects a pattern of police action for which there is no possible justification. Testimony strongly suggests that State Police elements were mainly responsible with some participation by National Guardsmen. These raids resulted in personal suffering and economic damage to innocent small businessmen and property owners who have a stake in law and order and who had not participated in any unlawful act. It embittered the Negro community as a whole at a time when the disorders had begun to ebb.

13. The evidence: presented to the Commission does not support the thesis of a “conspiracy" or plan to initiate the Newark riot.

RECOMMENDATIONS (pages 162-175 )

A. Urban Problems:  POLITICAL

I. The resources of Newark and urban centers of the State are no longer adequate to to cope with the current crises that afflict them. Therefore, the administration and financing of certain basic services, such as the police, should be consolidated throughout Essex County. Financial incentives should be provided which are designed to encourage consolidation of services as speedily as possible. However, such financial and administrative consolidation should in no way conflict with effective delivery of service and community involvement at the neighborhood level. Some Commissioners, while they approve this recommendation, believe that it falls short of what is required in the present circumstances. They believe that the very structure of municipal government in New Jersey, with revenue raising, zoning and planning functions fragmented among 567 municipalities and 578 school districts, is the largest contributing factor to the urban problems outlined in this report. They believe that the power of local municipalities to adopt restrictive land use patterns, which exclude lower income people while attracting industrial and commercial ratables, contributes substantially not only to the inability of the older cities to finance essential services, but also to the steady increase of segregated urban housing and education. In their view consolidation of municipalities and school districts, and regionalized zoning and planning are the essential first steps toward any permanent relief of these parallel sources of urban tension. They fear that if legislative action is not taken to break down the legally condoned barriers which have largely confined the Negro to the older cities these centers of segregation will, despite well intentioned remedial action, become increasingly ungovernable. They recommend legislation, granting State financial incentives to encourage consolidation of municipalities and school districts, and requiring regional zoning and planning are the essential first steps toward any permanent relief of these parallel sources of urban tension. They fear that if legislative action is not taken to break down the legally condoned barriers which have largely confined the Negro to the older cities these centers of segregation will, despite well intentioned remedial action, become increasingly ungovernable. They recommend legislation, granting State financial incentives to encourage consolidation of municipalities and school districts, and requiring regional control over zoning and planning. Some Commissioners feel that many municipalities which are now seeking to build new sources of strength and vitality will be deprived of their ability to do so through political consolidation. Therefore, they advocate consolidation of services as a practical and realizable step at this time.

II. To help relieve the feeling of Negro powerlessness, both political parties should support the emergence of more Negro candidates and should encourage active participation of Negroes of all economic levels in the political process. In any reorganization of the governmental structure, care should be taken to achieve districting with a make-up that will provide opportunity for adequate Negro representation. Efforts to reapportion or redistrict should avoid gerrymandering that favors whites, and districts should so be arranged as to give areas with a heavy nonwhite population an opportunity to be responsively represented.

III. The Commission "recommends that a special grand jury be called to investigate allegations of corruption in Newark.”

There were also extensive, specific recommendations regarding police-community relations, the municipal court, economics, housing, employment, public schools, welfare and antipoverty programs.

 

Handout 5: Federal Government Efforts to End Discrimination in Housing

Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968)

Prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of dwellings based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (12 U.S.C. 2901)

Intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations. Requires that each depository institution's record in helping meet the credit needs of its entire community be evaluated by the appropriate Federal financial supervisory agency periodically. Members of the public may submit comments on a bank's performance, which will be taken into consideration during the next CRA examination. A bank's CRA performance record is taken into account in considering an institution's application for deposit facilities. The regulation was substantially revised in May 1995 and updated again in August 2005.

 

Handout 6:  State Efforts to Reduce Discrimination

The 2025 New Jersey Revised Statutes :: Title 10 - Civil Rights :: Section 10:5-12 - Unlawful employment practices, discrimination. makes it unlawful to subject people to differential treatment based on race, creed, color, national origin, nationality, ancestry, age, sex (including pregnancy), familial status, marital status, domestic partnership or civil union status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, atypical hereditary cellular or blood trait, genetic information, liability for military service, and mental or physical disability, perceived disability, and AIDS and HIV status.

The Law Against Discrimination, first enacted in 1945 and updated through 2007, prohibits unlawful discrimination in employment, housing, places of public accommodation, credit and business contracts.

 

Handout 7:  Poverty rates, 2015

Handout 8: Readings, Drawing Conclusions, Taking Action

“This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.  …Worse, certain politicians and entrepreneurs conspire to keep the poor just as they are. On his HBO comedic news show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ran an expose of the payday loan business and those who so callously exploit the desperation of the poor. How does an industry that extorts up to 1,900 percent interest on loans get away with it? In Texas, State Rep. Gary Elkins blocked a regulatory bill, despite the fact that he owns a chain of payday loan stores. And the politician who kept badgering Elkins about his conflict of interest, Rep. Vicki Truitt, became a lobbyist for ACE Cash Express just 17 days after leaving office. In essence, Oliver showed how the poor are lured into such a loan, only to be unable to pay it back and having to secure yet another loan. The cycle shall be unbroken. …The multitude of millionaires and billionaires who lobby to reduce Food Stamps, give no relief to the burden of student debt on our young, and kill extensions of unemployment benefits. The middle class has to join the poor and whites have to join African-Americans in mass demonstrations, in ousting corrupt politicians, in boycotting exploitative businesses, in passing legislation that promotes economic equality and opportunity, and in punishing those who gamble with our financial future.”(“The Coming Race War Won’t be about Race,” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time Magazine, Aug. 17, 2014, at Ferguson: The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

Fox News host Elizabeth Hasselbeck asked why Black Lives Matter has not been labeled as a “hate group” on the morning show “Fox and Friends”.  Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a civil-rights leader, WND columnist said: “Without a doubt, Black Lives Matter is a hate group,” Peterson told WND. “If a white group was encouraging violence and targeting police, they would be rightfully labeled a ‘hate group’ by the mainstream media and by far-left groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and People For the American Way.” See Black Lives Matter under fire as a 'hate group' * WorldNetDaily * by WND Staff

“When people on the ground make decisions, articulate problems and come up with answers, the results are more likely to meet real needs. And that’s more sustainable in the long run: People are better prepared to carry out solutions they themselves created, instead of ones handed down by national leaders unfamiliar with realities in local communities. Such local work allows people to take ownership of the political struggles that affect their lives.” (“Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action,” by Barbara Ransby, in The New York Times Opinion, Oct. 21, 2017 at Opinion | Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action - The New York Times.

1. Do you agree or disagree with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? With Barbara Ransby? With Elizabeth Hasselback? Why or why not?
2. How has the approach to gain civil rights changed since the 1960s? Do you think this approach will be more or less likely to succeed?
3. In small groups of 3-5, create a specific agenda—a list of exactly what you think needs to be changed and how this can be achieved.