Northern Dissonance & Our Call to Action in South Jersey

Northern Dissonance & Our Call to Action

This section brings the story of desegregation, Brown vs Board of Education and Gradual Abolitionism home to South Jersey, examining our own history of “gradual” abolition, the Clark Township policing lawsuit, and the spiritual framework for reparations here and in the years to come as a country.

While the Chesapeake provided the legal blueprint for racial hierarchy, New Jersey provides the starkest evidence of Northern failure. As we approach 250 years as a nation in July 2026, New Jersey remains the most segregated state for Black students in the nation. This is not an accident of geography but a function of colonial legal precedent and Northern complicity.

Our Northern Dissonance in Civil Rights: New Jersey’s “Gradual” Abolition

Beverly Mills asks us to interogate from our own lived experiences why New Jersey is not known for ‘the slaves that were here tilling the soil’ and ‘how slavery was the underpinning of much of the wealth of New Jersey.’ What are the silences in our own Meeting’s history? How do we break them?

Historian James J. Gigantino II notes in The Ragged Road to Abolition that New Jersey was the last Northern state to pass an abolition statute (1804), and even then it was a “gradual” measure that kept children born to enslaved mothers in bondage for two decades. This created a unique economic class: the enslaved Northern Black body, hidden from the moral clarity of the Cotton Belt but subjected to a rigid, suffocating control. The same Partus Sequitur Ventrem logic that governed the Chesapeake was quietly preserved in the North’s gradualist compromise.

This history of “gradualism”—of doing just enough to soothe the conscience while preserving the structure—continues to shape New Jersey today. Wealthy white suburbs linked to New York City’s finance capital enforce segregation not by “Whites Only” signs, but by zoning laws, policing quotas, and exclusionary land use policies. The methods have changed, but the spirit of 1662 lives on.

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim…The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism a sham, your humanity a base pretense, and your Christianity a lie.” Excerpt derived from the 1852 Fourth of July speech by Black abolitionist, Fredrick Douglass.

NJ PBS / Dr. Linda Caldwell Epps, Beverly Mills. (2022-2024). Testimony from The Price of Silence.

This history directly informs the 2026 lawsuit by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin against Clark Township. In that lawsuit, investigators found that the Clark Police Department operated under a directive from former Mayor Salvatore Bonaccorso to “keep chasing the spooks out of town.” Audio recordings captured the mayor using racial slurs, and statistical analysis showed that Black and Hispanic drivers were stopped at rates nearly four times higher than whites, despite making up less than fifteen percent of the town’s population. This is the twenty-first-century enforcement of the eighteenth-century “Ragged Road”: a policy of exclusion masquerading as local safety.

As we approach April 23, 2026, South Jersey Quakers are invited to do more than observe the anniversary of Barbara Johns’ strike. We are invited to participate—by joining the march, by supporting the Moton Museum, by advocating for reparations legislation in New Jersey, and by examining our own meetings’ histories of complicity with gradual abolition and de facto segregation. What did your meeting do when the children of Prince Edward County had no schools? What is your meeting doing now, when the children of Camden and Trenton and Atlantic City are still trapped in separate and unequal systems?

Spiritual Roots of Resistance: Quakers, Bahá’ís, and Our Oneness of Humanity

The struggle against the legal architecture of race has always had a spiritual dimension. For Black Americans, the spirituals were not merely songs; they were maps, codes, and prayers. As the great theologian James H. Cone wrote: “The spirituals are the testimony of a people who refused to accept the world as it is.” They sang of a crossing over to Canaan, of a freedom not yet seen but deeply trusted. They sang because they believed that God’s justice was more real than human oppression.

The Quaker testimony of equality—the belief that there is “that of God in everyone”—has been a consistent, if imperfect, ally in this struggle. Quakers were among the first white Americans to condemn slavery outright, and Quaker communities in South Jersey and Philadelphia provided material support to the Underground Railroad, to freedpeople’s schools, and to the NAACP’s legal battles. The Prince Edward County Free School Association, which educated Black children during the five-year school closure, was funded in part by Quaker organizations. Where the state abandoned its children, the people of God stepped into the breach.

The Bahá’í Faith, established in the nineteenth century by Bahá’u’lláh, offers an even more radical framework: the oneness of humanity as a legal and spiritual principle. Bahá’u’lláh wrote: “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” The Universal House of Justice, the governing council of the Bahá’í Faith, declared in 1985: “Racism… retards the unfoldment of the boundless potentialities of its victims, corrupts its perpetrators, and blights human progress.”

From this perspective, reparations are not charity or punishment. They are the technical mechanism by which the oneness of humanity becomes legally enforceable. They are the restoration of the condition under which unity becomes possible. To demand reparations is to say that the wound must be cleansed before it can heal. To walk forty miles for forty acres is to say that we will not rest until the promise is kept.

There is a deep harmony here between the Bahá’í call for the elimination of all prejudice and the Quaker testimony of equality. Both traditions recognize that spiritual transformation without material repair is incomplete. As one Bahá’í writing puts it, “The light of men is Justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men.” To seek reparations, then, is not revenge—it is the restoration of the condition under which unity becomes possible.

The Nexus of the Struggle Today

The struggle today is no longer merely about integration into a burning house; it is about the liberation of the land and the dismantling of the legal structures built in the 1660s. The 75th Anniversary of the 40 Miles for 40 Acres campaign—led by Reverend Dr. Robert Turner—is a direct action against this history.

Currently, the legal architecture of racism has simply rebranded. Zoning laws in South Jersey, policing quotas in Clark, and algorithmic bias on social media serve the same function as the slave codes of 1662: to concentrate poverty, criminalize Blackness, and protect white property values.

But there is hope. In 2025, the Virginia General Assembly formally established the Commission to Study Reparations for Descendants of Enslaved Virginians. In 2026, New Jersey’s Attorney General is actively suing towns like Clark under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (1945), one of the strongest civil rights laws in the nation. And in Fairfax County, Justice High School stands as a living monument to what youth-led, multiracial organizing can achieve—and a reminder of how much remains to be done.

On April 23, 2026, Reverend Dr. Robert Turner will lead the 75th Anniversary March. We will walk not only for forty acres but for the four hundred years of stolen labor, stolen land, and stolen lives. We will walk for Gabriel, for Nat Turner, for Barbara Rose Johns, for the students of Justice High School, and for Paul Robeson. We will walk for the Bahá’í vision of one human family.

The wealthy suburbs of New York are segregated fortresses. Trenton and Camden are sacrifice zones. The legacy of Barbara Johns is a statue in a hall where few laws are passed to help the living poor. But the legacy of the 40 Miles for 40 Acres campaign is a living demand: repair the breach, restore the land, and recognize that there is but one country, and we are all its citizens.

A statue of Barbara Johns in the U.S. Capitol is a reminder of how teenagers change our world. The #40Milesfor40Acres march is a reminder that adults can finish what teenagers start. And the Spirit of our Living God is a reminder that justice is not a destination. It is a walk. A long walk. A walk that requires our feet, our treasure, and our prayers.

Come and join us!

The road to Richmond is open. The children are watching. The ancestors are waiting. And the Lord, who is justice and mercy, walks with us. Will you be counted among those who walk? Or will you stand at a distance, watching, while history passes you by?

The choice is yours. But the time to choose is now.

Worship Sharing Possibility: The Delaware Bay Crossing

Theme: Confronting the Ghosts of Labor and Law, Embracing the Oneness of Humanity

Context: The Delaware Bay was a border between “free” and “slave” territories, with southern New Jersey having deep economic ties to the Chesapeake. Paul Robeson said his ancestors “baked bread for George Washington’s troops when they crossed the Delaware.” Yet Washington owned enslaved people just miles from that crossing.

Opening Query for silent reflection and sharing:
“What are the spiritual ‘cargoes’ of racism that crossed this river with the colonial settlers? How do we, as a Meeting, actively unload those cargoes today and build the legal and economic infrastructure of one human family—following the example of Barbara Johns, the Justice High School students, and Reverend Dr. Robert Turner?”

Structure for Meeting for Worship:

1. Centering Silence (10 minutes): Listen to a recording of the Delaware River’s current or a Bahá’í prayer for unity.
2. Reading: An excerpt from the 1662 Virginia Act (Partus Sequitur Ventrem); a 2026 excerpt from the Clark Township lawsuit; the 2017 Justice High School renaming vote summary; and a reading from Bahá’u’lláh: “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.”
3. Worship Sharing (30 minutes): Respond to the query: Where do we see the “gradual” abolition mindset in our current work for racial justice, and how does “40 Acres” represent a spiritual demand for immediacy?
4. Closing: Commit to attending the April 23rd March, to supporting the Moton Museum, and to writing a letter to the Clark Township Council and the Fairfax County School Board, citing the Bahá’í principle of the oneness of humanity as a legal and spiritual standard.

Compiled for South Jersey Quakers and all who walk the long road to justice. For more information on upcoming wolks and #FreedomWalk2026 coming to SOuth Jersey please write to SJQ friends or nathannnola@gmail.com. To get a background on the April 23, 2026, march and the 40 Miles for 40 Acres campaign, please contact the Robert Russa Moton Museum or Reverend Dr. Robert Turner directly.