“We ain’t riotin’ agains’ all you whites. We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality, like that cab driver they beat up the other night. That stuff goes on all the time. When the police treat us like people ‘stead of treatin’ us like animals, then the riots will stop.” Billy Furr spoke these words to LIFE Magazine […]
Sometime ago, those of us who entered political movements for change walked on our first picket line or marched in our first demonstration. At some point we got hooked on concepts like “Freedom”, “Direct Action” and “Resistance” to get rid of Jim Crow racism. Eventually we came to learn how to spend time in jail, […]
Tedock Bell had moved to Newark from North Carolina in 1963 and worked two jobs in the city to provide for he, his wife Edna, and four children. During the week, Bell worked full-time as a machinist in a plastics factory, and on the weekends, tended bar at Ben’s Tavern on Bergen Street. It was […]
Rufus Council was born in North Carolina and moved to Newark a number of years before the rebellion that broke out in July of 1967. According to those familiar with him in Newark, Council was “a neighborhood drifter who did odd jobs to survive” and was working for a moving company in the city that […]
Around 12:30 A.M., July 14th, Moise and Rose Abraham were awakened by the sound of gunshots outside their home at 42 Blum Street. The two had married in 1944 and raised their six children in their single-family home, with all but the eldest still living there. After hearing the gunfire, Mr. Abraham walked downstairs to […]
Robert Lee Martin moved with his parents, Weldon and Ruby Martin, and three of his siblings to Newark in 1966 after graduating high school in Greenwood, Mississippi. By the time Robert Lee graduated high school, three of his older sisters had already married and moved north to Newark. The Martin family relocated to Newark in […]
Richard Taliaferro was the youngest of Harry and Elizabeth Taliaferro’s seven children. The family lived on 11th Avenue, near the corner of South 8th Street. After leaving school at the age of 16, Richard worked at Pechter’s Bakery in Harrison, and later at A&P Bakery on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark. According to his mother, ‘The […]
Rebecca and Ozell Brown moved from High Springs, Florida to Newark in 1961—the same year they were married. Mrs. Brown, a nurse’s aide at Orange Memorial Hospital, and Mr. Brown, a construction worker for Francisco Construction Company in Cedar Grove, lived in a third floor apartment in the Hayes Homes project with their four children, […]
Raymond Hawk lived in the South Ward’s Dayton Avenue project with his wife, Roberta, and their two-year-old son. The 24-year-old Hawk had worked at the J&R Clothing Company on Frelinghusyen Avenue, just down the street from their apartment, for the past eight years. When he finished work at J&R on Friday, July 14th, Raymond Hawk […]
Raymond Gilmer grew up in Newark’s East Ward at the corner of Ferry Street and Manufacture Place, where he and his nine siblings were raised by their grandmother, Mrs. Bessie Hopkins. After leaving school in tenth grade to start working, Gilmer later married his wife Sharon, with whom he had four children, the last being […]
