Exhibit memorializes South Jersey as a civil rights battleground

Men, women, and children stand outside the downtown Vineland Woolworth's in 1960 to protest the segregated lunch-counter policies of the retail chain's Southern stores.

Setting a national precedent, Lawnside establishes an official holiday in memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just five days after the civil rights leader's assassination April 4, 1968.

And that August, four Boardwalk blocks away from the home of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, Saundra Williams is crowned the first Miss Black America.

These and other dramatic events are showcased in "A Time for Change: Civil Rights in Southern New Jersey," which opened Friday and continues through Sept. 28 at the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey. The museum (aahmsnj.org) is within the Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton University, in Atlantic City; the exhibit originated in a graduate American studies class at the university in 2014.

Some 21 graduate and undergraduates at Stockton participated in the effort.

"People don't think about South Jersey when they think about the civil rights movement. But the movement didn't just happen in the South or in Washington, D.C.," says Michelle Craig McDonald, assistant provost and associate professor of history at Stockton. "It happened here as well."

McDonald and Stockton associate professor John O'Hara meet me at the museum, where founder and president Ralph E. Hunter Sr. gives me a tour of a permanent collection, much of which he has personally acquired since 1972.

The Aunt Jemima figurines, the dancer's costume from Atlantic City's legendary Club Harlem, the photos of celebrities and ordinary folks, and a cornucopia of other memorabilia - by turns entertaining, surprising, and moving - depict African American history in general and the 20th-century black experience in Hunter's adopted hometown of Atlantic City in particular.

"I want to tell you the story," says the retired retailer, 78, who grew up in a mostly white section of West Philadelphia.

"I took the bus to Atlantic City for Easter in 1952 with a friend of mine whose mother lived here," Hunter recalls. "I got off the bus, and I saw thousands of people who looked just like me, wearing suits and ties and driving new automobiles.

"The Northside was a self-contained African American community, a community like I'd never seen before," says Hunter, who was 14 at the time. "It was probably the best thing I'd ever seen."

These days the Northside, where Hunter makes his home, "is not what it was in its heyday," he notes.

But the neighborhood, and other landmarks of South Jersey black life, is vividly depicted in a handsome sequence of photographic and text panels that make up "A Time for Change."

Other panels cover the events in Vineland and Lawnside, as well as the civil unrest that erupted in Camden in 1969 and 1971.

Rarely seen video footage of the Miss Black America Pageant - compiled and digitized from TV news coverage, O'Hara notes - is delightful.

But to me, nothing in the exhibit possesses as much eloquent power as the masterfully presented material about the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City.

A national TV appearance by Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party provided unforgettable evidence of what was at stake for black America, and America, period, in the civil rights struggle.

"These issues are still relevant," notes O'Hara.

As video of Hamer, who had been brutalized by police while attempting to register black Southerners to vote, plays on a screen, I ask volunteer Charles W. Johnson and summer intern Asia Lackland for their thoughts about the exhibit.

Johnson, 58, of Pleasantville, agrees that Hamer's story is central. But he also points out the prominent presence of white people in the photos of Boardwalk protests during the '64 convention.

"We can't move this country forward if we don't do it together," he says.

Lackland, 17, is a junior at Egg Harbor Township High School.

She's fascinated by the Miss Black America display - it includes a photo of Oprah Winfrey as a 1972 contestant - and believes that people her age "have to take a strong role" in promoting awareness of the link between historical and current civil rights struggles.

"We have to talk about this," says Lackland, and McDonald agrees.

"We're glad the exhibit has been installed, but we don't see it as the end of the conversation," she says. "We see it as the beginning."

After Sept. 28, the exhibit will move to Stockton's main campus in Galloway Township, and later, to the museum's Newtonville facility.

Hunter is pleased with the professionalism and polish of what he views as an essential educational effort.

"The storytelling is quite wonderful," he says.

"The story really happened. And I was there."

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