By Allison Perrine
RED BANK – On March 5, 1886, the first documented lynching took place in New Jersey – and not far from Red Bank. Now, volunteers throughout the community are working on a project to honor the life of the man who was murdered that day.
During the Red Bank Public Library’s latest virtual Let’s Talk About Race program discussion, guest speaker Kerwin Webb – the president of the NAACP Greater Red Bank chapter, minister at Second Baptist Church in Asbury Park and liaison for the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) – shared the story of a 66-year-old Eatontown man named Samuel Johnson, nicknamed “Mingo Jack,” who was brutally beaten and lynched by an angry mob. Less than 24 hours beforehand, he was accused of assaulting a 24-year-old white woman.
Surprisingly – or to some, unsurprisingly – nobody was convicted for Johnson’s death.
Webb and others are working on a project through the EJI Community Remembrance Project to erect a Lynching in America historic marker that shares Johnson’s story and honors his memory, likely to be dedicated this June.
“Our hope, our desire, is to engage as many people as we can,” Webb said. “Part of this project is to not only share the difficult parts but then to forge a way forward.”
And they’re trying to get the word out about racism and its broad impacts in more ways than one, with various educational compo- nents to their efforts as well.
Bonnie Deroski, the director of children and youth ministries at United Methodist Church of Red Bank who has been working on this EJI project for over a year, said she has been hosting anti-racism virtual story time programs for children.
This month, which is Black History Month, she will hold four events geared toward children ages 5 to 11 every Saturday at 10 a.m. via Zoom. She will be joined by one Black cohost each week to provide a more “balanced dialogue.”
“They are books that are not heavy-handed. We’re going to be very gentle in the way we approach this, but we’re also going to speak to the real issues,” she said. The book she’ll read Feb. 19, for example, will present “all the positives” of the Black Lives Matter movement and what it stands for.
Preregistration for the programs is required and parents, grandparents and guardians are encouraged to listen along with their children.
“I hope by doing this that I will help parents start to have the difficult conversations that partic- ularly white parents don’t have with their kids about these issues,” Deroski said. “I feel like it’s important to start with children because they’re aware. They hear the news. They see people being upset and they themselves may very well be subjected to racism.”
Similarly, Webb introduced EJI volunteer Molly Walker who joined the organization last June. After she and her husband visited Montgomery, Alabama – the site of many important protests during the Civil Rights Movement – they felt compelled to help with the Eatontown project in honor of Johnson. Since their trip, the duo has worked on genealogy projects to find some of Johnson’s living relatives in the area and has helped organize an essay contest for local high school students about the project.
“We’re coming at this from different points because we believe it’s important, because it’s our history and because it’s also continuing to happen,” Webb said. “So our goal is to take lessons and to offer advice, suggestions on how we can talk our way out of this.”
Webb would like people to be able to look at everyone as a human. “That’s part of one of my goals with this project and beyond,” he said.
Attendee Birgit Mondesir has been active with this project alongside Rev. Terrence Porter, pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church. They, too, have held educational presentations on racism at the church and in other spaces, which Mondesir said has been a long ongoing process but “well worth it.”
“Without documentation of our history, it can literally be denied,” she said. “We see a concerted effort along those lines particularly recently because it seems that that’s the natural (reaction) to any sort of awareness and observation of history – to then counter that with a denial of that particular history, particularly when it’s shameful and makes everybody feel uncomfortable,” she said. In denying that history, it’s “adding insult to injury,” she added. “It’s really a disservice for all parties involved.”
Program moderator Patty Whyte suggested that the educational component of this initiative ties in with the current conversations about critical race theory in schools. The topic has become controversial, or as Webb put it, “a boogeyman,” because “any honest discussion about race puts up a mirror to people,” he said. “If you have any humanity or goodness about you at all, it’s going to make you uncomfortable to know how evil people can be.”
Webb defined critical race theory as “the examination of how race functions legally” and gave the example of powder cocaine versus crack cocaine. The two compounds are “chemically identical,” yet one carries a heavier sentence than the other, Webb said.
“What was the impetus for this differentiation? Well, the racist policies of people who decided that this chemical compound that dark-skinned people, brown-skinned people took – that’s a 30-year mandatory minimum.” For “the fairer-skinned person,” the sentencing is one that won’t “kill their college chances.”
To put it in simple terms, Mondesir noted that the subjects studied in critical race theory are like yeast in bread.
“You won’t taste it,” but without yeast, the bread won’t rise, she said.
Linda Hewitt, library circulation supervisor and adult program and outreach coordinator, added that such disparities could be seen within the marijuana industry today.
“You have to be a millionaire” to open a dispensary, she suggested. “You think about how many Black young youths spent years in jail for selling maybe a quarter of an ounce, many of whom are still in jail, and now it’s big business for millionaires.”
Attendee and former school teacher Judith Stevens said, in her English classrooms, she would sometimes incorporate lessons about LGBTQ+ issues and racism. Sometimes, it would land her in the principal’s office after a parent called to complain.
“All you can do at that point is shrug your shoulders and say, ‘If you have something to put in my file, do so, if not, leave me alone,’ ” Stevens said.
And attendee Craig Rubano suggested that not having critical race theory taught in classrooms is preventing students from having an “actual sense of the history of the country.”
“It’s absolutely maddening,” he said. “How could we move forward and do anything that benefits more and more people if we don’t have a sense of where we come from and we don’t have a sense of the true nature of how the country was constructed – literally upon all of this kind of vitriol and abuse of others.”
This article originally appeared in the Feb. 3 – 9, 2022, print edition of The Two River Times.
