Echoes of an Earlier Era in the Fight for Marriage Equality in New Jersey

The issue of marriage equality is an important one, and one that is still primarily debated and regulated on the state level. Unless the day arrives when the U.S. Supreme Court declares, all out, that gays have equal marriage rights to straights, the battleground for equality and dignity will remain in the statehouses of the nation.

First, I do not intend to mislead my readers. My position on gay marriage is clear. I believe that if two adult human beings want to abide together, pledge mutual lifelong love and loyalty and create a family, then the state ought to support them in doing so. It’s a tough, mean world out there, and no one ought to go it alone. People need to join together, and the family is the first and foremost institution for such a practice. We are social beings and need family. I do not mean this as a slight to single people, but on the whole, two are better than one, whether it is in the quest to make a living, buy a house, or find a pair of lost keys in the house. 

New Jersey has a long and, frankly, appalling history in the fight for equality and justice. While New Jerseyans tend to think of themselves as Northerners, as Progressives, the political history of the state is a rather conservative – almost a Southern – one. New Jersey had a slave population well up to the Civil War. New Jersey never voted for Lincoln. New Jersey wasn’t happy with the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, which established “equal protection of the laws” as national policy. New Jersey did not allow women to vote in most elections before the U.S. Constitution was changed in 1920. New Jersey had a prominent Ku Klux Klan movement in the 20’s, and a menacing Nazi Party in the 1930’s. Does all of this surprise you? It should.

Well, the Garden State continues to carry on its regressive tradition of embracing the wrong side of history. Though the year is not two months old, conservative legislators in Trenton have already proposed a state Constitutional amendment (ACR 11) barring legal gay marriage. It’s embarrassing, it’s shameful, but it is not unprecedented.

We last saw a similar debate, filled with prejudice and detestable declarations, in 1913. This was a tough year for New Jersey. Scenarios that any present-day resident would find eerily familiar plagued the state. Our cities were spiraling out of control due to growing poverty and crime. Urban schools were breaking down under the pressure of increased enrollment and deteriorating conditions. Teachers, particularly in Newark, were restive and would eventually strike for higher wages and job security. Corruption ruled the day in Trenton and the municipalities, defying Woodrow Wilson, the state’s progressive governor. Wilson would soon move on to a higher office, of course, but the graft would remain.

It was in this recognizable economic and political climate that the Legislature took up the debate on marriage equality. But this earlier struggle was not over homosexuality, it concerned race. In February of 1913 the New Jersey State legislature took up a bill that would ban interracial marriage.

To be fair, this was not just a state issue. Between 1910 and 1914 several states, including Iowa and Wyoming, considered such legislation. Congress openly debated amending the U.S. Constitution to ban interracial matrimony, as well as making such contracts a felony in Washington, D.C. In statehouses and even on the floor of Congress itself, politicians railed against the idea of whites and blacks joining together in matrimony. One prominent Georgia Congressman, Seaborn Roddenberry, even compared interracial marriage to a form of white slavery:

“Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania...Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy…”

Back in New Jersey, the proposed bill caused an uproar amongst the state’s religious and black leaders. One by one, key leaders spoke up, along with their congregations, on the issue. Heading the effort to defeat the bill was Presbyterian Rev. E.F. Eggleston. Speaking at one Newark protest meeting in February of 1913, he stated:

“It’s a snake bill. All the good people of this state are with us. If this proposed bill were against the Chinese, I would be opposed to it.” 

Echoing him was Reverend Frederick H. Butler of Montclair, one of Essex County’s most prominent African-American leaders:

“There are bad classes among the white people, just as much as among us. The Negro woman does her part. She is our mother, and she must be protected. If we could live better, we would not have this special class legislation thrust at us.”

Unlike in the South, African-Americans had some voting power in New Jersey, though they too experienced discrimination daily and at the polls. But New Jersey’s small black minority (larger numbers would not settle in the state until the Great Migration of the 1920's), joined with its religious allies, and eventually succeeded and defeated efforts in the Legislature to bar interracial marriage.

Other states would continue to ban, and even punish, interracial marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court labeled the practice unconstitutional in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia.

New Jersey’s residents need to recognize the authentic parallels between the two discriminatory movements. We need to learn from our history and reject hatred. Decent people must, in the words of songwriter Sarah Bareilles, speak up and BE BRAVE. We must honor those who seek to create households of love, honor, responsibility and family.

Stand up for family values. Stand up for honorable people. Defeat ACR 11 this year!

  

How One Newark Teen's Not-So-Excellent Adventure Bruised The Jim Crow South of the 1930's

Chain gang, early 20th Century

David Kraft was bored. A freshman at Newark’s Central High School, he apparently had had enough of the hum-drum life of a city kid. He needed to bust out, to see the world, to have an adventure. To his credit, he lasted in school for the first half of the 1932-33 academic year, but then Christmas Break came. With time on his hands, he planned his “escape” from the Brick City for a more exciting life, or at least, an audacious episode. Like many young people in this more so-called innocent age, Kraft made his way out of town by hitching rides. He sought a sunnier climate than the New Jersey winter, and headed south.

At first, all went according to plan. Kraft threaded his way through New Jersey, Delaware and the lengths of Virginia and North Carolina. Not exactly “progressive” states, but not the “Deep South,” either. But then he crossed a line that mattered, really mattered, at December’s end. He was a young, unemployed teen journeying far away from his Northern home, and he had crossed a boundary too far. He had crossed into South Carolina.

South Carolina was about the last place than any penniless out-of-town northerner (of any color) wanted to be in the early 1930's. This was a state where the Confederate Flag flew over the State Capitol in Columbia. This was a state that, well into the 1960’s, kept an overwhelming majority of its black and poor white population in a condition of endless penury and peasant-hood. In South Carolina, like most other “conservative” Southern states, Jim Crow stood strong, and had since the departure of occupying Union troops in the 1870’s.

States like South Carolina trapped African-Americans (and many lower class, working whites) in a complex web of elite white supremacy enforced by law, custom and blatant illegal violence. Though blacks and poverty-stricken whites were technically “free” there in the 1930’s, poll taxes, impossible literacy tests, long residency requirements and voter disqualification laws for minor convictions kept them from voting. Segregation, as we all know, ruled the land. Blacks were forced into their own urban and rural ghettoes, wood shack schools, treated in barren hospitals and forced to the backs of trains and trolleys. The same voting laws kept them from sitting on juries, and in most of the state the only seat in any courthouse reserved for a black man was that of the accused. White-on-black crimes, typically committed in the same of racial regulation, were rarely if ever investigated, and even more seldom prosecuted. But even with all of these laws, there was one danger that, on a daily basis loomed over every teenage and adult poor man. It wasn’t abstract and it wasn’t sporadic. It was facing arrest for no reason at all, for being poor, for standing around, or for what southern authorities throughout the former Confederate states called “vagrancy.”

Vagrancy laws were really a tripwire for poor (mostly black) southern men, meant push them into a state of slavery – or worse – hapless, endless, humiliating and debilitating punishment. Vagrants were typically arrested and brought into court, “convinced” to plead guilty, and fined. Being too poor to pay, steep fines ($10 or more) would then have to be “worked off” either through a state-approved contractor (neo-slave-owner) or by being hauled to a form of Hell itself. That Hell wasn’t prison, either. It was the chain gang, and it was a real and present danger. It was this nightmare that grabbed a young David Kraft of Newark, New Jersey by the neck in early 1933. It turned his adventure, his flight from boredom into a dramatic struggle against racial and economic injustice, physical abuse and state-sponsored criminality.  

Let’s get back to the young man, David Kraft. Kraft had spent New Year’s Eve in Greenville, South Carolina. Sometime before midnight he was arrested by local authorities and charged with vagrancy. Much like a young Emmet Till, a black teen murdered two decades later in Mississippi, Kraft had no idea of the immediate, mortal danger facing him.  

The Newark teen was hauled into court and “counseled” by some adult present – we don’t know if it was a lawyer, or the judge himself – to plead guilty, which he promptly did. His sentence was either to pay an enormous $10 cash fine (more than an adult's average week's wage of the time) or spend a month in jail. Being broke, and probably thinking that sitting around for a month wasn’t the end of the world, Kraft entered into one of the harshest and most perilous historical environments of the 20th century: the South Carolina penal system.

What Kraft described next later horrified readers in the North. The 14-year-old was forced into prison stripes and shackled at all times like a convicted mass murderer, though his only crime was standing around and being broke. Along with dozens of others he was taken to work on various county roads and labored without pay or meaningful rest from 5 a.m. to sundown. At times Kraft became so physically ill he could not continue, only to face the disfiguring lash at the hands of his sadistic guards. Somehow he was able to get a letter out to his parents back in Newark and within a few days his father sent him the money to pay his fine and his bus fare to Washington, D.C. Once there, David he met up with his father who then brought him home to freedom, to Newark.

Kraft’s story was immediately published in papers nationwide. The Associated Press quickly dispatched a reporter to Greenville. Once there, the reporter interviewed the convicting Magistrate, L. Cooley, and the county “Supervisor of Chain Gangs” (and certainly, local S.O.B.) J. Ed Means. The judge claimed that he had never been told of Kraft’s actual age and that Kraft had never used his real name. Means also denied any whippings, though he did admit, perhaps with some measure of professional pride, that he had instituted a “sweat box” where “unruly prisoners” were sent to cool off.

Not being satisfied with the explanation of the “unbiased” authorities, a reporter then interviewed another former prisoner. The man not only confirmed Kraft’s experience but actually spoke of much worse conditions for African-Americans, whereby sadistic guards had extorted bribes from black prisoners to avoid beatings and lashings.

By mid-year papers all over the nation were publishing stories about the plight of “vagrants.” Clearly embarrassed at the unwanted exposure, many southern governors ordered investigations, and some localities claimed to stop the chain gang practice altogether. But there was little real progress made, and Jim Crow’s harsh burden on Southern blacks and underprivileged whites continued unabated until the well-publicized Till murder in 1955. But that was a different time in history. In 1933 there was no television. African-Americans (and poor whites) in the South had little access to instant, private communications like the telephone, which proved instrumental in all organizing efforts during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s.     

Though this story ended somewhat well for the once-adventurous Freshman of Central High, who did escape with his life, the nightmare of Jim Crow would take the efforts and many lives of voting organizers, freedom riders, protesters and others before vagrancy laws were finally repealed. Still, Newark’s wandering David Kraft deserves our thanks for (eventually) thinking smart under pressure and publicizing the South’s brutal way of life and punishment decades before the efforts of King and countless others.

Proposed Changes Aim To Transform Jersey into Dixie

One of the most destructive legacies of the white supremacist South can still be seen and felt by the voters and citizens of the states below the Mason-Dixon line. Though these features are not immediately apparent, they manifest themselves in the very design of the governments of most of the former “rebel” states. Submerged deep within the constitutions and laws of states like Mississippi and Louisiana are provisions that make governing and change next to impossible. In these fundamental documents are features that more or less paralyze each branch of government from effecting needed changes in society or rising to meet new challenges. These provisions are partially responsible for the slow social, educational and industrial development of the South.

So why should you care? You live in New Jersey. It’s the year 2014. Sure, the Garden State has its problems, but legal racial segregation, laws barring interracial marriages and similar features of the Jim Crow South aren’t present here. We’re a state of fast movers, of high technology, of superhighways that span the state. We’ve got fiber optic Internet service that goes right into our homes. But just a glance at some proposed state constitutional amendments now under consideration by our legislators in Trenton attest to a true, backwards-looking mentality aimed at making governmental change nearly impossible.

Now before these proposed amendments are discussed, we need to glance at the process of how changes are made to the state constitution. It’s a bit complicated, as it should be.

First, unlike in other states, our constitution requires that allproposed amendments to the constitution originate in the Legislature. There is no popular initiative system that begins with the people, as in a state like California. If you want to change the document, there are several requirements. The first is that it must be officially proposed, and can only embrace a single subject. To officially propose an amendment the Legislature has two options. The first is straightforward enough. If a 3/5 supermajority in each house (Assembly and Senate) approves the proposal, it then gets put on the next statewide ballot for popular approval.

The other method is a bit more, well, sneaky. Just when you think that the state constitution makes it arduous to propose an amendment, it surprises you. If in the first instance the proposed amendment does not gain 3/5 approvals in each house, but does get majority approval, it is ‘tabled’ until the next legislative year. Then, the next year, if the Legislature approves the proposed amendment by simple majority in each house, the question goes to the voters, to the people. Strange…but it’s the law of the land nevertheless.

Again, it should be repeated, that the Legislature cannot, underany circumstances, change the state constitution by itself. No way. Not a chance. Only tiny Delaware’s legislature can do that.In the Garden State, proposed amendments must, in all instances, be approved by a majority of voters in a statewide election.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way (whew!), let’s take a look at two rather scary, proposed amendments that are working their way through the Legislature. I am not alleging that the sponsorsof these proposals are racist in any way. But the ideas are regressive and we can see the legacy of such proposals today, especially in the states of the Deep South. Both proposed amendments, if ever enacted into the state constitution, would basically paralyze the entire state government in any effort to create change or react to a crisis.

The first is SCR24. Under this proposal, the Legislature would lose the ability to raise most taxes unless upon the approval of a ¾ majority in each House. Now there are times when supermajority requirements are necessary, as with proposing fundamental changes to a constitution, but raising and lowering taxes is a routine legislative matter. Legislatures need this power to react to change and calamity. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t like taxes. I pay a lot of money in taxes…more than I’d like. But handcuffing my elected officials in nearly all situations isn’t just the wrong way to design a government, it goes against my interests as a person who wants an effective government. Additionally, it places the financial elites of the state, be they institutions or individuals, in a position where, upon ‘convincing’ just a small minority of representatives, they can completely torpedo a piece of revenue legislation. I’m for minority rights, but not minority rule.  

The second adorable proposal is ACR71. Under this beauty of a plan, the entire state government’s budget would never be allowed to exceed 2 percent over that of the last year’s. In times of desperate economic downturn this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Constraining our legislators in acting to aid the people of New Jersey, or its businesses, or educational institutions, etc…is not only unwise but also regressive. There are already enough fitting restraints on elected officials in the form of terms of office and the constant prospect of facing reelection.

Adding up these amendments, if enacted, you get a government that, aside from law enforcement and providing some other basic functions, is powerless. And if you want to see the results of a powerless state government, venture down to Louisiana, Alabama or Northern Florida. There, black and white students alike attend substandard, dilapidated schools. Unemployment and disability benefits are bare-boned and callously limited in their duration. Local roads and bridges lay in disrepair and various states of deterioration. Routine workplace, food, hospital and safety inspections are rare due to lack of funding. Don’t take my word for it…take a road trip and see it for yourself. And the prospect of emergency aid in times of, say, natural or manmade disaster? In Louisiana, unless British Petroleum is paying for it, you’re on your own.

I don’t want a state government like that. We've been down this road before; it was called the late 1800’s. The idea that a government, any government, does not have a vested interest in easing economic disparities and protecting its own people from hapless poverty has been tested. It’s well documented in books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in the photos of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, and in Dickens’ book Oliver Twist.

New Jersey is a complex entity with millions of people. It should not, nor ever become some experiment in Social Darwinism. Behind these seemingly ‘prudent’ proposals lies an agenda to transform our state into some northern version of Alabama. I don’t want to move to Alabama, even in 2014. I don’t want a failed state.