Nation’s Change Is Felt in Jersey City
By Mary Anne Christiano • Jan 23rd, 2009 • Category: Featured, Politics
Photo: Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force
This week in Washington, when Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States, it signified to many leaders in Jersey City that change was on the way in America.
“It’s a turning point for the United States,” state Sen. Sandra Cunningham says. “It [the inauguration] happening during the week we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday makes it a little more poignant for African Americans. I’m sure Martin Luther King, Jr. is smiling right now.”
Cunningham knows a thing or two about breaking color barriers. Her late husband, Glenn Cunningham, became Jersey City’s first black mayor in 2001. When he died before finishing his term in 2004, current state Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith stepped in as acting mayor before the Nov. 2004 special election. Smith is running for mayor this year, and Cunningham has flirted with a run but not yet announced one way or the other.
Ward A City Council candidate Andre Richardson came to live in Jersey City during Glenn Cunningham’s tenure. “I’ve been able to see a lot of firsts,” he says. “As far as Dr. King is concerned, all the doors he knocked down enabled Barack.”
James Adams, the founding publisher of the Courier Times newspaper, says that the election is loaded with meaning for his community.
“The election of Obama is not only a historical moment, but a moving moment,” he says. “It brings to light the huge advances in social and racial equality in our country.”
Adams then echoed King in explaining the significance of a black man in the White House. “People begin to look at the sense of character rather than the color of the skin,” he says. “It should say to every boy and girl in this country, regardless of color or background, ‘Everything is possible with hard work.’”
In Jersey City, Ward F Councilwoman Viola Richardson says that some politicians and citizens are working hard together to truly bring equal opportunity to all.
“There’s been a group of black elected officials and community people that have been strategizing,” she says. “There are some changes that have to take place in our communities to minimize the end result of people getting locked up and us losing our children and our males [to the penal system].”
Richardson concedes that the problems in her communities are complex, and reach into matters far more mundane than access to public office. “If a child can’t read and can’t write, that becomes a barrier for them to be fulfilling, healthy people,” she says. “Gangs tend to reach out to these kinds of people and supply that need that may be missing.”
When Jersey Journal columnist Earl Morgan was a kid, blacks were limited in television roles. Blacks couldn’t be quarterbacks — they couldn’t be reporters. Things changed, but Morgan feels the change is not uniform and there are still a lot of things left behind.
“If you have 150 years of neglect in an area in part of the city, you’re going to feel that somewhere,” he says. “It’s crime, it’s drugs and it’s poverty … and it’s always black people.”
The 65-year-old journalist remembers when Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947. “He changed everything,” Morgan says. “That is on par with Obama. Obama is the quantum leap. Hillary Clinton could have been president. A woman can run and win - there’s not doubt about that anymore. Both Obama and Hilary changed everything.”
“What it has done for people who are interested in solving the problem is it’s given them an idea that things are possible,” Morgan says. “There are people who now believe, who swell up with all kinds of pride.”
Check out our brief timeline of black elected officials in Jersey City below. Navigate through the timeline by using the green shape at the bottom.
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Mary Anne Christiano is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in Manhattan Spirit, Our Town, The Chelsea Clinton News, The Westsider, The NY Blade, The Aquarian Arts Weekly, Punk magazine, Exit magazine, The Paterson Pulse, NJ Health and Fitness magazine and The Montclair Times, to name a few.
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