by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

March 19, 2009

Combining interracial communication with nostalgic reflection, several generations of black and Jewish graduates from Newark’s Weequahic High School gathered Sunday.

Together they filled the sanctuary at Congregation Ahavas Sholom, the city’s oldest operational synagogue, to focus on “The Struggle for Integration: Weequahic and Beyond.”

Once a predominantly Jewish section of Newark, the Weequahic neighborhood evolved into an African-American area in the late 1960s.

Sunday’s event revealed a gap in perceptions between the older Jewish alumni and the younger black residents, and looked back on the tensions that exploded into a series of riots in the mid-1960s.

The two panel discussions also raised the possibility for future efforts at bringing the two communities together — through philanthropy and alumni activity.

“We are going to be talking about contentious issues, about how the neighborhood changed and people got along or did not get along,” said Max Herman, a congregation member as he began the program.

“We are also going to be talking about the future and our efforts to ensure racial integration in New Jersey.”

Herman is president of the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, which is located on the synagogue’s second floor. The featured exhibit on display was “Weequahic Memoirs,” presented by the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest.

Sandra King, a Jewish woman and 1965 graduate who moderated a panel called “Children of Weequahic,” noted that there were only 20 black students in her graduating class of several hundred. Those statistics notwithstanding, “People who went there in those years thought they went to an integrated school,” she said.

This moved Komozi Woodard, an African-American who graduated two years after King, to raise the issue of what constitutes racial integration.

“If you ask white people, they’ll say it is when one out of 10 people is black. In my community, they’ll say it’s 50-50.” In some communities, he said, a black population of six or seven can result in “white flight.”

“Newark was a segregated town,” Woodard said unambiguously.

African-American panelist Harold Edwards, class of 1966, talked about another cause of Weequahic’s downslide. He said he had a “wonderful childhood” in the neighborhood until the construction of Intestate Route 78, which demolished many neighborhoods on Newark’s south side. More than the presence of racial tension, he said, his family’s displacement “totally affected my life.”

Another African-American panelist, Sandra West, class of 1964, however, returned to the topic of racism. “When we first moved into our house,” she said, “I picked up the telephone and a person said, ‘The niggers are coming, the niggers are coming. Sell your house. Sell your house.’ They didn’t know they were talking to a child. That traumatized me.”

Speaking of the violence that engulfed the black community after she graduated from Weequahic in 1967, Paula Borenstein called it “a very disturbing and scary time.”

As a Jewish woman, she said, she was “worried about my friends on the other side of town” who faced the violence of the Newark police and the National Guard. “I went to a high school that was integrated, but my neighborhood was not.”

Expressing a sentiment of reconciliation to heal the wounds left from those turbulent times, Edwards addressed both black and white alumni at the gathering, saying “We need and we want you to come back and share the experience to help your home, Weequahic.”

Referring to Newark as a type of spiritual hometown, Borenstein responded by saying, “We have never left Newark. Newark is Jerusalem.”

‘Provide opportunity’

In a second panel entitled “Lessons Learned,” members of an older generation of Weequahic residents spoke of events leading up to the six days of rioting that rent Newark in July 1967.

Robert Curvin, an African-American community activist who tried in vain to calm an angry crowd at the outset of the riots, recalled “constant incidents of police brutality and a police department which did little or nothing about it.”

He cited as conditions that led to what he called an “uprising” the building of a medical college to replace 150 residential acres in the predominantly black Central Ward and a lack of construction jobs for people of color.

“There was a term used in those days,” said Jewish panel member Estelle Greenberg. “The medical school was paid for by ‘urban removal.’ So were the highways.”

Recalling civil rights struggles in the Newark area of the 1960s, moderator Hal Braff and members of the audience described chaining themselves to fences at a pharmaceutical plant to demand minority hiring and a sit-in at a public golf course to change its whites-only membership policy.

“We reacted to what was going on in the South,” said panelist Gladys Grauer as she considered what triggered the upheavals. “Our anger as black people was building up. We had to do something.”

Noting that there were more Jewish-owned businesses in black communities than in white Christian areas, Grauer said the two communities “were thrown together.” Speaking of looters who raided stores during the rioting, she said, “Remember, they did not hurt people. They took things.”

Prior to the reminiscences, Braff, a founder and copresident of the Weequahic High School Alumni Association, tied the area’s past, present, and future together.

“From the 1930s until the 1960s, it was a safe community. Jews were safe in an unsafe time, and yes, there was an impulse to be a successful kid.”

After decades of ethnic shifts and economic downturns, “things have changed,” he said. “But the kids are still good kids. They just do not have the culture we had. Not only do they not have the economy we had, not only do they have more poverty than we ever saw, not only do they not have a culture where they hang out with people who are successful academically — but they don’t understand the opportunities that the people here gave them.”

Braff urged his audience to increase its support of the biracial alumni association. He said it has enabled current students to receive computers, books, and college scholarships.”

“We are graduates of Weequahic High School, both blacks and Jews, and we say there is a lot of energy that pulls people back,” Braff said. “What if we reach back and provide opportunity?”

He said that the response would be: “‘What are these older folks doing getting involved with the kids at Weequahic?’ Here’s why…. Nobody is saying, ‘Get out of here.’ If anybody wants to help us provide for these good kids, we’ll take it. We’ll take your money gladly,” said Braff.

“Our goal is to use Weequahic High School as an example of what can be…in every place in this country. There is an example of blacks and Jews working together.”

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