- New Jersey was the last northern state to even attempt to abolish slavery, and was probably the northern state with the strongest sympathies towards the South.

Because it was the southern most northern state, it had a lucrative trade policy with the southern states.

- New Jersey's known as The Garden State.

We're known for our blueberries.

We're known for our corn.

We're known for our peaches.

But we're not known for the slaves that were here tilling the soil.

We're not known for the whole history of slavery connected to New Jersey and how slavery was the underpinning of much of the wealth of New Jersey, particularly in this region.

- When you start looking at everything that the African Americans did here in New Jersey, you can start all the way down to the shore and bring it all the way up to the tip of New Jersey.

- All of my education is here, from kindergarten through a doctoral degree, never once did I, certainly in elementary school or high school, learn anything at all about the enslavement of people in this state.

- We look now and say, "How do you reconcile with this?"

"If you're talking to me, how can you be a pastor of a church that they had enslaved members?"

Well, here's the only thing I know.

And that is, we have got to tell our past, we've got to acknowledge it.

You've gotta tell the whole truth about it.

There was a time when people would say in our culture, in today's culture, "Well, slavery was bad, but not that bad."

No.

we've looked at it more carefully.

Slavery was a gross evil.

[orchestral music] [gentle music] - The colony of New Jersey was founded for prosperity purposes, and the concessions agreement of 1664, actually awarded settlers for the number of enslaved people that they had.

So they could, depending upon the value of that enslaved person, could inherit anywhere between 40 and 150 acres of free land.

So, from the very beginning, our thoughts were on prosperity, on making a profit.

As time went on and New Jersey shoreline became even more important for trade, enslaved people were used to work on the docks, doing all kinds of jobs, loading, unloading, in the production of ships, or any maritime equipment that was needed.

New Jersey was a northern state that made a good deal of its fortune out of furnishing products to the South.

We gave the southern plantations what they needed to be profitable.

So, New Jersey in particular, it was famous for its leather goods, for its belts, and its buckles, and its boots, and its whips.

Bergen County has an extensive shoreline and there was a good deal of trade that went on the Arthur Kill, the Hudson River, that it was Bergen County.

So they used a large number of enslaved people in the making of maritime equipment, in the shipment of other goods to Europe and, and other places.

At one point I believe the enslaved population of Bergen county was 20% and above.

So it was quite a substantial number of people who were there, enslaved.

- Were slave auctions done here?

Yes.

Were slave ships docked here?

Yes.

Where people come off in chains, and shackled, and being brutalized here?

Yes.

It's not even really known exactly how many Africans were enslaved, because of the fact that the records have never been maintained very well.

- During the Civil War, Newark, New Jersey especially provided uniforms for southern armies.

It helped clothe the Confederate soldiers.

It had also provided battle gear for battles.

[gentle music] - The founders of the country were actually slaveholders, especially the signers of the Declaration of Independence for this region.

John Hart was a slave owner.

Historians and our school books don't really talk about the impact of slavery in this area, and how it mirrored the South.

- They captured young, strong, intelligent Africans, brought people here, and then enslaved them so that people could make money.

That's all it was about.

That's all it was about.

- In researching "If These Stones Could Talk", the information that I found out, I did not know that the African Americans that lived in this community, the descendants, the ancestors were the founding Black families for this region, for Hopewell, for Pennington, for Amwell, for Skillman.

And we've been here since the beginning of colonial times.

- My name is Beverly Mills, and I am co-author of "If These Stones Could Talk."

I discovered the name Friday through some work that a cousin of mine, she hired a genealogist back in the early 90's.

And I remember her saying, "We had an ancestor "who was named Friday and he married a woman named Judah."

Friday Truehart was my fourth great-grandfather on my maternal side.

He was an enslaved 13 year old boy, who came to this region with the Reverend Oliver Hart.

Placed the church where he pastored, where we're sitting today.

[gentle music] How Friday and his mother became owned by Oliver Hart kind of remains a mystery because I don't know if it was a private sale, or there was some kind of oral history that he was purchased off of a slave ship.

[gentle music] - The evidence we have here is that he was purchased at a slave auction somehow from, we don't know who, but with his mother, and Friday at age three here in the city of Charleston.

[gentle music] - Oliver Hart was a very prominent figure in Charleston.

He was responsible for pretty much pulling together the structure of the Baptists down in Charleston.

He had had much success in Pennsylvania.

And even as a young pastor, the hierarchy saw this skill within him and said, "Perhaps you need to go to Charleston, so you could kind of make sure that the same structure takes place in Charleston, that took place in Pennsylvania."

- We know that the culture in this city at that time was very much pro-slavery.

It was the culture that was pushing this idea that that African slaves were better off in slavery.

And just a horrible, mixed up narrative that was definitely not biblical, definitely not Christian.

And yet Hart, even though he believed the Bible to be true, even though he had sincere faith, he allowed the culture to shape his thinking on that issue.

- I know there was an entry in Oliver Hart's diary about, "We will be free.

"We will no longer be slaves of the British," which I thought was rather ironic because it's very indicative of how men of that time period could very easily separate the two.

And what is good for them is, is not necessarily okay for other people.

So even though he enslaved people, he did not want to consider himself to be under the yolk of anyone else's bondage.

Meaning the British.

- As the time came for the Revolutionary War, and the British troops finally captured Charleston in 1780, Oliver Hart was someone that the British troops had on their list to capture.

They came and closed the church down and they tried to find and arrest him.

He escaped the city.

That's where his journey led from, back from Charleston, back to Hopewell, New Jersey in 1780, at that time, near the end of the revolutionary war.

But he never returned to Charleston.

He made Hopewell his home after that point.

- There's no information of Friday being in contact with his mother again.

What I do know is that also in Oliver Hart's will, he instructed his daughter-in-law, who was the enslaver of a woman named Dinah.

I can only surmise that that's Friday's mother.

And it instructed her that, if she was to remarry, that she was instructed to sell Dinah, and the proceeds to go towards the upkeep of Oliver Hart's grandchildren.

So the way he thought of these people, the way he thought of Dinah, she was nothing but a vehicle for dollars and cents.

She wasn't a person.

I wish I knew more about Friday's mother, but unfortunately I do not.

But what I'm very thankful for is that I even have a name because African Americans know practically zero about their history.

But now I know that I had a fifth great-grandmother by the name of Dinah, and only reason why I know that is because it was written in Oliver Hart's diary.

I don't know what life was like for her.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like to have to give her son up to go with Oliver Hart.

To come north, to leave his mother after she raised him for 13 years of his life, only to have him leave her side, knowing probably that she'd never see him again.

I can't imagine what that was like for a mother.

I can't, I can't imagine.

Friday was freed through Oliver Hart's will.

However, what I found interesting and rather heartbreaking was that he was first to be given to Hart's son, John, and he was listed along with family possessions, coat of arms, and paper, and pepper mills, and things of that nature, and Friday.

So you're heaping this human being in with these possessions.

[gentle music] This is where he raised his family after he was manumitted in 1802.

15 years after his freedom, he was a landowner.

Through his example, he was able to pass on his property, and his sons were also able to pass on their property.

So he went from being enslaved to being a landowner in Hopewell Township.

as an African American woman, who, in her later years found out about the accomplishments of someone by the name of Friday Truehart.

As a woman, who, in her later years learned so much about the rich history of the other African Americans who were in this region, in this country, who contributed so much with their sweat and their blood.

I think about the African American women who produced the labor force to make America the powerhouse that it is.

And that includes my fifth great-grandmother, Dinah, who was Friday's mother.

I think about these people, and to be able to stand on the shoulders of these people is an extraordinary feeling.

That's a feeling that has been robbed from us.

I never learned about this in school.

If anything, we were taught to feel shame.

And today, at my age, I feel nothing but pride and I feel empowered.

- So learning about Friday Truehart gave us a start.

It's one piece of the story.

[gentle music] - We can document that Harriet Tubman was here in Cape May in 1852.

It's likely that she was here other summers in the early 1850s as well.

And she said that she was working here as a domestic laborer and as a cook in order to support the missions that she was running back to the eastern shore of Maryland.

It's most likely that she was here because she was working with a number of abolitionist activists who were supporting and organizing the Underground Railroad from Philadelphia.

And they were spending their time, summers, here in Cape May.

["Oh Freedom!"

By Golden Gospel Singers] ♪ Oh Freedom ♪ ♪ Over me ♪ ♪ And before I'd be a slave ♪ ♪ I'd be buried in my grave ♪ - I'm John Buck, and I am the president of Stoutsburg Cemetery Association.

Silvia Dubois is very important character here in Sourland Mountain Region.

And there's a story of Silvia Dubois who just whooped her mistress because she was just getting tired of being beaten.

[gentle music] We did discover that in an old Princeton newspaper where Silvia Dubois' funeral was held at the colored church, which is now our Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum or SSAAM Museum.

In that article, Silvia Dubois had her service at that church and was buried in the colored cemetery.

And this would be the colored cemetery that she would be buried in.

- She was her own woman.

She really changed the trajectory of history in this community because of the way that she was.

She grew up to the age of five years old with her mother.

And then she was separated from her mother and went to be with a family, the Dubois family.

And so she took on the name, the surname, of the owner, Minicus Dubois.

She was abused by the mistress, and she would just beat her for... probably just because she could.

So at one point they were having something at the tavern and she didn't like the way Silvia mopped the floor, or cleaned up the tavern.

And she hit her with a coal shovel and dented the back of her head.

And the dent was still in her head to the day she died, that's how hard this woman hit her.

So Silvia had had enough at her, with this beatings, and hitting her with different things.

And she whipped the woman, beat her senseless.

Well, she gained her freedom after she whipped the mistress.

And so now she has a pass.

You had to have a pass that said that you were free.

She had that pass.

And that was everything to her and to Black people, when they had a pass of freedom.

[gentle music] - This house was built in 1766 by a member of the Stockton family.

The Stockton's were a very prominent elite family in Princeton and New Jersey at the time.

In the 1770s, it was the residence of a man named Absalom Bainbridge and his family.

Absalom Bainbridge was a graduate of Princeton university class of 1762.

At the time, Princeton was called the College of New Jersey.

Bainbridge himself was a slave owner here in Princeton at the Bainbridge house.

He owned an enslaved man named Prime.

[gentle music] Princeton at the time of the Revolution, was a place of revolutionary and patriotic fervor.

John Witherspoon, the Princeton College president at the time, signed the Declaration of Independence.

In 1777, George Washington won a victory over the British at the Battle of Princeton.

Later on, in 1783, Nassau Hall, the main campus building, would actually serve as the seat of the Continental Congress.

So this was not a town that was friendly to loyalists.

And Absalom Bainbridge had declared his allegiance publicly to the British Crown.

In 1777, He was convicted of high treason on account of his loyalist activities and was forced to flee Princeton.

So Bainbridge packed up his family and left Princeton for British occupied New York City.

During the war, Prime did what thousands of enslaved people across the country did.

He took advantage of wartime upheaval to seize his own freedom.

In 1778, Prime escaped the Bainbridge family, where they were living on Long Island and he fled back to New Jersey.

Now that's interesting because in 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any enslaved man who would leave his rebel master and serve the British Army.

Now that proclamation wouldn't have applied to Prime because Prime's enslaver Absalom Bainbridge, was a loyalist, meaning that Prime couldn't flee to British occupied New York for his safety or for his freedom.

He had to leave New York and go back to Princeton.

We know about his escape because Absalom Bainbridge placed an advertisement in a local newspaper describing Prime as a runaway and offering a reward of two guineas for his recapture and return to the Bainbridge family.

The year that Prime escaped and returned to Princeton, Bainbridge's property and land in New Jersey was confiscated by the state.

That property included Prime, which meant that Prime had run away from slavery in New York only to be re-enslaved as confiscated loyalist property when he got back to Princeton.

Prime was given the impression, that if he joined the Continental Army and fought for the revolutionary cause after the war, he would become a free man.

- Well, the British were the first to approach enslaved people and say, "If you come and fight for us, "we will give you your freedom."

And they did.

It wasn't until Washington was convinced that he also needed more manpower and woman power to fight that war that he made some stirrings or some attempts at offering freedom.

It was never a universal offer from Washington, but he did.

Some people who were enslaved caught onto this idea of Liberty and freedom, and actually ran away to fight.

Others were told by their masters that they had to fight, and of course you don't defy your master.

- So Prime did what he believed would make him free.

He joined the Continental Army.

After the war, he settled in Trenton, New Jersey believing that he was a free man.

He took jobs as a day laborer.

Prime was essentially kidnapped from Trenton by a man named John VanHorn, who claimed that he was Prime's rightful owner, that in 1777 VanHorn had purchased Prime from John Taylor, the father-in-law of Absalom Bainbridge, who had purchased Prime from from the Bainbridge family himself.

As evidence, John VanHorn produced a sale document, a receipt, showing that, in 1777, John Taylor had indeed paid 100 British pounds to his daughter, Mary Bainbridge, in order to purchase a chair, a horse, and Prime.

So VanHorn took this claim to court and the legal issue wasn't whether Prime was a free man or enslaved by John VanHorn.

It was whether Prime was enslaved by John VanHorn or by the state of New Jersey as the confiscated property of a loyalist, Absalom Bainbridge.

So when the court decided against VanHorn, Prime wasn't freed.

He was just, once again, made the property of the State of New Jersey.

So Prime didn't give up.

After the court declared him the property of the State of New Jersey.

He submitted a petition to the state legislature.

He would've had to rely on someone to assist him in writing and submitting the petition to the state assembly.

That person was most likely a man named William Churchill Houston.

So in his petition, Prime wrote, "The legislature then sitting at Princeton seemed to "be of the opinion that there was something "very inconsistent in contending for liberty under "an appeal to Heaven.

"And at the same time, selling the bodies and "service of human beings into perpetual bondage."

So the legislature debated Prime's petition.

They ultimately passed a special act of the assembly, which they titled "An Act For Setting Free Negro Prime."

So Prime was ultimately freed by this act of the legislature.

- I can only imagine what it was like to get that bill through.

As a sponsor of many pieces of legislation that prohibits human trafficking, this puts me in that mind frame where an individual was actually in bondage, freed, served the country, came back.

Still could not be free, told he had to work in public service.

So you're still an indentured servant just because of the color of your skin.

It's appalling.

It's hurtful.

It's traumatizing.

I'm a mom, I'm a wife.

I have a brother, a father, the family lineage.

It's hurtful to know that the generation suffered and had to find someone who had a heart, who was compassionate to care about their humanity for the legislature to move and act.

It was in New Jersey's Constitution that people, Black people, were property of the state.

So it was critical that the legislature make the change to the constitution in order for Black people to be free in the State of New Jersey.

So hence, the Reparations Task Force Bill is so critical, so we really can start teaching our history, and talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

That is history.

- One of the big barriers is just to see people, just to notice people.

It's easy for a white person not to notice a person of color.

It's easy just not to notice.

That's part of the step.

Now it's just a minor step, I realize, but it's a step.

- African American history is American history.

And I think that the discussion and the knowledge of African American history and American history should be in every school system, all across America.

[jazzy music]