[Train horn blowing] - In the first decade of the formal period of the Great Migration, there's enormous kind of outrage and response from not just landowners, but political leadership trying to find ways to prevent Black migration.

And so this is also a fraught and dangerous activity that if caught could be jailed, could be punished, could be fined.

[dramatic music] [train rustling] Booker T. Washington had become president of Tuskegee Institute.

[dramatic music] And he called the school to say, "We need a doctor here for our students.

Can you send someone?"

[birds chirping] They sent Grandpa Kenney.

So he arrived in Tuskegee and was horrified at what he found here.

There was no running water.

There was no sewer system.

Everything was as unhealthy as it could be.

So he collaborated with George Washington Carver, the two of them, to try to address some of these health issues.

And so they came up with systems that would improve sanitation.

Grandpa Kenney would work for about 20 hours a day because he was also going out as far as 100 miles in a horse and buggy to treat people in the rural areas.

Now, during this time, right after World War I, there were about 3,000 Black veterans who came back and had nowhere to go for ongoing treatment.

Grandpa Kenney got right on the train, went to Brookline, Massachusetts, to the donor's home.

Elizabeth Mason, and he pleaded his case, and she gave him another 25,000.

So he had enough to build a real hospital and named it after her grandfather, John Andrew.

Isn't that amazing?

It was the John Andrew Hospital, and here's Grandpa Kenney, John Andrew Kenney.

It's just amazing.

So...

The hospital was open, it was functioning, but the Ku Klux Klan here in Tuskegee said, "There is no way.

"These Black people don't know enough.

"They don't know what they're doing.

"We are not gonna have a hospital here run by Black people.

We're not gonna do that."

And Grandpa Kenny was seen as the single barrier because when they would have meetings with the university or Tuskegee Institute officials, um, he would be the one that was not in any way, shape, or form prepared to compromise.

So they said, "He's the problem.

"He's got to go."

When he got that call about the Klan, everybody in the family was asleep.

He woke Frieda up, "We gotta go."

"We gotta go."

She got the children up, they threw some things in the bag, they got in the car, they had a dog in the front seat, and a rifle on the front seat.

Kids in the back.

In the middle of the night, creeping along with no lights on, the car, to the train station.

[Train horn blowing] He put Frieda and the children, all four children, on the train.

- After the Klan ran Granddaddy and the family out of Tuskegee, Alabama, he moved them to Newark, New Jersey area so that he could establish a hospital for Blacks, and whereas there were no hospitals treating Blacks at the time, other than a few white hospitals, which were shoving them to the back of the room.

- Newark would be the place because the community need was overwhelming.

So many people had moved to Newark from the South, but they were confined to the Third Ward because that's where they let Black people live.

So it was so overcrowded, it had become a slum.

And so... Grandpa Kenney said, "This is where we need to build that hospital."

- One of the amazing things about my grandfather was his dedication to patients as a physician, regardless of economic status.

So he encouraged anyone, any patient that needed care, any Black patient that needed care to come to the hospital and there were sliding scales economically of whether they were able to pay or not, or how much they were able to pay.

And therefore the Black community poured into the hospital that he created because they were welcomed and they were not welcomed at white hospitals.

My grandfather was the personal physician to Booker T. Washington and also to George Washington Carver.

And what that meant for my father and his brothers and sisters is that they had exposure to these great Black pioneers and the level at which they excelled.

I am so proud of my father, John Kenney Jr., who was the leading dermatologist in the country.

Because of his accomplishments, he established a dermatology department at Howard University.

He became the most noted dermatologist in skincare for Blacks.

My dad was incredible as well.

He went to Bates College in Maine.

Then he went to Meharry Medical School.

He did internships and residencies in internal medicine.

And had an abiding interest in sickle cell disease.

Now, interestingly enough, he was medical director of John Andrew Hospital.

Then he was medical director of the VA Hospital, the same one that got his dad right out of town.

The Great Migration began during the 1890s, when there started to be a slow trickle.

Jim Crow was at its worst during that period.

And they knew that life was not going to get any better where they were.

That they had to take - they had to be in control of their own future.

And that future was looking pretty bleak if they stayed in the South.

They looked to the North, hoping to find better job opportunities, hoping to find better housing.

But again, most important of all, they looked to the North as the hope for their children.

That their children would be able to receive an education, would have freedom to walk the streets, and would have access to better schools.

And they knew that there was no hope for them where they were.

They knew staying in the same place was not going to get any better for them.

And there was the possibility, if they migrated North, that their life could change for the better.

People were driven out of the South by the transformation of Black Codes and the actual attacks of the Ku Klux Klan between 1865 and 1873.

They were moving because terrorism and the suppression of their right to vote, the loss of the opportunities of Reconstruction were moving people out of the South.

Jim Crow evolves in really important ways between 1875 and 1896.

And that piece where it goes from being essentially local versions of racial suppression into an organized and systematic national system of racial suppression, that's one of the most important transformations in the United States.

So redlining as a policy evolves pretty dramatically across the first half of the 20th century.

There is a private group of lenders called the Homeowners Loan Corporation that prior to 1925 had maps that they produced for local banks to decide where they could maximize the profit in terms of giving out homeowners loans.

So green-lined areas aggressively grew.

Redlined areas stagnated and fell apart and were targeted to be destroyed.

Those processes assume that all those neighborhoods remain the same generation by generation, and it's absolutely not true.

You can look at a place like Newark and see the ways that ethnic and different kinds of racial neighborhoods shift.

This happens all across the country and it continues and is amplified.

Ironically here in New Jersey by Woodrow Wilson, both as governor and then as he runs for president, where people call Abraham Lincoln the great liberator, which is also a kind of troublesome phrase.

Woodrow Wilson was really the great segregator.

He reintroduced different levels of racial segregation with the force of federal law and policy that then defined the next 50 years of US history.

And as they needed African-American workers to populate the hotels and the restaurants, they were very explicit about Blacks living on the west side of town and then setting aside a segregated area for those residences and expecting a certain kind of behavior.

I think the most horrifying story in that particular town was there was a segregated beach, beach number four, was the only beach African-Americans were allowed to use.

And they actually had an open sewage line dumping out into the water where they were supposed to go in.

And so these kinds of daily humiliations, often by the minute or by the hour, were the standard.

And so, yeah, the New Jersey was not a warm and welcoming paradise.

Most African-Americans, as they tried to move out of the South, were taking trains.

And so there were, some of the best jobs were Pullman porters, people working to kind of support and keep organized the experience on a segregated train system.

And so the porters actually would circulate Black newspapers across the South quietly, under the notice of their employers.

And this would give people hints about where there are jobs, where there are new opportunities, where they could actually have more freedom than what they had where they lived.

So if you're very lucky, it's a domestic service job, but overall they tended to be migrant labor, agricultural jobs.

New Jersey is still a garden state in this period.

And so to be able to be in the cranberry bogs, the blueberry bogs, to pick potatoes, string beans, Jersey tomatoes.

- Well, there was a process.

Again, usually one member of the family, usually a male member of the family, came first, established himself in some sort of position, usually went to a friend or someone else.

Worked, saved his money, and then would send back for either one other person from the family.

So there would be two of them up here, or maybe made enough money and was sensible enough with his or her money to ask for the rest of the family to come.

When it finally came crashing in on them that we're losing our workforce here, because most, a good number of Black people were tenant farmers.

And my land is not being worked properly because I'm losing this workforce.

There were aggressive attempts to stem the tide of migration.

So a father might come, send money back down for a railroad ticket for his family.

Well, the mail would be tampered with.

And the owner of the land that you were farming on would come and say, if y'all know what's good for you, you'll tell Jack to come back home where he belongs and tell him if he doesn't, he may not have a family to come back to.

Well, my family, I guess they were pretty typical, both my mother's family and my father's family.

My father's family came up probably around 1915 to Elizabeth.

And my mother's family came in 1921 to Newark.

My father, who lost his mother, I think he was probably about 10 years old when his mother died.

And he and his younger twin brothers were taken from Elizabeth to what was supposed to be an orphanage in Florida.

It turned out to be one of those work camps.

This would have been probably about 1924 or so.

After a year there, he could not take the conditions and somehow he escaped.

He made his way on foot back to New Jersey.

It took him almost a year to do it, but he did it.

Worked for somehow amassed some money, went back South and rescued his brothers and brought them back up to New Jersey.

I don't know how he came back up with his brothers, but I do remember him telling about walking from Florida back to New Jersey, the Hobo route, hopping on trains, that kind of thing.

The journey was very dangerous because you never knew.

There were scouts along the way who were looking for people who were purposely leaving the South to come North, who would send you right back to where you came from or arrest you on some sort of trumped up charge or arrest you for trespassing because you were found sleeping in their barn or elsewhere.

In New Jersey, the migrants flocked to the larger cities like Newark and Elizabeth and Trenton and Patterson.

Overall in the state, the Black population increased by 132% within a very short period of time.

There is no way that those cities were prepared to handle that large influx of people in such a short period of time.

The housing was substandard.

There were no utilities that were available to accommodate that many people in some of our neighborhoods.

And because of the large numbers and because of Northern prejudice against people of color, they were limited to only certain areas of cities.

Indoor plumbing was a very poor quality if it existed at all.

Outhouses in our large cities were very common things to see even during the early days of the 20th century.

The schools were not fully equipped to handle the children in many ways.

- So of course, this discrepancies between African-Americans and other Americans in terms of their healthcare, these reflected the rest of the kind of Jim Crow structures that existed.

In the particular case of hospitals, it was nearly impossible for anyone who managed to get a medical license as an African-American to gain privileges within a white hospital.

- Well, probably one of the biggest discrepancies is that one who was Black could not be admitted into a hospital by a Black doctor.

A Black doctor would have to turn his patient over.

They had had partnerships with white doctors and that white doctor would have to be responsible for who was, what was your patient while they're in the hospital.

- The National Medical Association was established in 1895.

And really it was established because physicians realized, I learned through my own research that there were locally throughout the nation, throughout the United States, there were local, county and state medical societies.

And physicians of color, Black physicians were not able to join those local county medical societies.

And if you couldn't join the local county medical societies, that meant you could not also join the AMA, the American Medical Association.

Dr. Kenney was involved very early on with the NMA.

He was a secretary for eight years of the National Medical Association and he was also an editor of the journal.

So, Governor Murphy established in New Jersey Maternal and Infant Health Innovation Authority.

And that authority was really established to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality and to also reduce racial disparities for birthing people.

That's extremely important in the United States.

Our maternal morbidity and mortality is too high compared to other industrialized nations.

And the disparities that we see among Black birthing people are three to four times higher than their white counterparts.

In New Jersey, those disparities are along the lines of seven to nine times higher than their white counterparts.

And unfortunately, those disparities have been persistent over a number of decades.

So I think that, you know, when we really want to unravel this problem, we have to understand that it didn't occur, it occurred over a long period of time.

And so then we really have to really unroof it at its very core and its very beginning.

And I say that also, you know, oftentimes when we think about some of the disparities that exist, people think about the social determinants of health.

They think about access to care.

They think about transportation.

They think about childcare issues.

But one of the things that we know, and there's much evidence in the scientific literature to demonstrate this, is that even Black women of high socioeconomic status still have some, still experience some of the same maternal disparities in morbidity and mortality.

So if we've now taken away the issues of access to care, because these women with high socioeconomic status, they have insurance, they have access to care, then why they don't have transportation problems.

They don't have inaccessibility to healthy foods.

Why then are we still seeing these disparities in morbidity and mortality for these birthing people?

And so this is where we know that racism in the healthcare system has to be addressed.

Much like maternal morbidity and mortality, there are disparities in infant mortality in New Jersey.

In the United States, um, the mortality rate is about 5.2 per 1,000 births.

But the disparity that exists between Black non-Hispanic infants is about 10.9 per 1,000 births, compared to about 4.4 for non-Hispanic whites.

So it's about almost double the rate for non-Hispanic Blacks.

In New Jersey, the disparities are, for non-Hispanic Blacks, the infant mortality rate is about four times higher.

So there still are disparities that we want to address for infant mortality, as well as for maternal morbidity and mortality.

I always want to remain optimistic and hopeful, but we have a lot of work to do.

When we have a diverse workforce, we have better health outcomes.

- The mission for us is really serving historic communities, right?

Communities that have, over time, had to be resilient in the face of so much turmoil.

And we just use arts as a motivator for that, kind of like taking a social justice lens of equity and justice, but putting it through the artwork, putting it through theater, and putting it through visual arts and public art.

And then there's another piece to that, which is making sure that the youth who work and live in a city or who grow in a city, come of age in a city, really have an understanding on what it's like to take control and own what's around you.

So my entire lineage came from the South.

My mother's family has a really rich history in Oxford, North Carolina, and both her parents, her father, Odell Rowland, her mother, Madeline Hines Rowland, their families, their parents, both migrated here from North Carolina.

And when you look at "Souvenir de la voix", right?

It's about remembering the voices, right?

Which is really about oral traditions.

I'm really big into oral traditions, right?

We don't really have history without those things being passed down from generation to generation.

And my mural partner, Hans Lundy, is of Haitian descent.

So oral histories is almost all he has.

So a lot of our collaborative murals have Haitian Creole names, titles.

And that's just us sharing culture.

I'm giving a lot of game on like American history and migration and revolution and all that stuff.

And then he's giving me a lot of game on just Haitian history.

And we kind of uncovering things together.

But that mural is about that.

It's about having those oral histories and memories of ancestors that kind of set forth the path of what your life could be.

And then we made all of the young people on the painting in color 'cause they were in full focus, right?

And then it's transitionary things that people do in their own lives that transition Black or white or ethnicity or culture.

Everybody does hair, everybody braids hair.

Everybody has music and drums.

Everybody likes cool clothes, whatever you deem to be a cool clothing, right?

And everybody is under one sky.

So there's that cloud scene that leads off to the distance, which is dreaming and inspiration.

There's the mother and child with the braided hair.

And then there's the two elders, the grandmother and grandfather in the background, one smoking a pipe and one playing the drums, right?

One looking off to the distance and one looking at the crowd.

And then there's the young lady with the headphones on.

So, it's an ode to the past, but looking towards the future.

(upbeat music) ♪ Oh ♪ Yes it does, Yes it does, Yes it does ♪ ♪ Gonna take my time, yeah ♪ I feel like...

I feel like Superman ♪ ♪ Take my time, gonna take my time ♪