New Jersey Organization of Teachers of Colored Children, 1932

Ira De A. Reid, The Negro in New Jersey: Report of a Survey by the Interracial Committee of the New Jersey Conference of Social Work in Cooperation with the Department of Institutions and Agencies (Newark, NJ: The New Jersey Conference of Social Work, 1932).

 Courtesy, New Jersey Historical Society


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Teachers’ organizations, such as the National Education Association, were not racially integrated until the 1950s. Before that time in New Jersey, black teachers taught almost exclusively in schools for black children. Teachers, such as Nellie Morrow Parker of Hackensack, had to struggle under threatening circumstances to gain teaching positions in white communities. African American teachers in New Jersey formed their own professional organization in the early 1930s. During the 1930s and 1940s, schools in the state became increasingly segregated. The situation provoked Dr. Marion Thompson Wright to undertake an investigation which was published in 1941 and used by politicians and activists to demand an end to de facto segregation of state schools. School segregation in New Jersey was outlawed  after World War II, under the New Jersey Constitution of 1947.