The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question:  How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle. 

HETTIE V. WILLIAMS is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. She is the former president of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and has authored and edited six books and several essays, articles, and book chapters.

“Williams accurately and masterfully centers local Black women intellectuals in New Jersey as the vanguard of the long Civil Rights movement. In doing so she pushes beyond a Southern based narrative and urges us all to acknowledge and applaud these women's long underappreciated hard work.”
 — Cherisse Jones-Branch, author of Crossing the Line: Women's Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World W

“Williams’s well-constructed study of five influential Black women in mid-twentieth century New Jersey will add much to understanding of the roles of African American women and Civil Rights. The Georgia of the North is a significant contribution to Black women’s intellectual history and New Jersey history.”— Graham Russell Gao Hodges, author of Black New Jersey, 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press)