
Ridgewood presentation recounts history of discrimination
September 19, 2014 Last updated: Friday, September 19, 2014, 12:31 AM
By Jodi Weinberger
STAFF WRITER
The Ridgewood News
It wasn’t so long ago in the history of Ridgewood, and all of northwest Bergen County, that racial restrictions in deeds kept many from owning or renting property.
This violation of the 14th Amendment was hard to contest in court because house sales are private contracts, explained Joe Garbas, a land title expert and historian.
Grabas presented a history of deed restrictions at the library on Sept. 13 as part of a panel of speakers on housing discrimination in suburbia. The group, curated by reference librarian Peggy Norris, also included Joseph Suplicki, Ridgewood historian; Lee Porter, director of the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey; Tom Dunn, archivist for the Mahwah Museum Society; and Carlos Martinez, an intern minister of the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood.
Norris said the idea came to her to put together this presentation when she was asked to look into the deed restrictions and saw how pervasive the racism was.
In other words, spoken by Suplicki, “These bucolic little towns … had a darker side.”
In the 1920s, racism went beyond black and white though. Suplicki presented a history of the Ku Klux Klan in Bergen County, who also targeted Jews and Italians, from research by Kay Yeomans, curator of the Upper Saddle River Historical Society. Yeomans’ paper included stories of Klan marches down Main Street in Ramsey and burning crosses in Mahwah, and Suplicki showed images on a projector of houses with “KKK” spray-painted on the side.
Another relic, an article from The Ridgewood Herald in 1927 described a Klan gathering in Glen Rock: “It was a picturesque gathering of Klansmen and curiosity seekers to the number of over 300, but who were Klansmen and who were not was difficult to tell. There was no doubt whatever about the half dozen hooded men, robed in white whose eyes and noses alone were visible through holes in their white hoods.”
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/community-news/speakers-recount-history-of-discrimination-1.1091692#sthash.CYdewzUJ.dpuf