For Cross-Gilyard, visiting the tunnel was a very emotional experience. "I've been researching my family history for about 27 years – I traced my family back to 1720, and I do have ancestors who were enslaved,”
North Jersey's slave sites are hiding in plain sight: What I learned njherald.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from njherald.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Slavery s legacy is written all over North Jersey, if you know where to look What to watch next
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New Jersey residents might like to think that, as Northerners, we don t share the South s brutal slave history.
We would be wrong. New Jersey was known as the slave state of the North, said Elaine Buck, who co-founded the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Hopewell with Beverly Mills in 2018.
The legacy of slavery is hidden in plain sight all over the map, in family names like Berkeley, Carteret, Beverwyck, Morris, Livingston and Schuyler, whose wealth and power was founded, in part, on slave labor.