Charles H. Thompson Newark's African American Voting Rights Activist

This photograph depicts the Black abolitionist, activist and educator Charles H. Thompson while at Oberlin College. Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell, co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women, graduated from Oberlin too. Both institutionally educated and self-taught activists contributed to the struggle for voting rights, but many of their voices have been overlooked by historians. Thompson and two other New Jersey Black activists were at the center of a campaign in 1860 to challenge the voting law’s unconstitutionality. Thompson, pastor of Plane Street Colored Church, and Abraham Conover were the Newark test plaintiffs and sued for damages of thousands of dollars for being refused the right to vote. Though they lost, their strategy was remarkable. Reflecting the cross-state and national organizing that Blacks had engaged for more than half a century, the council hosted “numerous meetings and the committees appointed at those meetings in the States of New York, Newark, Pennsylvania and Delaware.” The case elevated public awareness and demonstrate Black New Jersey’s resistance against exploitation. This discussion is an excerpt from an upcoming exhibition curated by Noelle Lorraine Williams at Newark Public Library called “Black Power! 19th Century Newark’s First African American Rebellion.”

Oberlin College

1860

Noelle Lorraine Williams

This photograph is of Newark clergyman, Black abolitionist and voting civil rights activist Charles H. Thompson while a student at Oberlin. It is dated 1860. Several Black activists that would fight against slavery and for voting rights and suffrage attended the school. Like many of the pastors of Newark’s Plane Street Colored Church he would spend most of his life fighting for the rights of African Americans through the legislative, religious and higher education spheres.