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James W. Loewen (1942-2021)

We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague and remain committed to the work he began.

Carteret

New Jersey

Basic Information

Type of Place
Other
Metro Area
Politics c. 1860?
Don’t Know
Unions, Organized Labor?
Don’t Know

Sundown Town Status

Sundown Town in the Past?
Probable
Was there an ordinance?
Don't Know
Sign?
Don’t Know
Year of Greatest Interest
1926
Still Sundown?
Surely Not

Census Information

The available census data from 1860 to the present
Total White Black Asian Native Hispanic Other BHshld
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900 19025 1108
1910
1920
1930 0
1940 13339 386
1950 11976 281
1960 13030
1970
1980
1990
2000 20709 14239 1975 1922 49 4839
2010
2020

Method of Exclusion

  • Violent Expulsion

Main Ethnic Group(s)

  • Unknown

Group(s) Excluded

  • Black

Comments

Carteret is one of New Jersey’s many boroughs, a type of municipality unique to the state.

In Middlesex County, overlooks Staten Island.

“1926: White mobs burned churches and attacked Negro families during riots in Carteret, NJ. As a result of the riots all Negroes left the town. The rioting followed the indictment of Robert Ducrest, a Negro, for the murder of John Carroll, a white boxer.” (see Peter M. Bergman and Mort N. Bergman, The Chronological History of the Negro in America (NY: Mentor, 1969), 423.) [The departure had to be temporary, though, because blacks were back in the 1930 census.]

Robert Minor, white Communist, wrote about Carteret, 1926, “in which armed whites drove the entire black population from the town, burned a black church, ‘and generally conducted an organized reign of terror of the sort which America calls a race riot and which the old Russia of the now-dead czar called a pogrom.’” (see Robert Minor, “After Garvey – What?” Workers Monthly, 5/1926, quoted in Clarke, Marcus Garvey, 165-66.)